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Sir Alfred Milner, who spoke, wrote, and acted as if he recognized himself the chosen instrument of a plan to force a crisis in South Africa.

The only display of destiny was in the perverse will of man; everything which, to the idle spectator, seemed to indicate the 'inevitable,' resolved itself into human motives.

As we were told war was inevitable, so we are told annexation is inevitable. In the name of inevitability we are invited to banish justice and reason, whose protests are silenced by the false finality implied in the term. The distinction between true and false laws of causation, as applied to national conduct, is here made manifest. Politicians invoke 'the inevitable' for some brief expediency or some convenient emergency; summoned in order to bless the lust of the moment, it remains to curse. The true laws of the Inevitable are not seen in short bursts of passion and the conduct they impel, but in the long rhythms and compensations of reason and justice. That abuse, which is nothing less than the impudent negation of international morality, a quasi-scientific sanction of collective theft, does not impair by one jot or one tittle the literal validity of the true law.

The great masterpieces of literature have