ng machines. There were men alive still who could remember
the last great debate in the London House of Commons--the legal party,
the party against the Council was in a minority, but it made a desperate
fight--and how the members came crowding out upon the terrace to see
these great unfamiliar winged shapes circling quietly overhead. The
Council had soared to its power. The last sham of a democracy that had
permitted unlimited irresponsible property was at an end.

Within one hundred and fifty years of Graham's falling asleep, his
Council had thrown off its disguises and ruled openly, supreme in his
name. Elections had become a cheerful formality, a septennial folly,
an ancient unmeaning custom; a social Parliament as ineffectual as the
convocation of the Established Church in Victorian times assembled now
and then; and a legitimate King of England, disinherited, drunken
and witless, played foolishly in a second-rate music-hall. So the
magnificent dream of the nineteenth century, the noble project of
universal individual liberty and universal happiness, touched by a
disease of honour, crippled by a superstition of absolute property,
crippled by the religious feuds that had robbed the common citizens of
education, robbed men of standards of conduct, and brought the sanctions
of morality to utter contempt, had worked itself out in the face of
invention and ignoble enterprise, first to a warring plutocracy, and
finally to the rule of a supreme plutocrat. His Council at last
had ceased even to trouble to have its decrees endorsed by the
constitutional authorities, and he a motionless, sunken, yellow-skinned
figure had lain, neither dead nor living, recognisably and immediately
Master of the Earth. And awoke at last to find himself--Master of that
inheritance! Awoke to stand under the cloudless empty sky and gaze down
upon the greatness of his dominion.

To what end had he awakened? Was this city, this hive of hopeless
toilers, the final refutation of his ancient hopes? Or was the fire of
liberty, the fire that had blazed and waned in the years of his past
life, still smouldering below there? He thought of the stir and impulse
of the song of the revolution. Was that song merely the trick of a
demagogue, to be forgotten when its purpose was served? Was the hope
that still stirred within him only the memory of abandoned things,
the vestige of a creed outworn? Or had it a wider meaning, an import
interwoven with the destiny of