And suddenly he began to tell White as plainly as he could of the faith that had grown up in his mind.  He spoke with a touch of defiance, with the tense force of a man who shrinks but overcomes his shame.  “I will tell you what I believe.”

He told of his early dread of fear and baseness, and of the slow development, expansion and complication of his idea of self-respect until he saw that there is no honour nor pride for a man until he refers his life to ends and purposes beyond himself.  An aristocrat must be loyal.  So it has ever been, but a modern aristocrat must also be lucid; there it is that one has at once the demand for kingship and the repudiation of all existing states and kings.  In this manner he had come to his idea of a great world republic that must replace the little warring kingdoms of the present, to the conception of an unseen kingship ruling the whole globe, to his King Invisible, who is the Lord of Truth and all sane loyalty.  “There,” he said, “is the link of our order, the new knighthood, the new aristocracy, that must at last rule the earth.  There is our Prince.  He is in me, he is in you; he is latent in all mankind.  I have worked this out and tried it and lived it, and I know that outwardly and inwardly this is the way a man must live, or else be a poor thing and a base one.  On great occasions and small occasions I have failed myself a thousand times, but no failure lasts if your faith lasts.  What I have learnt, what I have thought out and made sure, I want now to tell the world.  Somehow I will tell it, as a book I suppose, though I do not know if I shall ever be able to make a book.  But I have away there in London or with me here all the masses of notes I have made in my search for the life that is worth while living. . . .  We who are self-appointed aristocrats, who are not ashamed of kingship, must speak to one another. . . .

“We can have no organization because organizations corrupt. . . .

“No recognition. . . .

“But we can speak plainly. . . .”

(As he talked his voice was for a space drowned by the jingle and voices of mounted police riding past the hotel.)

“But on one side your aristocracy means revolution,” said White.  “It becomes a political conspiracy.”

“Manifestly.  An open conspiracy.  It denies the king upon the stamps and the flag upon the wall.  It is the continual proclamation of the Republic of Mankind.”

15

The earlier phases of violence in the Rand outbreak in 1913 were manifest rather in the outskirts of Johannesburg than at the centre.  “Pulling out” was going on first at this mine and then that, there were riots in Benoni, attacks on strike breakers and the smashing up of a number of houses.  It was not until July the 4th that, with the suppression of a public meeting in the market-place, Johannesburg itself became the storm centre.