ause, it is for a cause so false to all
the past, from Agincourt to Balaklava, that it has but to be named to
carry with it its own refutation. There is a kind of tragic elevation
in the very horror of the march of Attila, of Ginghis Khan, or of
Timour. But to assemble a host from all the quarters of this wide
Empire, to make Africa, as it were, the rendezvous of the earth, for
the sake of a few gold, a few diamond mines, what language can equal a
design thus base, ambition thus sordid? And if we call to memory the
dead who have fallen in this war, those who at its beginning were with
us in the radiance of their manhood, but now, still in the grave, all
traces of life's majesty not yet gone from their brow, and if those
dead lips ask us, "Why are we thus? And in what cause have we died?"
were it not a hard thing for Britain, for Europe, indeed for all the
world, if the only answer we could make to the question should be, "It
is for the mines, it is for the mines!" No man can believe that; no
man, save him whose soul faction has sealed in impenetrable night! The
imagination recoils revolted, terror-struck. Great enterprises have
ever attracted some base adherents, and these by their very presence
seem to sully every achievement recorded of nations or cities. But to
arraign the fountain and the end of the high action because of this
baser alloy? To impeach on this account all the valour, all the wisdom
long approved? Reply is impossible; the thing simply is not British.

Indeed, in very deed, it is for another cause, and for another
ideal--an ideal that, gathering to itself down the ages the ardour of
their battle-cries, falls in all the splendour of a new hope about the
path of England now. For this these men have died, from the first
battle of the war to that fought yesterday. And it is this knowledge,
this certainty, which gives us heart to acquiesce, as each of us is
compelled to acquiesce, in the presence of that army in South Africa.
They have fallen, fighting for all that has made our race great in the
past, for this, the mandate of destiny to our race in the future. They
have fallen, those youths, self-devoted to death, with a courage so
impetuous, casting their youth away as if it were a thing of no
account, a careless trifle, life and all its promises! But yesterday
in the flush of strength and beauty; to-night the winds from tropic
seas stir the grass above their graves, the southern stars look dow