self. And he had still to reckon with stupidity. He believed in
the statecraft of leader-writers and the sincerity of political
programmes. And so regarded, what an avenue to Empire was
Whitehall! How momentous was the sunrise in St. James's Park, and
how significant the clustering knot of listeners and speakers
beneath the tall column that lifts our Nelson to the windy sky!

For a time Benham was in love with the idea of London. He got maps
of London and books about London. He made plans to explore its
various regions. He tried to grasp it all, from the conscious
picturesqueness of its garden suburbs to the factories of Croydon,
from the clerk-villadoms of Ealing to the inky streams of Bow. In
those days there were passenger steamboats that would take one from
the meadows of Hampton Court past the whole spectacle of London out
to the shipping at Greenwich and the towed liners, the incessant
tugs, the heaving portals of the sea. . . . His time was far too
occupied for him to carry out a tithe of these expeditions he had
planned, but he had many walks that bristled with impressions.
Northward and southward, eastward and westward a dreaming young man
could wander into a wilderness of population, polite or sombre,
poor, rich, or middle-class, but all ceaselessly active, all
urgently pressing, as it seemed, to their part in the drama of the
coming years. He loved the late afternoon, when every artery is
injected and gorged with the multitudinous home-going of the daily
workers, he loved the time of lighting up, and the clustering
excitements of the late hours. And he went out southward and
eastward into gaunt regions of reeking toil. As yet he knew nothing
of the realities of industrialism. He saw only the beauty of the
great chimneys that rose against the sullen smoke-barred sunsets,
and he felt only the romance of the lurid shuddering flares that