My withdrawal from political work I connect with the death of Queen Victoria, the Coronation of King Edward, and the end of the South African War. From the same period--a time of the inception of radical, far-reaching change in England--I date also my final emergence from that phase of one's existence in which one is still thought of, by some people at all events, as a young man. The phase has a longer duration in our time, I think, than in previous generations, because we have done so much in the direction of abolishing middle age. Grey hairs were fairly plentiful with me well before the admitted end of this phase. Those last years of the young man, the author and journalist of 'promise,' who was a 'coming man,' and, too, the maturer years which followed, ought, upon all material counts, to have been the happiest and most contented in my life; since, during this time, my position was an assured one, and I went scatheless as regards anxiety about ways and means--the burden which lines the foreheads of eight Londoners in ten, I think. Yes, by all the signs, these should have been my best and most contented years. As a fact, I do not think I touched content in a single hour of all that period. What then was lacking in my life? It certainly lacked leisure. But the average modern man would say that this commonplace fact could hardly rob one of content. My income did not fall below from seven hundred to a thousand pounds in any year. In all this period, therefore, there was never a hint of the bitter, wolfish struggle for mere food and shelter which ruled my first years in London; neither was I ever obliged to live in squalid quarters. On the contrary, I lived comfortably, and had a good deal more of the sort of social intercourse which dining out furnishes than I desired. And, withal, though I knew much of keen effort, the stress of unremitting work, and, at times, considerable responsibility, I do not think I tasted content in one hour of all those long, crowded, respectable, and apparently prosperous years. If one comes to that, could I honestly assert that in the years preceding these I had ever known content? I fear not. Elation, the sense of more or less successful striving, occasional triumphs--all these good things I had known. But content, peace, secure and restful satisfaction-- No, I could not truly say I had ever experienced these. Perhaps they have been rare among all the educated peoples of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; particularly, it may be, among those who, like myself, have been more or less freely admitted prospectors in the home territories of various classes of the community, without ever becoming a fully accredited and recognised member of any one among them.