For a week he laid siege to the League of Nations, then to the Foreign Office. Simultaneously I went as a suppliant to Crawleigh in the hope that he would forward my petition to the Vatican. On the same day, in almost the same words, we were told that there was no precedent to guide a sovereign power in summoning an arbitrator to settle differences between a government and its subjects.
“You can’t run an empire on those lines,” said my father-in-law.
“You’re not running an empire on your present lines!” I retorted.
He was impregnable. Until the republican leaders came, like the burghers of Calais, barefoot, in their shirts, with ropes round their necks, he would not parley with them; and, unhappily for him, no one was strong enough to compass an unconditional surrender.
As I walked empty-handed away from Berkeley Square, I met Hornbeck returning home from the Admiralty.
“Making a nice, tidy world for heroes to live in?,” he enquired with a grin.
Though his tone was bantering, it was free from malice. Philip Hornbeck had no political predilections and less than no belief in the perfectibility of man. Government, for him, always came back to a whiff of grapeshot, which he was always ready to discharge, always without passion and always without error.
“The problem’s not insoluble,” I maintained. “We settled Quebec; we settled South Africa. We could settle Ireland, if we wanted to; but, of a hundred men who talk of settlements, ninety-nine will only settle on their own terms.”
On reaching Fetter Lane, I found my uncle at work on an appeal to the nation.
“The Foreign Office,” he told me with frozen rage, “wanted to know what business this was of mine. Perhaps we can shew them.”