in the main for birth and not worth, must be thrown overboard, finally and forever in England, if they wish any serious reform in the management of their War Office, their Naval Office, or of any of their great offices of administration. Routine work of a common place order can be done fairly well by country gentlemen who give to public affairs the intervals between golf and grouse. Public work of the highest order calls for men of brains, who have learned how to do hard work, who approach politics with something other than the temper of dilettantes, who take their official work seriously, and give to it their entire energies. The Marquis of Salisbury is undoubtedly right. His views quite thoroughly coincide with those of Lord Rosebery, who is reported as having very recently delivered himself of the following remarks:

"The war will be cheap if it teaches the nation that it has lived too much from hand to mouth and that it must place things on a scientific or methodical basis. In commerce, education and war Great Britain is not methodical and not scientific. The task ahead is the greatest which ever lay before a nation, and will occupy the present Government and many future Governments. But it will have to be faced. The country has yet to bring the war to a triumphant conclusion. When that is done, it must set to work and put the Empire on a business footing, and strive to make it realize the British ideal of an Empire, without menace, without oppression-a model State ruled by institutions and inhabited by a model race.”

THE CAUSE OF THE BOERS.

The cause of the Boers is the cause of all that is best in British history. For the time—the English people have forgotten their high mission, the diffusion of the blessings of civil and religious freedom. By the strange irony of events, they have allowed the helm of State to get into the hands of a cheap Birmingham demagogue, who has in his nature nothing whatever that is noble or magnanimous. The English people, in their temporary neglect of public affairs, has allowed itself to drift into a policy of wanton aggression-into an attempt at mere mediæval Spanish conquest-for land, and gold. It has—in effectplaced its army, and its navy, at the beck and call of a speculator in mining stocks, and a professional machine politician. England's statesmen have been-for the time-guilty of the crime of abdication.

England must correct her errors. Those errors cannot be corrected by mere persistence in wrongdoing. England must suffer to some extent-the consequences of her own neglect of her own public affairs. By an oversight, she has allowed the supreme control of her foreign policy to fall into unworthy hands. Her Prime Minister has been unduly confiding. The House of Commons leader in Her Majesty's Government has been unduly confiding. Their confidence has been betrayedby a man who has been using the great powers of his public office for personal ends. It is by no means the first time, that the same man has been guilty of the same offense. It is needless at this moment to recall from the pages of their chosen organ the veracious utterances of the feelings of loathing and disgust, which the Marquis of Salisbury and Mr. Balfour have felt in the past for Mr. Joseph Chamberlain. Those feelings have never changed. The exigencies of party politics have for the time compelled the two Conservative statesmen to treat with an appearance of friendliness, in public, and probably in private, a man for whom they have always had feelings of supreme com.

tempt. Those feelings were due to the man's real character. That character has never changed. He will sell out any friend, or any cause.

No obligations, which the statesmen of the Conservative party in England have any right now to consider, bind them to give a longer support to a man who has betrayed the confidence of his colleagues, of his Sovereign, and of the English people.

All three of these, the statesmen of the Conservative party, Her Majesty our Sovereign Lady the Queen, and the English people, owe it to themselves, and to the rest of the civilised world, to depose from his high place the man who is-thus far-almost solely responsible for the existence of a war of unprovoked lawless aggression on a poor and small people, a people that has thus far been commonly deemed weak, even for the mere purposes of self defense.

Further persistence in this unholy and unrighteous war, by the English people, will make them accessories to the crimes of Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Rhodes-will make them accessories before the fact. In law, subsequent ratification is equivalent to previous authorisation. If the English people ratifies the action of Mr. Rhodes and Mr. Chamberlain-and an omission to disavow and undo that action will be a ratification-then the English people will be-in legal effect-the originators—from the outset, and the pursuers-to the close of this policy of lawless aggression, of wholesale robbery and murder.

In that case, the rest of the civilised world will know how to deal with England.

