Serious men were apt at times to wonder whether more was not ...

Serious men were apt at times to wonder whether more was not at stake than the suzerainty of the Queen; whether, if the safety of the

Empire required the extinction of the Republics, the

integrity of the English character was not bound up with the resistance they might offer to the tactics of the company promoter and the morals of the mining camp.

A stain was left on the year of Jubilee; a discord had made itself heard, growing louder through the disasters and ineptitudes of the South African War, till it merged into the triumph song' of Liberalism reunited and victorious, but with a small, vigorous, and disconcerting auxiliary operating on its left flank. The Imperialism of the nineties had burnt itself out in the Mafeking bonfires, and the Conservative overthrow of 1905 recalled, in its grounds and its magnitude, the defeat of 18 80. But in twenty-five years much had happened that could not be undone.

The Empire was a thing in being.

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