unnatural: he was one
of the people whom Wallingham's scheme in its legitimate development of
a tariff on foreign manufactures might be expected to enrich. This fact,
which he constantly insisted on, did give them weight; it made him look
like a cunning fellow not to be caught with chaff. He and his business
had survived free trade--though he would not say this either--and he
preferred to go on surviving it rather than take the chances of any
zollverein. The name of the thing was enough for him, a word made in
Germany, thick and mucky, like their tumblers. As to the colonies--Mr
Chafe had been told of a certain spider who devoured her young ones. He
reversed the figure and it stood, in the imperial connection, for all
the argument he wanted.

Alfred Hesketh had lived always in the hearing of such doctrine; it had
stood to him for political gospel by mere force of repetition. But he
was young, with the curiosity and enterprise and impatience of dogma
of youth; he belonged by temperament and situation to those plastic
thousands in whom Wallingham hoped to find the leaven that should leaven
the whole lump. His own blood stirred with the desire to accomplish, to
carry further; and as the scope of the philanthropist did not attract
him, he was vaguely conscious of having been born too late in England.
The new political appeal of the colonies, clashing suddenly upon old
insular harmonies, brought him a sense of wider fields and chances; his
own case he freely translated into his country's, and offered an open
mind to politics that would help either of them. He looked at the new
countries with interest, an interest evoked by their sudden dramatic
leap into the forefront of public concern. He looked at them with what
nature intended to be the eye of a practical businessman. He looked
at Lorne Murchison, too, and listened to him, with steady critical
attention. Lorne seemed in a way to sum it all up in his person, all the
better opportunity a man had out there; and he handled large matters of
the future with a confidence and a grip that quickened the circulation.
Hesketh's open mind gradually became filled with the imperial view as
he had the capacity to take it; and we need not be surprised if Lorne
Murchison, gazing in the same direction, supposed that they saw the same
thing.

Hesketh confessed, declared, that Murchison had brought him round; and
Lorne surveyed this achievement with a thrill of the happiest triumph.
Hesket