I know that before the end of my Harbury days I was already dreaming of a Career, of some great and usefulness in the world. That has always haunted my mind and haunts it now. I may be cured perhaps of the large and showy of youth, I may have learnt to drop the "great and conspicuous," but still I find it necessary to believe that I matter, that I play a part no one else can play in a progress, in a universal scheme moving towards ends.  
Almost wholly I think I was dreaming of public service in those days. The Harbury tradition towards the state, and all my world was bare of to any other type of ambition. Success in art or literature did not appeal to us, and a Harbury boy would as soon think of being a great tinker as a great philosopher. Science we called "stinks"; our three science masters were ex officio ridiculous and the practical laboratory a refuge for oddities. But a good half of our fathers at least were peers or members of parliament, and our sense of politics was close and keen. History, and particularly history as it came up through the eighteenth century to our own times, supplied us with a gallery of intimate models, our great uncles and grandfathers and ancestors at large figured abundantly in the story and furnished the pattern to which we cut our anticipations of life. It was a season of , the Imperialism of the earlier Kipling phase, and we were all of us for the Empire. It was the empire of the White Man's Burthen in those days; the anti-climax of the Reform Movement was still some years ahead of us. It was easier for us at Harbury to believe then than it has become since, in our own racial and national and class . We were the Anglo-Saxons, the elect of the earth, leading the world in social organization, in science and economic method. In India and the east more particularly we were the apostles of even-handed justice, , personal cleanliness, and modern efficiency. In a spirit of we were spreading those over a reluctant and occasionally ^............