How I Met the President

Several years ago, when there was a small war going on in South Africa
and a great fuss going on in England, when it was by no means so popular
and convenient to be a Pro-Boer as it is now, I remember making
a bright suggestion to my Pro-Boer friends and allies, which was not,
I regret to say, received with the seriousness it deserved.
I suggested that a band of devoted and noble youths, including ourselves,
should express our sense of the pathos of the President's and
the Republic's fate by growing Kruger beards under our chins.
I imagined how abruptly this decoration would alter the appearance
of Mr. John Morley; how startling it would be as it emerged from under
the chin of Mr. Lloyd-George. But the younger men, my own friends,
on whom I more particularly urged it, men whose names are in many cases
familiar to the readers of this paper--Mr. Masterman's for instance,
and Mr. Conrad Noel--they, I felt, being young and beautiful,
would do even more justice to the Kruger beard, and when walking
down the street with it could not fail to attract attention.
The beard would have been a kind of counterblast to the Rhodes hat.
An appropriate counterblast; for the Rhodesian power in Africa
is only an external thing, placed upon the top like a hat;
the Dutch power and tradition is a thing rooted and growing
like a beard; we have shaved it, and it is growing again.
The Kruger beard would represent time and the natural processes.
You cannot grow a beard in a moment of passion.

. . . . .

After making this proposal to my friends I hurriedly left town.
I went down to a West Country place where there was shortly afterwards
an election, at which I enjoyed myself very much canvassing for
the Liberal candidate. The extraordinary thing was that he got in.
I sometimes lie awake at night and meditate upon that mystery;
but it must not detain us now. The rather singular incident
which happened to me then, and which some recent events have
recalled to me, happened while the canvassing was still going on.
It was a burning blue day, and the warm sunshine, settling everywhere
on the high hedges and the low hills, brought out into a kind
of heavy bloom that HUMANE quality of the landscape which,
as far as I know, only exists in England; that sense as if
the bushes and the roads were human, and had kindness like men;
as if the tree were a good giant with one wooden leg;
as if the very line of palings were a row of good-tempered gnomes.
On one side of the white, sprawling road a low hill or down
showed but a little higher than the hedge, on the other the land
tumbled down into a valley that opened towards the Mendip hills.
The road was very erratic, for every true English road exists
in order to lead one a