of season, to defend the cause of the progressive Briton
against the Conservative Boer, and especially to advocate the Cause of
the Reformers and Uitlanders against the old Tory Administration of
President Kruger. By agitation, by pressure, and even, if need be, in
the last resort by legitimate insurrection, I had always been ready to
seek the establishment of a progressive Liberal Administration in
Pretoria. And I have at least the small consolation of knowing that if
any of the movements which I defended had succeeded, the present crisis
would never have arisen, and the independence of the South African
Republic would have been established on an unassailable basis. But with
such a record it is obvious that I was almost the last man in the Empire
who could be regarded as an authorised exponent of the case of the
Boers.

That in these last months I have been forced to protest against the
attempt to stifle their independence is due to a very simple cause. To
seek to reform the Transvaal, even by the rough and ready means of a
legitimate revolution, is one thing. To conspire to stifle the Republic
in order to add its territory to the Empire is a very different thing.
The difference may be illustrated by an instance in our own history.
Several years ago I wrote a popular history of the House of Lords, in
which I showed, at least to my own satisfaction, that for fifty years
our "pig-headed oligarchs"--to borrow a phrase much in favour with the
War Party--had inflicted infinite mischief upon the United Kingdom by
the way in which they had abused their power to thwart the will of the
elected representatives of the people. I am firmly of opinion that our
hereditary Chamber has done a thousand times more injury to the subjects
of the Queen than President Kruger has ever inflicted upon the
aggrieved Uitlanders. I look forward with a certain grim satisfaction to
assisting, in the near future, in a semi-revolutionary agitation against
the Peers, in which some of our most potent arguments will be those
which the War Party has employed to inflame public sentiment against the
Boers. But, notwithstanding all this, if a conspiracy of Invincibles
were to be formed for the purpose of ending the House of Lords by
assassinating its members, or by blowing up the Gilded Chamber and all
its occupants with dynamite, I should protest against such an outrage as
vehemently as I have protested against the more heinous crime that is
now in course o