the hansom cabs of my first experiences were ousted more and more by
taxicabs as the second Parliament of King Edward the Seventh aged; I
think of the Admiralty and War office with their tall Marconi masts
sending out invisible threads of direction to the armies in the
camps, to great fleets about the world. The crowded, darkly shining
river goes flooding through my memory once again, on to those narrow
seas that part us from our rival nations; I see quadrangles and
corridors of spacious grey-toned offices in which undistinguished
little men and little files of papers link us to islands in the
tropics, to frozen wildernesses gashed for gold, to vast temple-
studded plains, to forest worlds and mountain worlds, to ports and
fortresses and lighthouses and watch-towers and grazing lands and
corn lands all about the globe. Once more I traverse Victoria
Street, grimy and dark, where the Agents of the Empire jostle one
another, pass the big embassies in the West End with their flags and
scutcheons, follow the broad avenue that leads to Buckingham Palace,
witness the coming and going of troops and officials and guests
along it from every land on earth. . . . Interwoven in the texture
of it all, mocking, perplexing, stimulating beyond measure, is the
gleaming consciousness, the challenging knowledge: "You and your
kind might still, if you could but grasp it here, mould all the
destiny of Man!"



4


My first three years in Parliament were years of active discontent.
The little group of younger Liberals to which I belonged was very