Mr Burden’s dissociation from the underlying philosophy of his time went deeper still. He would have maintained, in a kind of abstract way, that the connection between finance and politics was dangerous—it is difficult to say whether he saw that it was necessary. At any rate he dreaded and avoided that necessity. He would have admitted that a Cabinet drawn from the ranks of rich men was a purer and better government than one formed upon the less stable models of democratic nations, but in some vague way he must have thought of their wealth as exclusively territorial, for he would not only have expressed, but would have felt a very genuine horror at hearing that a Cabinet minister had held, or had been given, such and such shares in a company connected with our Imperial development. When he was asked, as I once asked him, how a man could be rich and yet not mixed up with the principal source of modern wealth in England, he replied with a simple affirmation; he said that any one in office should sell whatever shares he had possessed in such concerns. He refused to follow the logical consequences of his creed. It was precisely upon this point that a greater mind, a mind more necessary to England, though not perhaps more English, found the principal difficulty of contact. Mr Barnett knew that the M’Korio Delta was a touchstone for the future of England. I do not pretend that his only motive lay there. His motives were largely economic. But, at anyrate, the fulfilment of his own legitimate ambition demanded that he should persuade English opinion of what the M’Korio Delta was. As I have repeatedly pointed out, there was not at that time in the city any name whose influence would have a more immediate effect towards converting the investor in W. African securities than that of Mr Burden; and yet every avenue of Mr Burden’s mind was closed to such methods of approach as Mr Barnett comprehended. He could not offer shares, and that sharp imaginative power which would have turned the M’Korio Delta into the great province it must become in the future, he knew that Mr Burden did not and could not possess. The very circumstances by which Mr Burden came to be the sole arbiter (as it were) of M’Korian trade made Mr Barnett’s advance the more difficult.