to this very day abuse their talents in encouraging among the ignorant multitude the belief that the Irish leaders of that day were, to use the old hackneyed phrase, “traitors to the Empire.”  If we look at the whole of these events in just perspective, if we search coolly and patiently for abiding principles beneath the sordid din and confusion of racial strife, we shall agree that in some respects Irishmen were better friends to the Empire than the politicians who denounced them, and sounder judges of its needs.  Yet there can be no doubt that the Transvaal complications, followed unhappily by the Gordon episode in the Soudan, reacted fatally on Ireland, and that the Irish problem in its turn reacted with bad effect on the Transvaal.  When the statesman who refused to avenge Majuba in 1881 proposed his Irish Home Rule Bills in 1886 and 1893, it was easy for prejudiced minds to associate the two policies as harmonious parts of one great scheme of national dismemberment and betrayal.  Boers, Irish, and Soudanese savages, all were confusedly lumped together as dangerous people whom it was England’s duty to conquer and coerce.

The South African War of 1899-1902 came and passed.  People will discuss to the end of time whether or not it could have been avoided.  Parties will differ to the end of time about its moral justification.  For my own part, I think it is pleasanter to dwell on the splendid qualities it evoked in both races, and above all on the mutual respect which replaced the mutual contempt of earlier days.  I myself am disposed to think that at the pass matters had reached in 1896 nothing but open war could have set the relations of the two races on a healthy footing.

But bold and generous statesmanship was needed if the fruits of this mutual respect were to be reaped.  The defeated Republics were now British Colonies, their inhabitants British subjects.  After many vicissitudes we were back once more in the old political situation of 1836 before the Great Trek, and the policy which was right then was right now.  Bitter awakening as it was to our proud people after a war involving such colossal sacrifices, it was still just as true as of old that in Ireland, Canada, Australia, South Africa, or anywhere else, it is utterly impossible for one white democracy to rule another properly on the principle of ascendancy.  It was physically possible, thanks to Ireland’s proximity, to deny that country Home Rule, but it would not have been even physically possible in the Transvaal and Orange River Colony.  Yet the idea was conceived and the policy strongly backed which could only have had the disastrous effect of bringing into being two Irelands in the midst of our South African dominions.  It is not yet generally recognized that we owe the defeat of this policy in the first instance to Lord Kitchener.  From the moment he took the supreme military command in South Africa at the end of 1900, while prosecuting the war with iron severity and sleepless