upon which to base a claim of Suzerainty, in all conscience. In truth, we never heard of this Suzerainty until the action of the German Emperor and his Government forced Mr Chamberlain into taking up the rôle of a Jingo. Now, as I have said, I think the action of the German Emperor and the German Government was indiscreet, but at the same time the manner in which the British public lost their heads over such indiscretion was a trifle too ludicrous. For the matter of that President Kruger had no more desire for German than he has for English interference in the affairs of his State, and he would most certainly and most justifiably resent one equally with the other. A certain section of the public here at home seems, by some process of mental reasoning or mental obfuscation, to have arrived at the conclusion that President Kruger was waiting with open arms to welcome a German force, and ready to place his country under German protection. Of course all this was the merest chimera. A German Protectorate over the Transvaal or a predominant German influence in South Africa could never, even by the wildest stretch of imagination, come to be considered a question of practical policy.

Out of evil, however, proverbially cometh good, and the proposal of the German Government to despatch a small armed force to Pretoria, incidentally gave occasion for the ancient ally of England, gallant little Portugal, to demonstrate her friendship for this country, and her determination to preserve at any cost the inviolability of her territory. To the

German request for permission to land this force at Delagoa Bay and send it through Portuguese territory to Pretoria, the Lisbon Government returned a distinct and dignified refusal. The action of the Portuguese in this matter seems to me to have escaped in this country the generous recognition it deserved. Portugal does not now claim the position of a first-class power, but the world owes her a debt of gratitude for the achievements of her glorious sons in the past, and the names and fame of the intrepid Portuguese navigators, and the great Portuguese soldiers of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, will endure to the end of time, At the present moment, Portugal owns a huge slice of Africa, a great portion of which it has proved utterly impossible for her to develop, but I think a meed of praise ought to be given to her for the good work she has done at Delagoa Bay and in the development generally of the Port of Beira.

It was to me inexpressibly sad to witness the terrible outburst of bluster and braggadocio, worthy indeed of the Johannesburg financiers, but unworthy of a great nation like England, which so largely affected the usually stolid, staid and sedate people of this country in January 1896. They have now had time to reflect, and I sincerely hope they see what fools they made of themselves. England has nothing to fear from Germany, or from any other power or combination of powers, so long as she pursues the even tenour of her way, trusting not only in her enormous strength actual and latent,

and in her vast and illimitable resources, but trusting also in the purity of her motives, the uprightness of her actions and the conviction among the nations of the earth, that she will do right and act justly at any cost and at any sacrifice.

CHAPTER XI

THE FEELING IN ENGLAND

WHY the people of this country are so easily influenced by expressions of opinion in the newspapers, is a question that I have never been able to satisfactorily answer. The ordinary Englishman who goes to his business in the morning and who reads his favourite newspaper on the way, for the rest of the day, if he thinks at all upon current events, thinks only after the manner of the leading articles he has been reading in the morning and adopts as his own particular opinions the opinions therein expressed. This is undoubtedly a time-saving process, but it is hardly an intellectual feat, nor does it seem to me to be either a satisfactory or a fair way of arriving at correct conclusions upon vexed problems. The ordinary newspaper man, be he editor, leader-writer or what not-and I have known many of them-is not a bit more intellectual, or in the slightest degree more fitted to express an opinion upon any subject, than the ordinary man in the street. If the newspaper man

were to ventilate his opinions in the first or thirdclass carriage, as the case may be, in which he rides to or from his office, he would most probably be put down by his auditors as either a blatant humbug or a bore, and nobody would pay the slightest attention to him. But when he sits down in the editorial chair or mounts upon the sub-editorial stool, and indites. his opinions upon all and sundry matters, regarding most of which he usually knows nothing, substituting the pronoun "we" for the pronoun "I," and when these opinions are printed on paper, the public-that foolish, credulous, idiotic public-imagines it is listening to the voice of an oracle when, instead, it is often only reading the scribblings of the hack journalist, and actually adopts and ratifies and takes as its very own the opinions of this very ordinary, sometimes a penny, sometimes twopence, a liner. Now, when the various occurrences in the South African Republic came about at the end of December and beginning of January last, the newspaper editor and writers of this country, with a few exceptions, went in for sheer and unadulterated and exceptionally wicked Jingoism. I suppose the people who owned and controlled these various journals thought there was money in pandering to this Jingo feeling, and, accordingly, they set about the process with very much the same objects in view as had the Johannesburg financiers in. organising an agitation against the Government of the South African Republic. Accordingly, the wildest rumours, the most improbable and impossible stories, legends puerile and fantastic, were for many days