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Finding himself in an insignificant island floating in the immensity of space, he decides that he is at last master of his own destinies; he can fling away the old equipment of final causes, original sin, and the rest; he can construct his own chart and, bound by no cosmic scheme, he need take the universe into account only in so far as he judges it to be to his own profit.
The savage had disappeared from its green forests for ever, and no longer profaned with slaughter, and his unholy whoop of death, its broad and beautiful abodes. A newer race had succeeded; and the wilderness, fulfilling the better destinies of earth, had begun to blossom like the rose.
Constance, it is true, had been no mean figure in that epoch, and had exerted a most powerful influence in shaping the destinies of Spain for her own time and for the future, but this was done by an exercise of indirect rather than direct authority. Constance had been queen, but there had been a king to rule as well, and with him remained the real power.
Don't you think," she added, leaning towards her companion, her beautiful eyes full of entreaty, "that for one night at least, all thoughts of your country and of her destinies might pass away? Let us live in the world that amuses itself, that takes the pleasures that grow ready to its hand, whose arms are not rapacious, and whose sword lies idle. Forget for a little time, dear friend.
Those who guide her destiny and the destinies of her millions of subjects have apparently come to the conclusion that democracy, as England has known it, cannot survive and that it is a choice between fascism and communism. Under communism, the ruling class to which the Cliveden week-end guests belong, stand to lose their wealth and power.
The moment was critical. It was one of those points of time where the threads of many lives and many destinies cross and intersect each other, and thence part different ways, leading to life or death, happiness or despair, forever! Le Gardeur spurred his horse madly over the wounded man who lay upon the ground; but he did not hear him, he did not see him.
By adopting that course he would have the satisfaction of reflecting that, having obtained the object of his laudable ambition having become the foremost subject of the Crown, the director of, it may be, the destinies of his country, and the presiding genius in her councils he had achieved a still higher and nobler ambition: that he had returned the sword to the scabbard that at his word torrents of blood had ceased to flow that he had restored tranquillity to Europe, and saved this country from the indescribable calamities of war.
In plain fact, they were considering nothing more lofty than their own material interests, and upon this point their distinguished statesmen did not feel the need of seeking information or advice from the Western lawyer who had just been so freakishly picked out of a frontier town to take charge of the destinies of the United States.
Unaccountably strengthened in body by the indignation which possessed him, and inspired with a virtuous repulsion at the treacherous manner of behaving on the part of those who guided his destinies, he hastened back to his place of obeisance, and perceiving that the habitually placid and introspective expression on the dragon face had imperceptibly changed into one of offensive cunning and unconcealed contempt, he snatched up his spear and, without the consideration of a moment, hurled it at a score of paces distance full into the sacred but nevertheless very unprepossessing face before him.
But "murder will out," and the Committee despite the tiny group of able, and in certain cases honourable, men who control its destinies has gradually been revealed in its true colours, as a parasitic growth upon the body politic, preserving the worst faults of the old régime and blending with it much of the decadence which lies like froth along the backwaters of Western civilisation.
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