thousands upon thousands of English Krugers gave the
same vote. And thus Kruger was pulled down and the dark-faced men in the
photograph reigned in his stead.

XX. The Giant

I sometimes fancy that every great city must have been built by night.
At least, it is only at night that every part of a great city is
great. All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps
architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks. At
least, I think many people of those nobler trades that work by night
(journalists, policemen, burglars, coffee-stall keepers, and such
mistaken enthusiasts as refuse to go home till morning) must often have
stood admiring some black bulk of building with a crown of battlements
or a crest of spires and then burst into tears at daybreak to discover
that it was only a haberdasher's shop with huge gold letters across the
face of it.

.....

I had a sensation of this sort the other day as I happened to be
wandering in the Temple Gardens towards the end of twilight. I sat down
on a bench with my back to the river, happening to choose such a place
that a huge angle and facade of building jutting out from the Strand
sat above me like an incubus. I dare say that if I took the same seat
to-morrow by daylight I should find the impression entirely false. In
sunlight the thing might seem almost distant; but in that half-darkness
it seemed as if the walls were almost falling upon me. Never before have
I had so strongly the sense which makes people pessimists in politics,
the sense of the hopeless height of the high places of the earth. That
pile of wealth and power, whatever was its name, went up above and
beyond me like a cliff that no living thing could climb. I had an
irrational sense that this thing had to be fought, that I had to fight
it; and that I could offer nothing to the occasion but an indolent
journalist with a walking-stick.

Almost as I had the thought, two windows were lit in that black, blind
face. It was as if two eyes had opened in the huge face of a sleeping
giant; the eyes were too close together, and gave it the suggestion of a
bestial sneer. And either by accident of this light or of some other, I
could now read the big letters which spaced themselves across the front;
it was the Babylon Hotel. It was the perfect symbol of everything that I
should like to pull down with my hands if I could. Reared by a detected
robber, it is framed to be the fashionable and l