about so unexpectedly, that people—­at least the people the young man knew and esteemed—­were still trying to explain how it had happened.  The old party had been sleeping, of course; it had grown too confident, some said too corpulent; and it had slept on peacefully, in spite of the stirring strength of the labour leaders, in spite of the threatening coalition of the new factions, in spite even of the swift revolt against the stubborn forces of habit, of tradition, of overweening authority.  His mother, he knew, held the world war responsible; but then his mother was so constituted that she was obliged to blame somebody or something for whatever happened.  Yet others, he admitted, as well as his mother, held the war responsible for Gideon Vetch—­as if the great struggle had cast him out in some gigantic cataclysm, as if it had broken through the once solid ground of established order, and had released into the world all the explosive gases of disintegration, of destruction.

For himself, the young man reflected now, he had always thought otherwise.  It was a period, he felt, of humbug radicalism, of windbag eloquence; yet he possessed both wit and discernment enough to see that, though ideas might explode in empty talk, still it took ideas to make the sort of explosion that was deafening one’s ears.  All the flat formula of the centuries could not produce a single Gideon Vetch.  Such men were part of the changing world; they answered not to reasoned argument, but to the loud crash of breaking idols.  Stephen hated Vetch with all his heart, but he acknowledged him.  He did not try to evade the man’s tremendous veracity, his integrity of being, his inevitableness.  An inherent intellectual honesty compelled Stephen to admit that, “the demagogue”, as he called him, had his appropriate place in the age that produced him—­that he existed rather as an outlet for political tendencies than as the product of international violence.  He was more than a theatrical attitude—­a torrent of words.  Even a free country—­and Stephen thought sentimentally of America as “a free country”—­must have its tyrannies of opinion, and consequently its rebels against current convictions.  In the older countries he had imagined that it might be possible to hold with the hare and run with the hounds; but in the land of opportunity for all there was less reason to be astonished when the hunted turned at last into the hunter.  Where every boy was taught that he might some day be President, why should one stand amazed when the ambitious son of a circus rider became Governor of Virginia?  After all, a fair field and no favours was the best that the most conservative of politicians—­the best that even John Benham could ask.