mercial war upon America. "I note with satisfaction,” he wrote—this was in 1890-“that the committee appointed to inquire into the McKinley tariff reports that in certain articles our trades have fallen off 50 per cent. Yet the fools do not see that if they do not look out they will have England shut out and isolated, with 90,000,000 to feed and capable of internally supporting about 6,000,000. If they had a statesman they would at the present moment be commercially at war with the United States, and would have boycotted the raw products of the United States until she came to her senses; and I say this because I am a free trader." And again: "I believe that England, with fair play, should manufacture for the world, and, being a free trader, I believe that, until the world comes to its senses, you should declare war-I mean a commercial war-with those trying to boycott your manufactures. That is my programme. You might finish the war by a union with America and universal peace after a hundred years." It does not seem to have occurred to "the Colossus" that this plan for forcing a union essential to England's existence but non-essential to America's welfare might not prove to be the very best device for bringing about America's willingness to enter into it.

Once possessed by this nightmare, it is not surprising that Mr. Rhodes pursued it into nightmarelike ramifications. Since the stupidity of Parliaments would prevent them from adopting spontaneously the plan of economic coercion for effecting a world-wide Anglo-Saxon union, another resource would have to be brought into requisition. A coa

lition of multi-millionaires, forming themselves into a firmly-disciplined secret society carried on upon the system of the Jesuits, would be absolutely irresistible. As to any interference with the successful working of such a league of hundreds of millions of dollars which might come from the insignificant hundreds of millions of mere human beings, the diamond-mine empire-builder seems never to have regarded that as worthy of notice. Nor did it ever seem to cross his mind that it is only by the common consent of mankind, based upon the common sense of the world, that the possessors of great wealth are enabled to enjoy in peace such power as is now theirs, not to speak of the arrogation of such extravagant functions of world-rule as Rhodes fancied in his nightmare scheme.

At the end of the nightmare comes the bright dream again; the dream of an Anglo-Saxon world, a world unencumbered with incompetent and useless peoples, peoples that potter along with life, enjoying themselves in their own fashion, developing their own tastes, creating their own peculiar trifles of art or literature or amusement, but not accomplishing the one thing needful-the maximum of industrial production, the greatest development of wealth. To some minds, however-and to not a few "Anglo-Saxon" minds-this is the worst nightmare of all. There are those who are grateful for the variety of human ideals and aspirations that springs from the individuality of different races and peoples; who thank God not that we are unlike other peoples, but that other peoples are unlike us— that there is some room still left for variation from

the dominating type, some scope for other things being placed uppermost in the scale of living than those by which we happen to set most store. Long before Kipling, there was an English poet who had something to say on the Rhodes-Kipling ideals:

The world is too much with us: late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers

said Wordsworth, thinking of the commercialist absorption of his own time; and he would exclaim today, more fervently than he did then, that he would

rather be

A pagan suckled in a creed outworn

than a denizen of a world-empire in which the allpervading sound was the shrill and deafening note of Anglo-Saxon industrialism.

END OF A HEROIC STRUGGLE

(June 2, 1902)

After a magnificent contest against overwhelming odds, more than two and a half years in duration, the sturdy little Dutch republics of South Africa have succumbed to the power and resources of the British Empire. During the first six months of that period, the attention of all the world was riveted upon a struggle that recalled the days of Thermopylae and Marathon, and made real to the people of this age the deeds of Winkelried's Swiss peasants on the field of Sempach. For a time, it almost seemed as if the impossible were to be accomplished by the little army of undisciplined farmers who repulsed, again and again, the trained soldiery of Buller and Methuen. Even now, one is tempted to speculate on the results that might have followed if Cronje, instead of doggedly entrenching himself in the river bed at Paardeberg, relying on what he imagined to be the limitless ineptitude of the British, had taken counsel of ordinary prudence and escaped before he was hopelessly surrounded. His surrender was a staggering blow, not only through the loss of numbers, but through its moral effect both on the Boers and the British. Yet, after a short period of comparative inactivity, the war was resumed upon the basis of that irregular but wonderfully effective fighting which has given the names of De Wet and Delarey an undying lustre. With small and steadily diminishing numbers, the remains of the Boer army

have been giving the British such trouble as to tax to the utmost the skill, the endurance and the resources of that powerful enemy. What terms they have succeeded in exacting from England is not known at this writing; but there is good reason to believe that they are such as the Boer fighters can look upon as no mean tribute to their still remaining prowess.

That the English will endeavor to conciliate the Boers by a liberal policy may be taken for granted. They will do their utmost to restore tranquility and establish normal conditions. Civil government will be well administered. There will be a vast revival of activity in the gold mines. We shall probably soon be hearing of the wonderful prosperity of the region, and the extreme satisfaction with which the capitalists who own the mines, and the engineers who operate them, and the speculators who traffic in the stocks of them, look upon the substitution of British for Boer control. Possibly even the Boer farmers themselves-as many as are left to reoccupy their desolated homes, and gather together the surviving members of their families-will be having rather more bread to eat, a few years hence, than they were accustomed to in the days before the war. To a considerable class of minds, facts like these will constitute a justification of England's aggression. There are doubtless millions of honest English people who have all along considered England to be in the right chiefly because they thought that the Boers, in their comparatively primitive methods, did not give such opportunities for modern "development" as would come with British rule.