An aristocratic world-state; this political dream had already taken hold of Benham’s imagination when he came to town.  But it was a dream, something that had never existed, something that indeed may never materialize, and such dreams, though they are vivid enough in a study at night, fade and vanish at the rustle of a daily newspaper or the sound of a passing band.  To come back again. . . .  So it was with Benham.  Sometimes he was set clearly towards this world-state that Prothero had talked into possibility.  Sometimes he was simply abreast of the patriotic and socially constructive British Imperialism of Breeze and Westerton.  And there were moods when the two things were confused in his mind, and the glamour of world dominion rested wonderfully on the slack and straggling British Empire of Edward the Seventh—­and Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Mr. Chamberlain.  He did go on for a time honestly entertaining both these projects in his mind, each at its different level, the greater impalpable one and the lesser concrete one within it.  In some unimaginable way he could suppose that the one by some miracle of ennoblement—­and neglecting the Frenchman, the Russian, the German, the American, the Indian, the Chinaman, and, indeed, the greater part of mankind from the problem—­might become the other. . . .

All of which is recorded here, without excess of comment, as it happened, and as, in a mood of astonished reminiscences, he came finally to perceive it, and set it down for White’s meditative perusal.

4

But to the enthusiasm of the young, dreams have something of the substance of reality and realities, something of the magic of dreams.  The London to which Benham came from Cambridge and the disquisitions of Prothero was not the London of a mature and disillusioned vision.  It was London seen magnified and distorted through the young man’s crystalline intentions.  It had for him a quality of multitudinous, unquenchable activity.  Himself filled with an immense appetite for life, he was unable to conceive of London as fatigued.  He could not suspect these statesmen he now began to meet and watch, of jaded wills and petty spites, he imagined that all the important and influential persons in this large world of affairs were as frank in their private lives and as unembarrassed in their financial relationships as his untainted self.  And he had still to reckon with stupidity.  He believed in the statecraft of leader-writers and the sincerity of political programmes.  And so regarded, what an avenue to Empire was Whitehall!  How momentous was the sunrise in St. James’s Park, and how significant the clustering knot of listeners and speakers beneath the tall column that lifts our Nelson to the windy sky!