“So long,” I said, “as the prophet comes from another country, he has full honour in ours.”
“He was a cut above some of them,” said Saltash defensively; and I was told of one great public man who had dodged the dock in Australia to buy papers in England, of another who operated in London because he was threatened with a bullet in his brain if he ventured back to Winnipeg. Though Saltash did not say so, I think they may have fished in the waters which he troubled.
“The revenges of time!,” I said, as I stood up to go. “This is the remittance-man come home to roost.”
“A party can’t exist without funds,” said Saltash, beckoning to our waiter for a third liqueur. “Or without publicity.”
That I was not prepared to contest; and, as a new-born party had to collect its funds and build up its organization at short notice, I was not surprised that the rich men surrounding the coalition were more numerous and less savoury than the sufficiently dubious candidates for honours whom I had seen haunting the whips’ office during my active political career. If I was to believe Saltash, however, London had suddenly become a hunting-ground for the desperadoes of the empire. These “new men” were unknown names when the war began; soon I heard of them whenever a political crisis was being engineered. Their ability was undoubted; their experience had been gained in rough schools; and their resourcefulness admitted no limit. Supplying the impecunious with money and the affluent with advice, they acquired knowledge and influence which they used to acquire more money; and this in turn purchased them a further power of unseen interference in the direction of our government.
That night, as I sat down to our inaugural dinner, I told Bertrand of my host at luncheon and of his conversation.
“It’s no new thing,” said my uncle, who in these nights of doubt and sorrow unmasked an almost irritating resolution to be jolly at all costs. “The great international financiers have influenced governments and been influenced by them since banks and governments began.”
Historically, that may have been true. The new thing, as Bertrand himself might have said, was the character of the new men and the new methods which they employed.
3
This dinner was to be my last frolic as an irresponsible spectator.