to needless loss must be bad reason and bad policy.  Mr. Wyndham has had the courage to assert that there was no haphazard, that his chief knew quite well what he was doing, and that “the policy which the Government adopted was deliberately adopted with the fullest knowledge of possible consequences.”  If these words in Mr. Wyndham’s speech of October 20th mean anything, they mean that Lord Lansdowne and Mr. Wyndham intended Sir George White to be left for a month to fight against double his number of Boers; that they looked calmly forward to the terrible losses and all the risks inseparable from such conditions.  That being the case, it seems to me that it is Mr. Wyndham’s duty, and if he fails, Lord Lansdowne’s duty, to tell the country plainly whether in that deliberate resolve Lord Wolseley was a partner or an overruled protester.  Ministers have a higher duty than that to their party.  The Nation has as much confidence in Lord Rosebery as in Lord Salisbury and the difference in principle between the two men is a vanishing quantity.  A change of ministry would be an inconvenience, but no more.  But if the public comes to believe, what I am sure is untrue, that the military department at the War Office has blundered, the consequences will be so grave that I hardly care to use the word which would describe them.

I accept the maxim that it is no use crying over spilt milk or even over spilt blood, but the maxim does not hold when the men whose decision seems inexplicable are in a position to repeat it on a grander scale.  The temper of the Boers as early as June left no doubt in any South African mind that if equality of rights and British supremacy were to be secured it would have to be by the sword.  The Government alone among those who cared for the Empire failed to realise this in time.  That has been admitted.  The excess of hope for peace has been condoned and is being atoned for on the battlefields of Natal.  But to-day the temper of Europe leaves no room for doubt that, in case of a serious reverse in Natal, Europe if it can will interfere.  Have Mr. Goschen and Lord Lansdowne worked out that problem, or is there to be a repetition in the case of the continental Powers—­an adversary very different from the Boers—­of patience, postponement, and haphazard?  It is not the situation in South Africa that gives its gravity to the present aspect of things, but the situation in Europe.  Upon the next fortnight’s fighting in Natal may turn the fate not merely of Natal and of South Africa, but of the British Empire.  That this must be the case was plain enough at Christmas, and has been said over and over again.  Yet this was the crisis which was met by sending to the decisive point a reinforcement of ten thousand men to do the best they could along with the six thousand already there during a five weeks’ campaign.