We Americans have good memories. We were willing to forget the past. We were willing to forget the cruelty and barbarism of the persecution which drove our ancestors into exile, and compelled them in their days of poverty and distress to seek an asylum with the Dutch. We were ready to forget the years of cold neglect, tempered with tyranny, which we endured in our colonial period. We were ready to forget the further periods of oppression and misrule, which drove us into armed rebellion, into a reluctant declaration of our independence, and a protracted war to achieve our national existence. We were ready to forget the barbarous methods used by England in that contest, and her cruel and inhuman treatment of our cap

tured prisoners. We were ready to forget the later acts of insolence and cruel barbarity, which a second time drove us to take up arms against the mother country. We were ready to forget the occurrences of our Civil War; the indecent speed, with which she seized the first opportunity to jump on us when we were down, the alacrity with which she threw aside all her previous protestations against the horrors of slavery, and the glee with which her official class gloated over each fresh misfortune, which they fancied made another step towards the final result of defeat and disruption. All these things we were ready to relegate to the realm of the forgotten past on the first manifestation by the British people of any feeling of genuine friendliness or affection.

But when we see the same policy followed, persistently and relentlessly, against another race of kinsmen beyond the sea, the kinsmen who gave us shelter in the time of our weakness and misery, when we remember that the manifestations of friendly feeling for ourselves were delayed till the period when we are rich and strong beyond the dreams of ancient statesmen, then we are compelled to think. Then we are compelled to recall the fact, the never-ceasing fact, that English officialism, the English hereditary governing class, has at all times, with all peoples, been brutal, insolent, and cruel. We are compelled to realise, that the English hereditary governing class to-daywith many noble individual exceptions-is, as a class, precisely what it has been for centuries. The leopard has not changed his spots. To-morrow, if that policy would better serve its interests, and especially its money interests-and if it dared-the English hereditary governing class would turn upon us and rend us.

Let us make no mistake. As to the English people, this American people has always had a longing for its affection. That was the real reason, why we were, in years gone by, somewhat unduly sensitive to criticism from the English. Comparatively speaking, we cared little or nothing for criticism from other sources. But we were hurt by unkind words from Englishmen. The reason was, that we had a longing for their love. We did not get it. We did not get treatment that was

reasonably considerate or decent. And then-in our time of sorest need-we had England on our back.

Nevertheless, if this war on the part of England had been a war of self defense, a war for freedom, a war in a just cause, our hearts and our sympathies would have gone out, tumultuously, to our ancestral kinsmen.

But then, when we look at the facts, we are struck with the remarkable resemblance between the story of the Transvaal Burghers and that of certain Englishmen, of the faith of Milton and Cromwell, who came to New England in the seventeenth century. They, too, were driven into exile to escape the cruelty and oppression of the British King, and the British oligarchy, of that day. They took refuge with the Dutch. They found shelter with the Dutch. Thereafter they conquered new homes in a wilderness. Thereafter they suffered continued acts of oppression and tyranny at the hands of the British government of that day. Finally, they, too, were forced by the British oligarchy into war, a war of self defense, a war for liberty. In that war they won, quite contrary to the expectations of the British ministers of the time. That fact, however, did not protect them from further acts of British aggression.

Really, the two stories have a remarkable resemblance-thus. far.

To the Boers, to-day, is committed the guarding of the Temple of Liberty. To them, to-day, is committed the contest for the right of self government, the struggle for free institutions. They are the representatives, to-day, of the highest traditions of the English people. At present, the British Government is engaged in the work, in which it has often engaged outside its own territory, of unholy conquest. It is false to its own highest ideals.

Are we to-day to give any weight, in matters of international politics, to the question of right and wrong?

This unholy and unrighteous war ought to stop. It ought to stop at once. It can come to an end within any reasonable period, only by the withdrawal of the party who is in the wrong.

If that party persists in a war of lawless wanton aggression, who can say when the war will end, or how it will end?

But the British people ought to well comprehend the fact, that they are sitting on a volcano.