And then, after a brief conversation upon other topics, the Under-Secretary, when he had switched on the light for his chief, walked out, and went down the great staircase into Downing Street. CHAPTER NINE. DEFINES THE DAZZLING DEGRADATION. At "question-time" on the following afternoon Dudley Chisholm, as mouthpiece of the Foreign Office, rose to reply to a very pointed and seemingly awkward supplementary question put to him by an obscure Member. There was a big House, and owing to the continual allegations of England's unpreparedness made by the alarmist section of the Press, the answer was listened to with almost breathless interest. The man who stood there addressing the House affected a calmness which he certainly did not feel. He knew not but that at any moment some Member of the Opposition might rise and there publicly show him up as a political impostor, a man who was sailing under false colours, and who knew of England's danger yet dare not speak because to do so would be to expose his own crime. Nevertheless, even though the terrible tension had worked havoc with him throughout the long night, preventing him from sleeping and causing him to tramp for hours the deserted streets of London, he stood there speaking in his well-known deliberate manner, from time to time making home-thrusts at his political opponents, and eloquently assuring the House and the public that the Empire was safe from attack. In the course of his brilliant reply he deprecated the popular assumption that in diplomacy we were always left behind, and hinted, as Lord Stockbridge had instructed him to do, at certain secret agreements which, having been of late effected, placed England in an almost invulnerable position. Never during the century, he declared, had Great Britain been on more amicable terms with her neighbours, and never had her position as the first among nations been more secure. Then he went on to speak of the two great tasks Her Majesty's Ministers had themselves undertaken--the task of drawing all members of this vast Empire, all the dependencies of the crown in every quarter of the world, into a close and more organic unity, and the task of providing adequate defences for this great Empire. He admitted that it was sometimes held abroad that this awakening on our part to the obligations of Empire denoted a new spirit of antagonism in this country towards the legitimate aims and aspirations of European Powers. That was not so. The spirit in which we took up our portion of the task was not one of antagonism, but of generous emulation, with a view to seeing which of the favoured nations of the world could do most in the shortest time to perform the duty owed by them to the countries still oppressed by savagery, barbarism, or imperfect civilisation. That spirit was embodied in a certain secret agreement which he could not, of course, mention. The tasks he had spoken of could not be undertaken by their