s ventured to make war
against us."

Truly an extraordinary attitude for a future Prime Minister
of England!]

The charge of prolonging the war by public declarations of sympathy
with the enemy[267] was definitely formulated against certain members
of the Liberal Opposition and the Irish Nationalist party by Lord St.
Aldwyn (Sir Michael Hicks Beach), at Oldham on October 10th, 1901.

[Footnote 267: What was even worse than such declarations of
sympathy with the Boers was the manifestation of hostility
against the loyalist population of South Africa. _E.g._ Sir
William Harcourt (in a letter in _The Times_ of December
17th, 1900), wrote: "I sometimes think that those bellicose
gentlemen--especially those who do not fight--must
occasionally cast longing, lingering looks towards the times
before they were subsidised (_sic_) by the authors of the
Raid to bring about the position in which they now find
themselves."]

[Sidenote: Why the war was prolonged.]

"The real cause of the prolongation of this war has been
something which, on my word, I believe could never have been seen
in any other country in the world. It has been the speeches in
Parliament of British members of the House of Commons, doing
everything they could against their country and in favour of her
enemies. It has been articles in certain journals taking
absolutely the same lines--I am not talking of mere attacks on
his Majesty's Government, or even calumnies of individual
ministers, that is part of the ordinary machinery of political
warfare, and one of the advantages of an absolutely free Press.
No, what I am talking of is the prominence given to the opinions
and sentiments of men who were called Pro-Boers, as if they
represented the feelings of a large section of their
fellow-countrymen. The invention of lies, like the alleged
quarrel between Lord Kitchener and the War Office, was intended
to damage this country in the conduct of the war, as was also the
wicked charges made against the humanity of our generals and our
soldiers in the Concentration Camps and in the field, the
attempts, such as I saw only the other day in one of these
papers, to prove that in those gallant contests at Fort
Itala[268] and on the borders of Natal our