CHAPTER X
OUR ORIENTAL FUTURE (continued)
On Traitor's Hill the heat of the earlier afternoon was gone. The evening began, the tardy evening of our climate, so unlike that of the tropics, where the day begins suddenly, and the night is sudden too.
In the serene air of that stately prospect every fold and feature in the infinite articulation of London stood out perfectly, so that the volplane of sight sped with ease to the dome of St. Paul's and the towers of Westminster, those divided emblems of division in Church and State. But of the Thames that links them, and in its eastward flow gives to London its only unity, not a trace was to be seen. It was like the hidden path of our future.
For, to lift the purdah of that future, every thought, as it came, added to the conviction and to the certainty that for ourselves the determining trend of destiny lies east. At home, indeed, our problem is the condition of labour; in Europe, our function is to be the refrigerator of the passions of Christendom. But out there we have to face and remedy the old darkening hatred between
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