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into certain moral factors of individuals, and groups of individuals, chiefly consisting of ignorance, greed, and personal animosity. The inevitable was not responsible for the misconduct of shifty diplomatists, Chamberlain and Kruger, or for the mutual distrust which made diplomatic intercourse futile, or for the blend of bluff, menace, and evasion, the cynical repudiation of the most solemn undertakings under the Convention, the rejection by our statesmen of arbitration as a means of settlement upon grounds of narrow technicality, themselves a proper subject for a Court of Arbitration. There was nothing 'inevitable' in the fabrication of detailed falsehoods by which British and Dutch colonists alike were incited to hostility, and by which the public sentiment of Great Britain was manipulated in the interests of men who were calculating the profits they stood to make by war. The warlike preparations made on either side, the voting of supplies, the sending out of troops accompanied by Jingo trumpeting – these specific acts which made for war were none of them inevitable. The only point where I was brought into direct experience of anything which bore the semblance of 'inevitability' was in the tone and demeanour of