red
in the ranks of English merchants. Hume's work was thus caught in the
stream of Chatham's victories, and a ray from the glory of the nation
was reflected upon its historian. The general verdict was ratified by
the concord of the best judgments. Gibbon despaired of rivalling its
faultless lucidity; Burke turned from a projected History to write in
Hume's manner the events of the passing years, founding the _Annual
Register_. Its outspoken Toryism was welcome to a generation weary of
the "Venetian oligarchy," this epoch, if any, meriting Beaconsfield's
epithet. The work had the fortune which Gibbon and Montesquieu craved
for their own--it was read in the boudoir as much as in the study. Nor
did its power diminish. It contained the best writing, the deepest
thought, the most vivid portraiture, devoted to men and things English,
over a continuous period, until the works of Carlyle and Macaulay.

[8] The significance of these men's work may be estimated by the
ignorance even of scholars and tolerant thinkers. Spinoza, for
instance, in 1675, describes Islam as a faith that has known no schism;
and twenty years earlier Pascal brands Mohammed as forbidding all study!

PART II

THE DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN

LECTURE IV

THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA

[_Tuesday, May_ 29_th_, 1900]

Hitherto we have been engaged with the past, with the slow growth
across the centuries of those political or religious ideals which now
control the destinies of this Empire, a movement towards an ever higher
conception of man's relations towards the Divine, towards other men,
and towards the State. To-day a subject of more pressing interest
confronts us, but a subject more involved also in the prejudices and
sympathies which the violence of pity or anger, surprise or alarm,
arouses, woven more closely to the living hopes, regrets, and fears
which compose the instant of man's life. We are in the thick of the
deed--how are we to judge it? How conjure the phantoms inimical to
truth, which Tacitus found besetting his path as he prepared to narrate
the civil struggles of Galba and Otho thirty years after the event?

Yet one aspect of the subject seems free and accessible, and to this
aspect I propose to direct your attention. The separate incidents of
the war, and the actions of individuals, statesmen, soldiers,
politicians, journalists, and officials, civil or military, the wisdom
or the rashness, the energy or the sloth, th