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executive dependence as naturally carrying with it some modification of the absolute right to be protected."

Again he wrote, March 25th, 1865, to say that he looked in vain to find any mutual interest between Canada and Great Britain :

"The North American, like the Australian colonies, and like the Cape, have very naturally renounced all consideration of English interests, and renounced and resented every exercise of English power, so often as it conflicted in the slightest degree with colonial interests or sentiments. If (notwithstanding the Irish element in their populations) they have any sentiment of attachment to England (which I doubt) it is one which is ready to be converted into actual animosity on the slightest conflict of interests or interference with independent action."

In a subsequent letter this typical Downing Street Official pleaded for the abandonment of Canada, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and all the North American Colonies. Even Halifax was not wanted.

“If we had nothing to protect and nothing to quarrel about in these parts might not our navy be content with Bermuda ?

Nor was this the mere eccentricity of an individual. Sir F. Rogers (afterwards Lord Blachford) wrote to Sir H. Taylor:

"I go very far with you in the desire to shake off all responsibly governed colonies; and as to North America, I think if we abandon one we had better abandon all.”

“Better abandon all”—that was the note of Downing Street. Was there not urgent need that at Windsor we should have a more Imperial spirit than that which used the Colonial Office to alienate the Colonies?

In studying any subject, from the Queen upon her throne to the beggar on the dunghill, the easiest and most natural method of beginning it to start from the place where we happen to be standing at the moment. Therefore, in illustrating the influence of the Queen upon the development of the Empire, I shall jump into the middle of the subject from the jumping-off point presented by the topic of the present hour.

The one Imperial question that has been this year before the country is the South African question. The arrival of Mr. Rhodes, the reappointment of the Select Committee, the agitation in South Africa, lead us naturally to consider this as of all others the Imperial problem of the hour. I propose, therefore, to judge the rival factors in our Constitution from the standpoint of South Africa. It is a touchstone as good as any other. It has been with us long enough to afford ample opportunity of testing and proving the comparative wisdom and unwisdom of the Sovereign and her subjects. I shall not attempt an exhaustive survey; but, accepting the test which contemporary history or the daily newspaper brings to my hand, I apply it to the conduct of the Monarch and her Elected Councillors in a great crisis of the Empire, with results which, I venture to believe, will somewhat surprise those amongst us who are still under the sway of the delusion that vox populi is necessarily vox Dei when it is opposed to the will of the Monarch. I am not for a moment pretending that the Sovereign is infallible, neither am I going to maintain that the Queen has always been wiser than her subjects. It would indeed be difficult to do so just after the public confession made by the Prime Minister that in the one great war of the reign we had “backed the wrong horse," a blunder for which the Queen was equally responsible with her people. The Crimean crime was a folly, not to say a frenzy, which carried away Court, Cabinet, and populace. But I think it will be admitted, even by the most prejudiced opponent of the hereditary Monarchy, that in the crucial case of South Africa, at the turning point of its destiny, wisdom lay not with the Elect of the People, but with that "accident of an accident," the crowned heir of a hundred Kings.

D

I. THE KEYSTONE OF THE IMPERIAL ARCH.

South Africa, it is now universally admitted, is the keystone of the Imperial arch. The byway of the Suez Canal possesses a certain importance in times of peace, but from the point of view of the Empire in times of storm and stress and war it can hardly be said to count as an available factor in our national resources. With the Cape it is far otherwise. Whether we have regard to India or to Australia and the fair lands of far Cathay, the Cape is the universal stepping-stone of the world-wandering Briton. Without the Cape the world-empire which our fathers have reared, and which we their sons are rapidly filling with English-speaking homes, would be impossible. Plant the Tricolour or the German Eagle on the slopes of Table Mountain, and our communications with our nascent Commonwealths in Australia would exist but by sufferance of Paris or Ber

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SOUTH AFRICA IN 1854.

