Let me not be misunderstood. He had followed with a certain eagerness the development of England and of the Empire. He was an assiduous reader of the _Daily Telegraph_, _The Gleam_, _The Orb_, _The Globe_, _The Times_, and _The Meteor_; he received _The Spectator_, _The Economist_, _The Doctrinaire_ upon every Saturday morning, and occasionally looked at them; and when he went abroad, according to his custom, during the month of August, he was careful to make such arrangements as caused these standard weekly organs of opinion to reach him not later than the following Tuesday. The mere facts, therefore, he knew. He was gratified, and occasionally enthusiastic, over the expansion of our dominion. He had a grasp of the various stages by which the jealousy of foreign nations had been stilled, and their competition annulled. He had appreciated in latter years the decline of English commerce, the ruin of our agriculture, and the upbuilding of a Greater Britain beyond the seas. All the manifest destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race he had seen as clearly as the humblest clerk; he had received it with as religious an emotion as had the poorest and most vulgar of our electorate. Nevertheless all this had been for him but a pageant. He had never comprehended the great change in our method of thought which this new fact in the life of the world involved. He was like a man who hears of this or that catastrophe—of this or that triumph, suffers in the catastrophe or glories in the triumph, but suffers and glories as in a thing apart: a thing read or seen upon the stage. He never really got it into his mind that _he_ was an actor in the drama; that _he_, as a citizen, was making the new world. It is a paradox, but a paradox ever present in our contemporary life; we owe to it the extreme reluctance with which each new and necessary idea is accepted by a people born, after all, to Empire. It is in our blood. Did space permit me, I could give many instances of this failing: let me be content with two. Mr Burden had voted honourably and straightforwardly for that small taxation of our food supplies, which was necessary for the consolidation of the Empire. Of the direct effect of that vote he never complained; but he would not or could not connect with his opinion upon this matter, the necessary depreciation which it involved in his investments. Again, he had read and applauded Mr Chamberlain’s great speech just after the Australian Commonwealth cancelled the “loans previous”; he also appreciated that Australia must have new capital, and that, in the actual state of her credit, this capital could only come from Great Britain; yet in the meeting in the Cannon Street Hotel six months later, he had described the reconstruction of the Waga-Murri mine as “un-English.”