I saw frontiers annulled,
treaties violated, world-problems tumbling like clowns, standing on their
heads and crying, "Here we are again!" Power--after all, had solved
nothing!
My eye travelled over that problem of the Near East, which, for some
generations at least, we thought to have settled, to Vienna, Petersburg,
Constantinople--and away farther East to Teheran and--that other place
whose name I have forgotten. And, as I looked, a Recording Angel came, and
cried to me in a voice strangely familiar, the voice of one of my most
detested colleagues--trusted, I mean--"You have put your money on the
wrong horse!"
And I had, Doctor; if what I saw then was true--I had! Yes, if ever man
blundered and fooled his countrymen into a false and fatal position--I was
that man! It wasn't a question of right or wrong. In politics that doesn't
really matter; you decide on a course, and you invent moral reasons for it
afterwards. No, what I had done was much worse than any mere wrongdoing.
All my political foresight and achievements were a gamble that had gone
wrong; and for that my Day of Judgment had come, and I stood in the
pillory, a peepshow for mockery. But why for their instrument of torture
did they choose primroses? Oh, I can invent a reason! It was Moses
Primrose, cheated of his horse with a gross of green spectacles cased in
shagreen. But that was not the reason. For then came new insight, and a
fresh humiliation.
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