"They don't either. One or two of the most determined law breakers are in reality spies; they've kept us posted in the successive steps of the campaign up to the present. Now they report that there's no plan for the future. They know it would be futile to start assassination; if they go on burning and breaking, a proportion of them get caught and punished. Hunger striking's been killed by the Cat and Mouse Act. Well, militancy's dead, Toby. If you come down to the House to-night, you'll be present at the funeral."
"What's happening?"
"It's the division on the Suffrage amendment to the Electoral Reform Bill. Hullo! here's Philip. Let me introduce my eldest son."
I made friends with Philip as we crossed the Park and entered the House. He was curiously like the Arthur I had known twenty years before—tall, dark-haired, clean-featured, with an exuberant zest for life tempered to an almost imperceptible degree by the reserve of the responsible public man. The physical and mental vigour of father and son left me silently admiring; as they hurried along at a swinging five miles an hour, I took stock of their powerful, untiring frames, quick movements, and crisp, machine-made speech. They were hard, business-like, unimaginative, with the qualities of those defects and the defects of those qualities; trained, taught, and equipped to play the midwife to any of the bureaucratic social reforms that have been brought into the English political world the last few years, but helpless and impotently perplexed in face of an idea outside their normal ken. They were highly efficient average English politicians. Either or both would reform you the Poor Law, nationalise a railway, or disestablish a Church; but send Philip to India, set Arthur to carry out Cromer's work in Egypt, and you would see English dominion driven from two continents as speedily as North drove it from America. It was one of the paradoxes of English politics that Arthur should have been entrusted with the problem of Suffrage militancy, a paradox of the same order as that whereby Strafford grappled with the problem of a parliamentary system.
"You'll stay a few minutes," Philip urged as I abandoned him to Empire and wandered off to pay my belated respects to my brother.
I glanced round me and shook my head. I would not grow old all at once, and yet—Gladstone was Prime Minister when I left England: his statue now dominated the public lobby. And Salisbury, Harcourt, Chamberlain, Parnell, Labby—their voices were sunk in the great silence. In my day Committee Room Number Fifteen used to be an object of historic interest....
"They say the lion and the lizard keep
The Halls where Jamshyd gloried, and drank deep:
And Bahram, the great hunter, the wild ass
Stamps o'er his head, and he lies fast asleep."
I quoted the lines to Philip apologetically, reminding him that the Omar Khayyam vogue had not come in when I left England. "I shall see you at Brandon Court," I added.
"What are you going to do till then?" he asked.
"Heaven knows! I never make arrangements. Things just happen to me. I always contrive to be in the thick of whatever's going on. I don't know how long I shall stay in England, or where I shall go to afterwards. But whether it's a railway strike or a coronation, I shall be there. I don't like it, I'm a peaceful man by nature, but I can't help it. I always get dragged into these things."