Page:The Transvaal war; a lecture delivered in the University of Cambridge on 9th November, 1899.djvu/17

 Sir Alfred Milner could not be otherwise than a death-blow to the Boer ideal. Now we may think, and I have no doubt that most of us do think, that the English ideal is the better of the two, but that will not give us a right to enter upon a crusade for its propagation. If we allow propagandism to be a cause for war the result will be anarchy throughout the world. And who are we that we should take upon ourselves to say that our own ideals are not only the best, but so much the best as to make it worth while to propagate them in spite of the horrors caused by the sword? I must say that sometimes I have a feeling, which perhaps not many of you share, when I see the extent to which the English language and institutions are spreading over the world, that even if that spreading is brought about solely by pacific and fair means, there is the possibility that that danger may be incurred which the poet has expressed when he wrote "Lest one good custom should corrupt the world." I am therefore by no means inclined to hurry the extension even of our own ideal. We must then all of us ask what is the justification. for that demand which Sir Alfred Milner made at the Bloemfontein Conference and which has since been maintained, that the English ideal should be adopted in the Transvaal Republic or war should follow, as it has followed. In considering whether there exists justification, and, if so, what it is, I shall have to go to some extent through the recent history of South Africa, but I will at once, as a thread to guide you while you follow me in that history, say the result to which I hope to come. I think that the demand on our part was not founded on any legal right, but that it may have been justified, probably was justified, by one of those situations that occur in the mutual relations of nations, soluble by no canons of legal right but for which a higher justice must be appealed to, that larger justice which in this country is exercized not by courts of justice applying the law as it is but by parliament altering the law, and which is sometimes