"
"Tell me exactly how you started life," she begged.
"Like any other third or fourth son of a bankrupt baronet," he replied.
"I went to Eaton and Oxford with the knowledge that I had to carve out
my own career and my ambitions when I left the University were entirely
personal. I chose diplomacy. I did moderately well, I believe. I remember
my first really confidential mission," he went on, with a faint smile,
"brought me to Paris, where we met.--Then came Parliament--afterwards
the war and a revolution in all my ideas. I suddenly saw the strength
and power of England and realised whence it came. I realised that it
was our democracy which was the backbone of the country. I realised the
injustice of those centuries of class government. I plunged into my old
socialistic studies, which I had taken up at Oxford more out of caprice
than anything, and I began to have a vision of what I have always since
looked upon as the truth. I began to realise that there was some
super-divine truth in the equality of all humans, notwithstanding the
cheap arguments against it; that by steady and broad-minded government
for a generation or so, human beings would be born into the world under
more level conditions; and with the fading away of class would be born
or rather generated the real and wonderful spirit of freedom.
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