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 of perpetration in South Africa. And the very vehemence
with which I had in times past pleaded the cause of the People against
the Peers would intensify the earnestness with which I would endeavour
to avert the exploitation of a legitimate desire to end the Second
Chamber by the unscrupulous conspirators of assassination and of
dynamite. Hence it is that I seize every opportunity afforded me of
enabling the doomed Dutch to plead their case before the tribunal which
has condemned them, virtually unheard.