i know that before the end of my harbury days i was already dreaming of a career, of some great and conspicuous usefulness in the world. that has always haunted my mind and haunts it now. i may be cured perhaps of the large and showy anticipations of youth, i may have learnt to drop the "great and conspicuous," but still i find it necessary to believe that i matter, that i play a part no one else can play in a progress, in a universal scheme moving towards triumphant ends.

almost wholly i think i was dreaming of public service in those days. the harbury tradition pointed steadfastly towards the state, and all my world was bare of allurements to any other type of ambition. success in art or literature did not appeal to us, and a harbury boy would as soon think of being a great tinker as a great philosopher. science we called "stinks"; our three science masters were ex officio ridiculous and the practical laboratory a refuge for oddities. but a good half of our fathers at least were peers or members of parliament, and our sense of politics was close and keen. history, and particularly history as it came up through the eighteenth century to our own times, supplied us with a gallery of intimate models, our great uncles and grandfathers and ancestors at large figured abundantly in the story and furnished the pattern to which we cut our anticipations of life. it was a season of imperialism, the picturesque imperialism of the earlier kipling phase, and we were all of us enthusiasts for the empire. it was the empire of the white man's burthen in those days; the sordid anti-climax of the tariff reform movement was still some years ahead of us. it was easier for us at harbury to believe then than it has become since, in our own racial and national and class supremacy. we were the anglo-saxons, the elect of the earth, leading the world in social organization, in science and economic method. in india and the east more particularly we were the apostles of even-handed justice, relentless veracity, personal cleanliness, and modern efficiency. in a spirit of adventurous benevolence we were spreading those blessings over a reluctant and occasionally recalcitrant world of people for the most part "colored." our success in this had aroused the bitter envy and rivalry of various continental nations, and particularly of france, russia, and germany. but france had been diverted to north africa, russia to eastern asia, and germany was already the most considered antagonist in our path towards an empire over the world.

this was the spacious and by no means ignoble project of the later nineties. most of us harbury boys, trained as i had been trained to be uncritical, saw the national outlook in those terms. we knew little or nothing, until the fierce wranglings of the free traders and tariff reformers a few years later brought it home to us, of the commercial, financial and squalid side of our relations with the vast congeries of exploited new territories and subordinated and subjugated populations. we knew nothing of the social conditions of the mass of people in our own country. we were blankly ignorant of economics. we knew nothing of that process of expropriation and the exploitation of labor which is giving the world the servile state. the very phrase was twenty years ahead of us. we believed that an englishman was a better thing in every way than any other sort of man, that english literature, science and philosophy were a shining and unapproachable light to all other peoples, that our soldiers were better than all other soldiers and our sailors than all other sailors. such civilization and enterprise as existed in germany for instance we regarded as a shadow, an envious shadow, following our own; it was still generally believed in those days that german trade was concerned entirely with the dishonest imitation of our unapproachable english goods. and as for the united states, well, the united states though blessed with a strain of english blood, were nevertheless "out of it," marooned in a continent of their own and—we had to admit it—corrupt.

given such ignorance, you know, it wasn't by any means ignoble to be patriotic, to dream of this propagandist empire of ours spreading its great peace and culture, its virtue and its amazing and unprecedented honesty,—its honesty!—round the world.