Page:The life and times of King Edward VII by Whates, Harry Richard 5.djvu/24

LIFE AND TIMES OF EDWARD VII. CAPE TOWN AND TABLE MOUNTAIN. Photo: Barnard, Cape Town. emigrants, who would submerge the Boer population and teach them how to farm. Great was the optimism, real and feigned, especially by those who had South African shares to sell which the events of the pre- ceding years had reduced to waste-paper value. Most unhappily, fancy and reality did not meet. There was no " boom." South Africa was temporarily ruined. The country had been living on and out of the war, on the money which the Imperial Government had been spending so lavishly to prosecute the war. Peace meant the cessation of the greater part of this expenditure. It meant also a partial cessation of employment in those indus- tries in England which depend on the equipment and replenishing of armies. Many thousands of fighting men were thrown by the peace on the labour markets of South Africa and England. Instead of a trade revival there was a shrinkage. Unemployment increased, and men of dis- cernment, who looked at the facts of life amongst us with their own eyes, knew that the democracy was restive and clamorous. Such discernment was never lacking in Mr. Chamberlain. He read the signs of the times if none other did among his col- leagues in the Ministry, which ere this had lost the restraining influence of I^ord Salisbury ; and to read them was, to a man of his practical, contriving intellect, to search out a line of action. He had gone to South Africa on the conclusion of the peace, to confer with the men on the spot. It was an intrepid enter- prise, for he had been the object of bitter obloquy in the former Republics, and it is no slight tribute to the sanity and restraint of the Boer population, among whom he mixed freely, that no violence and no insult was offered him. With the work he did there we are not now concerned ; that belongs to the narrative of the paci-