h stood, to him, a product of that best which he was so occupied
in admiring and pursuing. Perhaps he more properly represented the
second best; but we must allow something for the confusion of early
impressions. Hesketh had lived always in the presence of ideals
disengaged in England as nowhere else in the world; in Oxford, Lorne
knew, they clustered thick. There is no doubt that his manners were
good, and his ideas unimpeachable in the letter; the young Canadian read
the rest into him and loved him for what he might have been.

"As an Englishman," said Hesketh one evening as they walked together
back from the Chafes' along Knightsbridge, talking of the policy urged
by the Colonial representatives at the last Conference, "I could wish
the idea were more our own--that we were pressing it on the colonies
instead of the colonies pressing it on us."

"Doesn't there come a time in the history of most families," Lorne
replied, "when the old folks look to the sons and daughters to keep them
in touch with the times? Why shouldn't a vigorous policy of Empire be
conceived by its younger nations--who have the ultimate resources to
carry it out? We've got them and we know it--the iron and the coal
and the gold, and the wheat-bearing areas. I dare say it makes us seem
cheeky, but I tell you the last argument lies in the soil and what you
can get out of it. What has this country got in comparison? A market of
forty million people, whom she can't feed and is less and less able to
find work for. Do you call that a resource? I call it an impediment--a
penalty. It's something to exploit, for the immediate profit in it,
something to bargain with; but even as a market it can't preponderate
always, and I can't see why it should make such tremendous claims."

"England isn't superannuated yet, Murchison."

"Not yet. Please God she never will be. But she isn't as young as she
was, and it does seem to me--"

"What seems to you?"

"Well, I'm no economist, and I don't know how far to trust my
impressions, and you needn't tell me I'm a rank outsider, for I know
that; but coming here as an outsider, it does seem to me that it's from
the outside that any sort of helpful change in the conditions of this
country has got to come. England still has military initiative, though
it's hard to see how she's going to keep that unless she does something
to stop the degeneration of the class she draws her army from; but
what other kind do we hear about?