In May, June and July, 1914, within three months of the war, every donkey in London was cutting, or trying to cut us, for wishing to settle this very same Irish question.  My presence at a hall with Elizabeth—­who was seventeen—­was considered not only provocative to others but a danger to myself.  All the brains of all the landlords in Ireland, backed by half the brains of half the landlords in England, had ranged themselves behind Sir Edward Carson, his army and his Covenant.  Earnest Irish patriots had turned their fields into camps and their houses into hospitals; aristocratic females had been making bandages for months, when von Kuhlmann, Secretary of the German Embassy in London, went over to pay his first visit to Ireland.  On his return he told me with conviction that, from all he had heard and seen out there during a long tour, nothing but a miracle could avert civil war, to which I replied: 

“Shocking as that would be, it would not break England.”

Our follies in Ireland have cursed not only the political but the social life of this country.

It was not until the political ostracisms over Home Rule began all over again in 1914 that I realised how powerful socially my friends and I were in the ’eighties.

Mr. Balfour once told me that, before our particular group of friends—­generally known as the Souls—­appeared in London, prominent politicians of opposite parties seldom if ever met one another; and he added: 

“No history of our time will be complete unless the influence of the Souls upon society is dispassionately and accurately recorded.”

The same question of Home Rule that threw London back to the old parochialisms in 1914 was at its height in 1886 and 1887; but at our house in Grosvenor Square and later in those of the Souls, everyone met—­Randolph Churchill, Gladstone, Asquith, Morley, Chamberlain, Balfour, Rosebery, Salisbury, Hartington, Harcourt and, I might add, jockeys, actors, the Prince of Wales and every ambassador in London.  We never cut anybody—­not even our friends —­or thought it amusing or distinguished to make people feel uncomfortable; and our decision not to sacrifice private friendship to public politics was envied in every capital in Europe.  It made London the centre of the most interesting society in the world and gave men of different tempers and opposite beliefs an opportunity of discussing them without heat and without reporters.  There is no individual or group among us powerful enough to succeed in having a salon of this kind to-day.

The daring of that change in society cannot be over-estimated.  The unconscious and accidental grouping of brilliant, sincere and loyal friends like ourselves gave rise to so much jealousy and discussion that I shall devote a chapter of this book to the Souls.