At any rate, passively, through
the mere fact of being English, he was ruling India. And he knew
nothing of India. He knew nothing indeed of Asia. So soon as he
returned to London his preparations for this travel must begin, he
must plot out the men to whom he would go, and so contrive that also
he would go round the world. Perhaps he would get Lionel Maxim to
go with him. Or if Maxim could not come, then possibly Prothero.
Some one surely could be found, some one thinking and talking of
statecraft and the larger idea of life. All the world is not
swallowed up in every day. . . .
15
His mind shifted very suddenly from these large proposals to an
entirely different theme. These mental landslips are not unusual
when men are thinking hard and wandering. He found himself holding
a trial upon himself for Presumptuousness, for setting himself up
against the wisdom of the ages, and the decisions of all the
established men in the world, for being in short a Presumptuous Sort
of Ass. He was judge and jury and prosecutor, but rather
inexplicably the defence was conducted in an irregular and
undignified way by some inferior stratum of his being.
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