ssed ordinary pity for, or sympathy with them,
because I did not wish to run the risk of being misunderstood.
What I have done, and what I hope I shall continue to do, is to
denounce the stupidity of the way in which the Government were
dealing with the Boers."

There is only one method by which the amazing effrontery of this
denial can be sufficiently exhibited. It is to place underneath it
quotations from speeches delivered by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman
himself at Stirling on October 25th, by Mr. Thomas Shaw, M.P., at
Galashiels on October 14th, and by Mr. E. Robertson, M.P., at Dundee
on October 16th, as printed in the "Official Organ of the Orange Free
State Government," dated September 21st, 1901, a copy of which was
found in a Boer laager on the veld. The extracts selected are these:

Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman:

"The whole country in the two belligerent States, outside the
mining towns, is a howling wilderness. The farms are burned, the
country is wasted. The flocks and herds are either butchered or
driven off; the mills are destroyed, furniture and instruments of
agriculture smashed. These things are what I have termed methods
of barbarism. I adhere to the phrase. I cannot improve upon it.
If these are not the methods of barbarism, what methods did
barbarism employ?... My belief is that the mass of the British
people ... do not desire to see a brave people subjugated or
annihilated."

Mr. Thomas Shaw, M.P.:

"The war was unnecessary, and therefore unjust.... He wished he
could agree that we were fighting in a just cause, that we had
always fought according to acknowledged civilised methods; but as
an honest man he could not do so."

Mr. Edmund Robertson, M.P.:

"The victory of the Government (at the last General Election) had
been the main cause of the prolongation of the war. If they had
been defeated their successors would have been men with a free
hand, and the Boers themselves might have been ready to make
concessions, which they would not make, and had not made, to
those whom they believed to be their enemies and persecutors. If
the Empire was to be saved, the Government must be
destroyed."[270]

[Footnote 270: The facts are stated in a letter published in
_The Times_ on March 10th, 1902.]

Can any human being of ordinary intelligence believe that t