The other day, accompanied by an engineer acquaintance, I was pottering about certain new excavations in the heart of London, and came upon a number of heaps of crushed and broken-up concrete, evidently the remains of old foundations. Yet those foundations could not have been very old, since I myself could remember the buildings of which they had been the support, and these had been old-fashioned rather than old. One of them had been a theater, another an hotel; and I stood there with my friend, looking over the waste of rubbish and barrows and wheeling-planks and thrown-up London clay, trying to evoke in my mind the exact plan of those vanished streets of thirty-odd years ago.

I found it difficult. Had these streets been older streets there would have been remembered records to help me. Prints would have jogged my memory, maps and plans have come to my aid. The seventeenth or eighteenth centuries would somehow have come nearer home than that unnoteworthy period of hardly more than a generation ago. Particularly when I tried to picture the huge new palaces of ferro-concrete that will presently arise, that intermediate epoch seemed ephemeral and without significance.

And so, even already, I find this record of our Case to be. There is a strange blank, full (I know) of all manner of busyness and bustle and restless effort, but without either the security of history nor yet the full brightness of new discovery. The Scepter action seems somehow more remote than the Armada, the findings of this high-sounding Committee or that farther away than Trafalgar. All is still too near to be seen, and by the time the dust has settled another pen than mine will have to take up the tale.

Indeed, I have more than once felt inclined to hand over the pen now, for, when all is still to prove, a younger faith and vision than those of my day are needed. For example, Cecil Hubbard tells me that the man who nowadays does not know at least the elements of all this lore of wave-lengths and directional wireless has no business to say that he belongs to his age at all, and sadly I believe him. Yet Philip Esdaile contrives to keep abreast, not by joining in the banging and burnt-cork of so much contemporary painting, but by virtue of something else, often temporarily hidden, that will still be quietly there when the whistles have ceased to scream and the tom-toms to thud. He too maintains the continuity, sharing with his forerunners that quality, whatever it is, which makes the old centuries modern and the novelty of yesterday afternoon musty and stale before the sun next rises.

Therefore, it should be understood that the rest is more theirs and less mine than ever. In the Scepter action Charles Valentine Smith, speaking (thanks largely to my friend Glenfield) from the witness-box and not from the dock, with wreaths and garlands and the glamour of his Embassy adventure almost visibly about him, made this abundantly clear. Easily, familiarly, and with pronouns all over the shop, he dealt with matters so far above my head that I will make no attempt to report him. If you are interested, there are The Times Law Reports in which you can read it all. And similarly with the whole crop of associated actions and inquiries and investigations. My own interest in them is no more than that something has been born in my time whose infant strugglings and gaspings I witnessed, and about which I shall doubtless become garrulous all too soon.