towards him as a toad towards its spawn in the next ditch.  To him he “was a broken wineglass from last night’s feast.”  “Often without a family, always without a nation or race, without education or moral training, and despised by the society in which he was born,” is it any wonder that the half-caste is the curse of the community in which he is found;—­one of those whips, as Shakespeare reminds us, that “heaven makes out of our pleasant vices” to “scourge” us into some sense of their seriousness?

If you would not incur that curse, that insoluble problem of the half-caste, then in both your civil and military services send out men of clean hearts and lives into your dependencies, Alas! in your great military camps during your Spanish war a moral laxity was allowed, which, had it been attempted in the Egyptian campaign, Lord Kitchener would have stamped out with a divine fury.  I had it from an eyewitness, but the details are wholly unfit for publication.

I do not hold with our “little Englanders” that the possession of an empire is a disaster; on the contrary, I hold that it constitutes a splendid school for the formation of strong character,—­of men who are the very salt of the earth,—­and that the sense of a great mission to be fulfilled tends to give a nobility of soul to the whole nation; while even the wars it may involve prove the vultures of God swooping down on the hidden social rottennesses which in prolonged peace may breed unnoticed and unreproved.  We have never forgotten the bitter lessons of the Crimean war which laid bare our miserable incompetence in organizing, and the moral rottenness of our English firms that could supply our soldiers with paper-soled boots and bayonets that bent at a thrust, when the very life of our brave fellows depended on their being well armed and well shod.

America will never forget the sufferings of her wounded in the Spanish war, sufferings caused by the like dishonesty in the goods supplied and the like criminal incompetency which failed to provide them even with necessaries.

But I do say that an empire presents many difficult problems, and that the men who accept its responsibilities need a sound head, clean hands, and above all a pure heart.

Let me in conclusion relate an incident which happened in the wreck of the Warren Hastings, to which I have already alluded,—­an incident which I can never tell without a breaking voice and eyes full of tears.  In that awful night of storm and darkness and iminent shipwreck, the officer in command, after ordering his men below to lighten the crowded deck, stationed two of his men at a narrow gangway through which he feared an ugly rush for life might be made, while the women and children were being embarked, bidding them on no account to leave their post till he gave them the word of command.  At length the women and the sick had all been saved in the boats.  This done, and not till then, the men had saved themselves,