in life then the world has to be a united world, Benham, as a matter of course.  That was settled when the railways and the telegraph came.  Telephones, wireless telegraphy, aeroplanes insist on it.  We’ve got to mediatise all this stuff, all these little crowns and boundaries and creeds, and so on, that stand in the way.  Just as Italy had to be united in spite of all the rotten little dukes and princes and republics, just as Germany had to be united in spite of its scores of kingdoms and duchies and liberties, so now the world.  Things as they are may be fun for lawyers and politicians and court people and—­douaniers; they may suit the loan-mongers and the armaments shareholders, they may even be more comfortable for the middle-aged, but what, except as an inconvenience, does that matter to you or me?”

Prothero always pleased Benham when he swept away empires.  There was always a point when the rhetoric broke into gesture.

“We’ve got to sweep them away, Benham,” he said, with a wide gesture of his arm.  “We’ve got to sweep them all away.”

Prothero helped himself to some more whiskey, and spoke hastily, because he was afraid some one else might begin.  He was never safe from interruption in his own room.  The other young men present sucked at their pipes and regarded him doubtfully.  They were never quite certain whether Prothero was a prophet or a fool.  They could not understand a mixed type, and he was so manifestly both.

“The only sane political work for an intelligent man is to get the world-state ready.  For that we have to prepare an aristocracy—­”

“Your world-state will be aristocratic?” some one interpolated.

“Of course it will be aristocratic.  How can uninformed men think all round the globe?  Democracy dies five miles from the parish pump.  It will be an aristocratic republic of all the capable men in the world. . . .”

“Of course,” he added, pipe in mouth, as he poured out his whiskey, “it’s a big undertaking.  It’s an affair of centuries. . . .”

And then, as a further afterthought:  “All the more reason for getting to work at it. . . .”

In his moods of inspiration Prothero would discourse through the tobacco smoke until that great world-state seemed imminent—­and Part Two in the Tripos a thing relatively remote.  He would talk until the dimly-lit room about him became impalpable, and the young men squatting about it in elaborately careless attitudes caught glimpses of cities that are still to be, bridges in wild places, deserts tamed and oceans conquered, mankind no longer wasted by bickerings, going forward to the conquest of the stars. . . .