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