length reconstruction found itself back at the injunction that a man should love his neighbour as himself.

Each with his own formula, the young agnostics of the last generation worked by discussion, reading and reflection to a new imperative; and those who found satisfaction in Christian ethics as a guide to conduct found also that the Christianity which they had fashioned for themselves was a militant faith. Injustice and fear, suffering and cruelty are not to be eradicated by private renunciations and protests; those who care enough for beauty to wish the world beautiful have to make the world beautiful. And the machine in which the form of the world is changed seemed in those days to be politics.[4]

Vast as had been the progress of recorded history, vaster progress remained to be accomplished if civilisation was not to be judged an hypocrisy or a failure; and, though the saddest limitation of youth be its utter misunderstanding of the obstacles in the way of any change, its most glorious endowment is surely its impulsive desire to realise its ideals. Impatient of muddle, intolerant of laziness, sensitive to beauty and fiercely sympathetic with suffering, youth glances with disgust at the meanness and squalor that desecrate every part of its world and offers the generous ardour of a world-builder to set it right. Childhood with its wooden blocks and sand-castles, boyhood with its tools and engines, youth with its instruments and diagrams are the constructive times of life: there is little that lusty youth will not make, nothing that impatient youth is afraid to reform; its heroes are the great conquerors and builders who tidied some corner of a dilapidated world, the explorers who sought new worlds to tidy, even the prophets and lawyers who tried to bring uniformity into religion and society.

In a thousand hours of meditation or wrangling the boys of that generation hammered out each his own formula of political change. The ethics of private property and communism, of war and peace, of equal democracy and paternal despotism, of the national ideal and the ideal of internationalism were argued at school from the standpoint which had been taken up at home and at home from a standpoint which had been startlingly occupied at school. Whatever had been the inherited preconceptions, every political doctrine was now required to justify itself: the party which had enjoyed almost unbroken tenure of office for nearly a fifth of a century fell from power in 1905, to be succeeded by one which brought up for settlement or readjustment all the old problems of domestic controversy and many that were new.

IV

It is easy to guess the political path chosen by an Irish boy brought up in England and sent to a tory stronghold by a father who had reared him on the pure milk of late-Victorian radicalism; it is not difficult to imagine what lions beset that path. The way of the minority politician in a public school is hard but stimulating: while the Boer war continued, any doubts of British wisdom or justice in South Africa were ill-received and answered by violence; for two years more, since free trade had been abandoned by Mr. Chamberlain, a solitary free-trader would be beaten to his knees by phrases about dying industries, dumping and unfair competition; and, all the while, there was little chance of agreement between those who would have solved the Irish difficulty by holding Ireland under the sea for five minutes and any one who was never able to forget the sailing of crowded emigrant ships from Queenstown and the keening which rose to Heaven in acknowledgment of British rule.

Only in the dignified atmosphere of the Debating Society, when a general election had sent hundreds of radicals to Parliament and proved that radicals existed, in hundreds of thousands, outside it, did radical policy get a hearing. Political interest revived sharply in 1905 and 1906: more than ever did the rising politicians use their privilege of attending debates in the House of Commons. It has been said that politics are made tolerable in England by the fact that hardly any one takes them seriously except the politicians, who are for the most part not English; but they are dangerous food for the young in the expectations that they arouse and in the disillusionment that they entail. After nearly twenty years of tory rule, the liberals in 1905 were healed of their long domestic dissensions and assured of a majority; the ministry so judiciously chosen by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman was overwhelming in its varied strength; with the pacification of South Africa and the repatriation of the indentured Chinese labourers, the dark infamy of the Boer war and of a calamitous plunge into Rand politics were to be forgotten; social reform was sketched with a bold hand; a message of peace and good-will was sent to the other powers.

So vast was the ministerial majority after the election of 1906 that a liberal prime minister, for the first time since 1880, seemed able to fulfil his promises without having to balance the claims of ill-assorted groups or to consider the vague menace of the House of Lords; the ambitions of the Liberal League had been defeated, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman had survived the efforts of his more spirited colleagues to kick him upstairs. In 1906, for those who cared to see the world beautiful and would spend their ardour to make it beautiful, there was still a sufficient part of the population illiterate, hungry and diseased, rendered miserable by fear and savage by injustice to keep the social reformers employed; Ireland, Egypt and India all demanded a change of administrative system. Those were days in which it seemed good to be a liberal.

V

It would have been a meagre tribute to the spell of Westminster if some of those who, in passing out of Abbey on that last Sunday of Election Term, passed also out of their pupilage, did not look forward from the threshold of manhood in a spirit of dedication; it would have been an admission of dubious gratitude if, in bidding farewell that afternoon under the trees of College Garden, they had not confessed their debt to the school. In six years some few of them had developed into fair scholars along lines of education which had not then been so bitterly attacked as they have been since: no one, indeed, aimed to make them proficient in preparing a manifest and detecting an escape of sewer gas; in their curriculum the financial possibilities of Spanish and Russian were ignored, like all other adjuncts to a sound commercial training; and, though the art of Asia and the letters of Ethiopia have since been urged as an alternative to Greek and Latin, they stuck insularly to the literature and history of the civilisation from which all the great modern civilisations of Europe derive. Those who cared to work contrived to cover a wide field even in that English literature which is popularly thought to be excluded from public-school study; for the rest, it should be recognised that a point is quickly reached at which those who do not wish to work can no longer be compelled. At the lowest computation, all had received at least a grounding in the humanities and an equipment for profounder study of subjects that by pressure of time could not be exhausted at school.

In addition, they were for five or six years disciplined to a system, yielding obedience as unquestioningly as afterwards they exacted it.

"This we learned from famous men,

Knowing not its