They were all more or less political careers.Whatever a democratic man may be, Prothero and he had decided that an aristocratic man is a public man.He is made and protected in what he is by laws and the state and his honour goes out to the state.The aristocrat has no right to be a voluptuary or a mere artist or a respectable nonentity, or any such purely personal things.Responsibility for the aim and ordering of the world is demanded from him as imperatively as courage.
Benham's deliberate assumption of the equestrian role brought him into contact with a new set of acquaintances, conscious of political destinies.They were amiable, hard young men, almost affectedly unaffected; they breakfasted before dawn to get in a day's hunting, and they saw to it that Benham's manifest determination not to discredit himself did not lead to his breaking his neck.Their bodies were beautifully tempered, and their minds were as flabby as Prothero's body.Among them were such men as Lord Breeze and Peter Westerton, and that current set of Corinthians who supposed themselves to be resuscitating the Young England movement and Tory Democracy.Poor movements which indeed have never so much lived as suffered chronic resuscitation.These were days when Tariff Reform was only an inglorious possibility for the Tory Party, and Young England had yet to demonstrate its mental quality in an anti-socialist campaign.Seen from the perspectives of Cambridge and Chexington, the Tory party was still a credible basis for the adventure of a young man with an aristocratic theory in his mind.
These were the days when the strain and extremity of a dangerous colonial war were fresh in people's minds, when the quality of the public consciousness was braced up by its recent response to unanticipated demands.The conflict of stupidities that had caused the war was overlaid and forgotten by a hundred thousand devotions, by countless heroic deaths and sufferings, by a pacification largely conceived and broadly handled.The nation had displayed a belated regard for its honour and a sustained passion for great unities.It was still possible for Benham to regard the empire as a splendid opportunity, and London as the conceivable heart of the world.He could think of Parliament as a career, and of a mingling of aristocratic socialism based on universal service with a civilizing imperialism as a purpose....
But his thoughts had gone wider and deeper than that....
Already when Benham came to London he had begun to dream of possibilities that went beyond the accidental states and empires of to-day.Prothero's mind, replete with historical detail, could find nothing but absurdity in the alliances and dynasties and loyalties of our time."Patched up things, Benham, temporary, pretentious.
All very well for the undignified man, the democratic man, to take shelter under, all very well for the humourist to grin and bear, all very well for the crowd and the quack, but not for the aristocrat--No!--his mind cuts like steel and burns like fire.Lousy sheds they are, plastered hoardings...and such a damned nuisance too! For any one who wants to do honourable things! With their wars and their diplomacies, their tariffs and their encroachments; all their humbugging struggles, their bloody and monstrous struggles, that finally work out to no end at all....If you are going for the handsome thing in life then the world has to be a united world, Benham, as a matter of course.That was settled when the railways and the telegraph came.Telephones, wireless telegraphy, aeroplanes insist on it.We've got to mediatise all this stuff, all these little crowns and boundaries and creeds, and so on, that stand in the way.Just as Italy had to be united in spite of all the rotten little dukes and princes and republics, just as Germany had to be united in spite of its scores of kingdoms and duchies and liberties, so now the world.Things as they are may be fun for lawyers and politicians and court people and--douaniers; they may suit the loan-mongers and the armaments shareholders, they may even be more comfortable for the middle-aged, but what, except as an inconvenience, does that matter to you or me?
Prothero always pleased Benham when he swept away empires.There was always a point when the rhetoric broke into gesture.
"We've got to sweep them away, Benham," he said, with a wide gesture of his arm."We've got to sweep them all away."Prothero helped himself to some more whiskey, and spoke hastily, because he was afraid some one else might begin.He was never safe from interruption in his own room.The other young men present sucked at their pipes and regarded him doubtfully.They were never quite certain whether Prothero was a prophet or a fool.They could not understand a mixed type, and he was so manifestly both.
"The only sane political work for an intelligent man is to get the world-state ready.For that we have to prepare an aristocracy--""Your world-state will be aristocratic?" some one interpolated.
"Of course it will be aristocratic.How can uninformed men think all round the globe? Democracy dies five miles from the parish pump.It will be an aristocratic republic of all the capable men in the world....""Of course," he added, pipe in mouth, as he poured out his whiskey, "it's a big undertaking.It's an affair of centuries...."And then, as a further afterthought: "All the more reason for getting to work at it...."In his moods of inspiration Prothero would discourse through the tobacco smoke until that great world-state seemed imminent--and Part Two in the Tripos a thing relatively remote.He would talk until the dimly-lit room about him became impalpable, and the young men squatting about it in elaborately careless attitudes caught glimpses of cities that are still to be, bridges in wild places, deserts tamed and oceans conquered, mankind no longer wasted by bickerings, going forward to the conquest of the stars....
