1897 was a year that frightened Kipling. It was of course Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee which Kipling refused to celebrate: “It's rather outside my beat and if I tried, I am afraid I should make a mess of it, but surely London is full of loyal poets who are all getting odes ready” (Birkenhead 1978: 176). Instead the year brought to climax a massive depression which he described as a “gathering blackness of mind and sorrow of the heart” (SM 129). Biographers follow Kipling's own lead in attributing his depression to the House at Torquay, to what he called “the Feng-Shui – the Spirit of the house itself” (SM 129). I prefer to see it as a multiply determined event provoked by the threatening collapse of many sustaining structures of empire, by turning points in what would be called, by at least one historian, the imperial sunset. (In his autobiography the paragraph describing his depression follows one in which he and his wife fall off a tandem bicycle.) The government of ever decreasing empires, it was becoming clear, depended on contradiction. As Max Beloff efficiently describes it, “The problem was thus to combine within a single system of government both an empire dedicated to the ideas of representative government and to a high measure of autonomy for its member nations, and an empire to which most responsible persons believed those principles to be inapplicable; either because they were unsuited to peoples of another and very different civilization or because they would, if introduced, lead to the complete severance of ties with the imperial metropolis” (p. 36).