nor from the Nonconformist Radicals of Upper
Canada. It would have been well if a small fraction of the abuse
lavished on the tyrannical Boer oligarchy six thousand miles away had
been diverted into criticism of the government of a country within sixty
miles of our shores, where a large majority of the inhabitants had been
for generations asking for the same thing as the Uitlander minority in
the Transvaal--Home Rule--and were stimulated to make that demand by
grievances of a kind unknown in the Transvaal.

But the British blood was up; the Boer blood was up. Such an atmosphere
is not favourable to far-seeing statesmanship, and it would have taken
statesmanship on both sides little short of superhuman to avert another
war. The silly raid of 1895 and its condonation by public opinion in
England hastened the explosion. Can anyone wonder that public opinion in
Ireland was instinctively against that war? Only a pedant will seize on
the supposed paradox that a war for equal rights for white men should
have met with reprobation from an Ireland clamouring for Home Rule.
Irish experience amply justified Irishmen in suspecting precisely what
the Boers suspected, a counter-ascendancy in the gold interest, and in
seeing in a war for the conquest of a small independent country by a
mighty foreign power an analogy to the original conquest of Ireland by
the same power. It is hard to speak with restraint of the educated
men--men with books and time to read them, with brains and the wealth
and leisure to develop them--who to this very day abuse their talents in
encouraging among the ignorant multitude the belief that the Irish
leaders of that day were, to use the old hackneyed phrase, "traitors to
the Empire." If we look at the whole of these events in just
perspective, if we search coolly and patiently for abiding principles
beneath the sordid din and confusion of racial strife, we shall agree
that in some respects Irishmen were better friends to the Empire than
the politicians who denounced them, and sounder judges of its needs. Yet
there can be no doubt that the Transvaal complications, followed
unhappily by the Gordon episode in the Soudan, reacted fatally on
Ireland, and that the Irish problem in its turn reacted with bad effect
on the Transvaal. When the statesman who refused to avenge Majuba in
1881 proposed his Irish Home Rule Bills in 1886 and 1893, it was easy
for prejudiced minds to associate the two policies as harmonious pa