CHAMBERLAIN (watching to see the effect of his news). 
He’s coming to-day:  to see me.

COLLINGS (surprised).  Coming here?

CHAMBERLAIN.  Yes, it’s all been nicely arranged—­just a call in passing.  To-morrow’s papers will describe it as “a pathetic meeting.”  Well, when a man has to meet his executioner on friendly terms, I suppose it is “pathetic” for one of them.

(All this is very disconcerting to poor Collings.  He helps himself to a half-sentence, and stops.)

JESSE COLLINGS.  Did he himself——?

CHAMBERLAIN.  Propose it?  Oh, yes—­in the most charming way possible.  Isn’t it amazing how a man with charm can do things that nobody else dare?  I never managed to charm anybody.

JESSE COLLINGS.  You made friends—­and kept them.

CHAMBERLAIN.  So does he.  He has been successful all round:  art, politics, letters, society—­he has friends in all.  I’ve only been successful in business.

JESSE COLLINGS.  My dear friend, aren’t you forgetting yourself?  You came out of business.

CHAMBERLAIN.  No, I only changed to business on a larger scale—­carried it on under a bigger name.  That’s how I found myself.  I had to make things into a business in order to make a success of them.  That was my method, Collings:  glorify it as much as you like.  And up to a point it was good business, I don’t deny.  That’s how we ran local politics, invented the Caucus:  Corporation Street is the result.  That’s how we managed to run Unionism:  made a hard and fast contract of it, and made them stick to it.  That’s how I ran the Colonies—­and the Boer War.  That’s how I was going to run the Empire on a Preferential Tariff.  That came just too late.  I’d made a mistake.

JESSE COLLINGS.  What mistake?

CHAMBERLAIN.  Collings, the Boer War wasn’t good business.  It might have been; but it lasted too long.  Any modern war that isn’t over in six months now is a blunder, you’ll find.  They were able to hold out too long.  That did for me.  There have been bees in my bonnet ever since—­all because of it.  Boers first; then Bannerman; then—­Balfour.  Just once my business instinct betrayed me, and I was done!

JESSE COLLINGS.  But—­wasn’t the war necessary?

CHAMBERLAIN.  To put the “business” on a sound footing?  Yes, I thought so; it looked like it.  No, it wasn’t!  But before I quite knew, there’d come a point where we couldn’t go back; and so we just had to go on—­and on.  D’you know what was the cleverest thing said or done during that war?...  You’d never guess ... but it’s true.  Campbell-Bannerman’s “methods of barbarism” speech.  We downed him for it at the time, but it caught on—­it stuck.  And it was on the strength of it (with C.-B. as their hope for the future) that the Boers were persuaded to make peace:  saved our face for us.  They might have gone on, till we got sick of it, and the world too.