Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/122

 from two relations who knew him at Cambridge, I saw much of him in my South African visit in 1899, spending much of my time at Pretoria as a visitor in his home. As a statesman he was then “in the making”: his task as State Attorney in conducting the delicate negotiations for Kruger’s government with England was no light one, but he kept up a cheery countenance and a conversation in which commentaries on the Greek drama and the nursing of an infant “Chamberlain killer,” reduced current controversies to a minimum. I did not then perceive how multifarious his abilities were destined to prove, as soldier, statesman, and philosopher. Even when nearly twenty years later I came again into close contact with him as adviser and member of our War Government, I did not realize the strength of the philosophic bent which was to find expression in his work on Holism. But it helped me to realize the impulse which has led several of the ablest statesmen of our time, Balfour, Haldane, Samuel, and Smuts to have recourse to the heights of philosophy as a refuge from the grave new issues pressing into the field of politics.

Personal contacts with many men and women of advanced political views from “good Liberals” to Socialists and Communists during the immediate post-War period, gradually led me to understand what the War had done to “politics” by exposing its super-