have got them from Boers. I count—any Liberal must count among his acquaintance—plenty of good people who hold all this to be clear beyond argument. Not only stalwarts of the caucus, like Blow and Crewdson, to whom the term 'Randlords' came like a mental labour-saving machine, but Fellows of their college and drawing-room intellectuals: Cockshaw, the Professor, to whom Liberalism is an exact science; and McFadden, to whom it is an emotion in a vacuum; and Henn, and Scuttermore, and Whymper of Magdalen, who belong to what a friend of mine calls the 'Peace to the Knife' party; and Patterworthy, who would like to subject all British acquisitions since (say) the Peace of Amiens to redistribution by a committee of Swiss jurists; and the Rev. Adderley Gall, who used to call for cheers at the National Liberal Club when Boer successes were reported, put on crape after Vereeniging, and was much disappointed, when he met the Boer Generals, with the tameness of their rancour. The view was developed to its full logic (if the reader allows one more type-personification) by Molyneux Dodley-Cottle (author of 'Submeanings of Maeterlinck,' 'A Pathology of Capital,' 'Ethics of a Nut Dietary,' etc.), whose pamphlet on the war proved that reform would have come, without any unkindness, if only British South Africans had shut their eyes tight and willed that it was coming.
These gentlemen were not living in the Colonies. To Milner the politics of Christian Science were not open. He had to act in South Africa, and upon facts. What he saw was that the admitted bad was not growing better, but worse. By bad, I mean bad for the status of British subjects, and for the British, as opposed to the Republican, trend of union. So far from freedom broadening down, the precedents, which came thick and fast, were all the other way. As for historic law, and the natural adjustment between town and country, he judged that the adjustment was likely to follow a new law of its own, where country meant a homogeneous and hostile race perfectly armed, organized as a rude
