Whether the world looks to us or not to do tremendous things, it
ought to look to us. And above all we ought to look to ourselves.
RICHESSE OBLIGE."
3
It is not to be supposed that Benham came to town only with a
general theory of aristocracy. He had made plans for a career.
Indeed, he had plans for several careers. None of them when brought
into contrast with the great spectacle of London retained all the
attractiveness that had saturated them at their inception.
They were all more or less political careers. Whatever a democratic
man may be, Prothero and he had decided that an aristocratic man is
a public man. He is made and protected in what he is by laws and
the state and his honour goes out to the state. The aristocrat has
no right to be a voluptuary or a mere artist or a respectable
nonentity, or any such purely personal things. Responsibility for
the aim and ordering of the world is demanded from him as
imperatively as courage.
Benham's deliberate assumption of the equestrian role brought him
into contact with a new set of acquaintances, conscious of political
destinies.
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