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has never by any oneRandolph who, in a fit

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hand over to Germany in return for a free hand in Egypt. Even in the darkest hour of Little Englandism, the coaling station at Simon's Bay was admitted to be indispensable. But it is now recognised that the coaling station irreducible minimum entails much more than an allotment garden on the toe of the continent. Who says coaling station must say Cape, who says Cape must say the Colony, and who says the Colony must say South Africa up to the Zambesi. Nor is it merely for the sake of the coaling station that South Africa has come to be regarded as indispensable. The world is filling up. Great tracts have been pegged out by hostile and rival Powers within which no British emigrant need apply. South Africa is the temperate end of the one great continent that awaits to be colonised and civilised. We have but scratched its surface as yet, but it has poured out diamonds as from the mines of Golconda, while the fabled river of Pactolus is thrown into the shade by the auriferous splendour of the Rand. So generally

is this recognised, that if by any conceivable accident Britons were no longer able to hold their own, there is no great Power that would not deem it well worth the incalculable risks of a great war to seize the wreck of our South African inheritance.

All that is admitted by everybody to-day. Mr. Rhodes, who looms so large before the eyes alike of friends and of foes, is but the concrete embodiment, the typical personification of the universally recognised doctrine of the importance of South Africa. But forty years ago the truth, the truism, was so far from being admitted, that both parties in the State acted deliberately and continuously on exactly the opposite hypothesis. The House of Commons and the House of Lords, the representatives of the great middle class which then held all powers in the hollow of its hand, were of one mind on this matter. If there was one point upon which Whigs and Tories all agreed, it was that South Africa was a nuisance to be abated, rather than an estate to be

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ing opposition
hallucination that possessed her councillors. The Queen, as I shall presently show in
some detail, was never deluded by the hollow claptrap talked about the worthlessness of
South Africa. When her councillors persisted in flinging away whole kingdoms from
her Imperial heritage, they did so in the face of an opposition from their Royal Mistress
which, whether persuasive, plaintive, or passionate, was wearilessly persistent. She
stood, as I said, almost entirely alone. But she never flinched. Her Majesty has

never been a Little Englander. She was not, of course, able to defy the counsels of
her Constitutional Ministers. But she withstood them manfully, as a true Queen
should, and at last, after many days, she had the satisfaction of seeing her subjects.
come round to the wisdom of the opinions which she had maintained with the fidelity
of an Abdiel in the days of long ago.

But that is not all. The Queen not merely recognised the importance of South

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Africa, but, in the days when Federation was but regarded as the airy dream of the philosopher, she supported it as the one method for securing a strong, contented, and united South Africa. Cecil Rhodes has been practically on his trial this year, because, at the eleventh hour, he strove with patriotic daring to secure by the high hand the great end of African federation, which Her Majesty had been thwarted in her efforts to attain forty years ago, when it would have been easy enough but for the infatuated folly of our politicians. It would almost seem as if the nation, grudging the loss of the American colonies which it owed to George III., took a sinister and suicidal revenge upon the dynasty by baffling all the efforts which the Imperial-minded grand-daughter of George III. made to save the colonies in South Africa.

If only our self-confident politicians would have done the bidding of their gracious. Sovereign, Africa would have been federated before Canada, and the long, bloody, and shameful story of the last thirty years of war against the Dutch and the native would never have been unfolded to the gaze of an indignant world.

II. DOWNING STREET v. WINDSOR CASTLE.

Carlyle, in his " Latter Day Pamphlets," indulged in some tolerably severe diatribes against Downing Street. But no one who reads the story of what Downing Street has done in South Africa can help feeling that Carlyle did not rise to the level of his opportunity. When the American humourist felt very bad, he swore till he was out of breath, and then hired a man to go on cursing until he bade him stop. It would take more than the combined energies of three men and a boy, the second beginning where the first left off, to curse up to the exigencies of the iniquities of Downing Street in relation to South Africa. Only after such a blowing off of the steam is it possible to discuss quietly the long record of political ineptitude, of Imperial blundering, of neglected opportunities, of broken faith, and of bumptious folly. It is no wonder the very name of Downing Street stinks in the nostrils of South Africans. It is not the fault of Downing Street that there is any South African Empire surviving to this day.

