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Now, the most astonishing phenomenon of this war-fever is the credulity displayed by the educated classes. It is, of course, true that ordinary education is so curiously defective in this country that not one in fifty persons could have correctly named the capital of the Orange Free State at the beginning of 1899. But education might have been expected to teach caution in the acceptance and assimilation of the flood of information which poured through the press during the last two years. Our educated classes are usually scornful of the man who believes everything he reads in the newspapers, and who pronounces quick dogmatic judgments upon delicate and intricate points of politics or economics. Yet the majority of these cultured persons have submitted their intelligence to the dominion of popular prejudice and passion as subserviently as the man in the street, whom they despise. The canons of reasoning which they habitually apply in their business or profession, and in the judgments they form of events and characters, are superseded by the sudden fervour of this strange amalgam of race feeling, animal pugnacity, rapacity, and sporting zest, which they dignify by the name of patriotism.

No one would think of accepting in any