Other liberties besides their own will be enshrined in these new Parliaments.  The people of South Africa, and, in a special measure, the Boers, will become the trustees of freedom all over the world.  We have tried to act with fairness and good feeling.  If by any chance our counsels of reconciliation should come to nothing, if our policy should end in mocking disaster, then the resulting evil would not be confined to South Africa.  Our unfortunate experience would be trumpeted forth all over the world wherever despotism wanted a good argument for bayonets, whenever an arbitrary Government wished to deny or curtail the liberties of imprisoned nationalities.  But if, on the other hand, as we hope and profoundly believe, better days are in store for South Africa, if the words of President Brand, “All shall come right,” are at length to be fulfilled, and if the near future should unfold to our eves a tranquil, prosperous, consolidated Afrikander nation under the protecting aegis of the British Crown, then, the good also will not be confined to South Africa; then the cause of the poor and the weak all over the world will have been sustained; and everywhere small peoples will get more room to breathe, and everywhere great empires will be encouraged by our example to step forward—­and it only needs a step—­into the sunshine of a more gentle and a more generous age.

LIBERALISM AND SOCIALISM

St. Andrew’s hall, Glasgow, October 11, 1906

(From The Dundee Advertiser, by permission.)

The first indispensable condition of democratic progress must be the maintenance of European peace.  War is fatal to Liberalism.  Liberalism is the world-wide antagonist of war.  We have every reason to congratulate ourselves upon the general aspect of the European situation.  The friendship which has grown up between Great Britain and France is a source of profound satisfaction to every serious and thinking man.  The first duty of a nation is to make friends with its nearest neighbour.  Six years ago France was agitated in the throes of the Dreyfus case, and Great Britain was plunged in the worst and most painful period of the South African war; and both nations—­conscious as we are of one another’s infirmities—­were inclined to express their opinion about the conduct of the other in unmeasured terms, and keen antagonism resulted.  What a contrast to-day!  Ever since the King, whose services in the cause of international peace are regarded with affection in every quarter of his dominions, ever since by an act of prescience and of courage his Majesty went to Paris, the relations between Great Britain and France have steadily and progressively improved, and to-day we witness the inspiring spectacle of these two great peoples, the two most genuinely Liberal nations in the whole world, locked together in a league of friendship under standards of dispassionate justice and international goodwill.  But it is absurd to suppose that the friendship which we have established with France should be in any degree a menace to any other European Power, or to the great Power of Germany.