If indeed there had not been a Windsor Castle to ward off some of the worst of the evils which Downing Street inflicted upon the luckless colony, it is by no means impossible that the German flag might at this moment be flying over the Cape of Good Hope. The Queen was unable to prevent much mischief. It did not lie within the compass of the Royal prerogative to avert the Sand River Convention, the abandonment of the Orange Free State, the disgrace of Majuba Hill, or the still more inexcusable blunder of the surrender of 1884. But so far as her influence and authority prevailed it was uniformly exerted against all the knockkneed blunders of successive Ministers. The Sovereign was true to the Empire, and if we have any Empire in South Africa to-day we owe it more to Her Majesty than to any of her advisers.

If the Queen had been allowed to have her way years ago there would have been no need for the emergence of Cecil Rhodes, who, like a man born out of due time, had to labour in double tides and by devious ways to overtake the arrears of work left undone by the blind leaders of an uninstructed public. He is now meeting the same fate, at the hands of the same kind of people, as those who, forty years ago, roused the indignation of the Queen by the scandalous fashion in which they treated another great African administrator.

Olive Schreiner some time ago—in the Karoo they do not always date their letters— recalled the memory of the greatest of our proconsuls. She wrote :—

"I am sending you a picture of Sir George Grey's statue. I wish you could find place for it in the Review of Reviews; it would show the dear old man that he was not forgotten in South Africa; and that thousands who, like myself, are not able to remember him, yet cherish the memory of his life and

LI

work here. Of the three large English-speaking men who have during the last fifty years appeared on the South African stage, William Pater, Saul Solomon, and Sir George Grey, I think the last was the greatest and most unique. A 'God's Englishman,' if you like it. It is the thought that there have been such Englishmen that takes away one's despair for England's future. His statue, of which I enclose the photograph, stands in the public gardens in the centre of Cape Town. The building behind him with the pillars is the public library which he laboured for and so richly endowed. I have walked out of the Cape Parliament, which stands just over the way, where debates were going on in which the most talented and wealthy Englishmen in the world were voting for 'strop' bills, and in which personal ambitions and the greed of wealth and power showed at every turn, and I've felt a curious consolation in coming across that statue. Greed and ambition may conquer for a moment, but there are also other elements in our national character. If Ahriman exists, so also does Ormuzd."

Olive Schreiner, when she wrote that, was in one of her moods of wrath against the ormer god of her idolatry, who, if she would look and see, is but carrying on by such

SIR GEORGE GREY'S STATUE.

(From a photograph by Mr. J. IV. Dugmore.)

instruments as are within range
of his hands the good work
which Sir George Grey aspired
to but was not allowed to
accomplish.

The story of Sir George
Grey's South African adminis-
tration reads like a fairy tale
from the days of old romance.
He was the forerunner of Mr.
Rhodes, the first great Imperial
statesman who realised that we
must Federate or Perish, and
that the only road to a per-
manent Empire lies through
Home Rule. After the lapse
of forty years we see from
Olive Schreiner's letter how to
this day the shining track of
his aureoled presence lights up
the dull and dusty road of
South African politics, and
every time we read anew the
story of what he did for South
Africa and for the Empire in
South Africa, we feel anew the
surge of two emotions-one
of almost savage resentment
against Downing Street, the
other of passionate gratitude
to the Queen. For when the
Colonial Office opposed this
man, betrayed him, cheated
him, thwarted him, and finally
cashiered him in disgrace, it
was Her Majesty who stood
by him, praised him, backed
him, watched all he did, read
all he wrote, struggled hard
against his recall, and then,
watching her opportunity,

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