How, to help this girdling of the whole world with beneficent influences, through the medium of the Anglo-Saxon?  Sir George turned him on his Mount Pisgah, first in New Zealand, later in South Africa.  He had been looking at the scored, furrowed, violent past.  It had worked out its meaning, nor was there doubt as to the bearing of that message upon the future.

At Pisgah’s highest peak the sun shone, only there were mists, which it did not pierce, in the valleys below.  Just, it caught one wisp of the vapour, and twirled it about in the wind.  The errant thing flung into a sign—­Federation of the English-speaking People; and was gone.

Sir George Grey dipped for a Grand Pacific Isles Protectorate, and a red noose from Downing Street strangled it.  He dipped for a Federated South Africa, and the red noose caught himself.  That is, he was recalled from his Cape Governor-ship on account of his projects.  Ah, that he had been permitted to go on with them!  All the gold of the Randt would not have weighed in the scales like that.

True, he was returned to South Africa, which clamoured angrily at his recall, but, as he said, ’It was with strict injunctions to stop my federation schemes, for these would not be tolerated.’

They were a generation too soon.  Yet, their author had already drawn on posterity in order to develop English colonies.  Was it right to tax posterity?  High talk turned on this at a dinner in London, where Sir George met Gladstone, Macaulay, and other celebrities.  ‘Certainly,’ Sir George argued, ’if some large expense is undertaken which will benefit those to come after us, as well as those already here, it is more equity that the former should be charged with their share.’  The principle had been put into practice in the Colonies, and he imagined that this dinner helped its advance in the Old Country.  Especially, he applied that opinion to the taking over, by Government, of the English telegraph lines.

‘I recall very well,’ Sir George stated, ’the picturesque way in which Macaulay expressed our common trait of being interested in trifles that affect us closely, to the neglect of large happenings which are distant.  “Here,” he said, about some item of news, “is a mandarin in China who has beheaded a thousand people in a batch.  I was quite shocked when I read of it this morning.  During the day I contrived to cut one of my fingers.  I’m ashamed to confess that I thought so much about the finger, that I quite forgot the massacred Chinamen!  That was Macaulay’s illustration.”

’As the dinner party was breaking up, I stood for a minute with him.  He had not been enjoying very good health.  When I congratulated him on his seeming revival in strength, he showed me his hand, which was puffy and blown, and answered:  “Oh, I’m not so well as you might think.”  Poor fellow, the remark was too true, for he died within a fortnight from that evening.’