tinguished figure
among the array of nation-guiders with whom I talked, and I interviewed
them all. I saw him as he sat in the British War Cabinet when the German
hosts were sweeping across the Western Front, and when the German
submarines were making a shambles of the high seas. I heard him speak
with persuasive force on public occasions and he was like a beacon in
the gloom. He had come to England in 1917 as the representative of
General Botha, the Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa, to
attend the Imperial Conference and to remain a comparatively short time.
So great was the need of him that he did not go home until after the
Peace had been signed. He signed the Treaty under protest because he
believed it was uneconomic and it has developed into the irritant that
he prophesied it would be.

In those war days when we foregathered, Smuts often talked of "the world
that would be." The real Father of the League of Nations idea, he
believed that out of the immense travail would develop a larger
fraternity, economically sound and without sentimentality. It was a
great and yet a practical dream.

More than once he asked me to come to South Africa. I needed little
urging. From my boyhood the land of Cecil Rhodes has always held a lure
for me. Smuts invested it with fresh interest. So I went.

The Smuts that I found at close range on his native heath, wearing the
mantle of the departed Botha, carrying on a Government with a minority,
and with the shadow of an internecine war brooding on the horizon, was
the same serene, clear-thinking strategist who had raised his voice in
the Allied Councils. Then the enemy was the German and the task was to
destroy the menace of militarism. Now it was his own unreconstructed
Boer--blood of his blood,--and behind that Boer the larger problem of a
rent and dissatisfied universe, waging peace as bitterly as it waged
war. Smuts the dreamer was again Smuts the fighter, with the fight of
his life on his hands.

Thus it came about that I found myself in Capetown. Everybody goes out
to South Africa from England on those Union Castle boats so familiar to
all readers of English novels. Like the P. & O. vessels that Kipling
wrote about in his Indian stories, they are among the favorite first
aids to the makers of fiction. Hosts of heroes in books--and some in
real life--sail each year to their romantic fate aboard them.

It was the first day of the South African winter when I arrived, but