Even the policemen and other poor men, who might have no share in these high things, felt the awe of what was toward. The hawkers and the newspaper boys, members of a rank where finance is forgotten, yet remembered England, and felt a pride of their own in the venture upon which these four men had entered; nor is there to-day any great city in the world, save London, where every citizen can forget envy and the differences of wealth in the passion of patriotism.
Meanwhile Mr Barnett, within, was reading the prospectus for the last, and, if I remember rightly, the fifth time.
He held the paper down on the table by the weight of his large left hand, and read it through most carefully; the volume of his voice was emphasised by the slight guttural accent and the broad vowels which alone betrayed his foreign experience.
It was a peculiarity of his—common to most men of dominant character—that he suffered no interruption: a chance remark from Mr Harbury, an interjection from Lord Benthorpe passed by totally unheeded. His voice, slowly proceeding from word to word, or jolting at the stops, went steadily over the other men’s remarks, and crushed them as a great stone roller crushes clods in its going. It had also this in common with the roller, that its pace was even. He emphasised no syllables; every letter—contrary to our modern English usage—was pronounced; and this, in words such as “undesirability,” “advantageous,” or “irrecognisable” produced an effect both rich and strange.
When he had finished reading, he smoothed the papers out, gathered them up, and sighed as over a thing completed. He rose, and the three others with him; and you may say that one of the greatest days in the recent history of our country had gloriously ended.
“Not once or twice,” as someone says somewhere, “in our rough island story, the path of duty was the road to glory.”
CHAPTER X
There runs a mandate to chosen nations to govern upon earth as vicegerents of the Divine. It has fallen upon peoples so separated by time and customs that its essential unity is with difficulty perceived; nevertheless, that unity is assured. The process whereby dominion is achieved is called by different names: the names, and not the events, deceive us; the names alone produce a false atmosphere of change. First, perhaps, it was the vague loyalty to the tribe, the marauding foray, the settlement; next the intense love of a city and of its gods, the successful defence, the advance, the conquest and organisation of lands beyond the boundary. Karl Unterwassen reverses the order; it is a point of small importance.