310 / Try Sir William Har court's Temper [1899 



came of age, and that her Majesty is constantly inquiring about the date 

 of the wedding, and has been soothed by being told that Neville will 

 at least be twenty on his wedding day. 



" 4th Jan. — To Malwood, where I had a long talk with Sir William 

 Harcourt about the line he ought to take as an independent member of 

 the Opposition. He told me that he intended to bring forward the 

 whole anti-Imperial case on grounds of economy. I told him that I 

 did not think he would get much following that way. Nobody cared 

 enough about economy to be enthusiastic over it. I thought he would 

 have more success if he gave his opposition a moral basis, exposing the 

 demoralization of England through the violence and bloodshed Im- 

 perialism entailed, the fraud, lying, and hypocrisy, and the growth of 

 militarism. Carried away by my argument I pressed him so closely 

 that he almost lost his temper, and as a final word said : ' Well, what 

 you say may be true, but this is my plan, and I mean to stick to it.' 

 Lady Harcourt, however, who was there, took my side, and afterwards 

 made me go with her upstairs to see her boy Bobby, and repeat to him 

 my argument. ' It will do him good,' she said, ' for he is just at a 

 moment of crisis when a very little may turn his ideas one way or the 

 other.' I found the boy in bed with a cold, writing his views on politics 

 in a copy-book, and I turned my eloquence on him. Old Sir William's 

 ill-humour was almost pathetic, and did not last long, and Lady Har- 

 court said to me as we went upstairs, ' He will not really mind, and he 

 will remember what you said when you are gone.' Really there never 

 was a moment, when a man with convictions and some knowledge of 

 foreign affairs, could do more in England. 



" Bennett, one of the military correspondents in the Soudan, has writ- 

 ten a powerful article in the ' Contemporary,' exposing the barbarity 

 of the war, about which all the country has been shouting triumph, and 

 about Gordon College at Khartoum. The British public are paying to 

 ease their consciences for the incredible slaughter of Omdurman. 



" 6th Jan. — The run of the season with the New Forest deer hounds, 

 in pursuit of an old roebuck from Lady Cross Lodge right across the 

 open heath of Beaulieu plain, very fast to the far side, when he turned 

 back and again faced the open. About the middle of the plain, on his 

 second journey, he lay down, and jumped up in the middle of the 

 hounds, racing away for two miles in view with the pack at his heels 

 to Hackett Pond, where he took the water and swam for ten minutes 

 with the pack after him, and out again, and was run into and killed in 

 the open. They say they never had so good a run before. It lasted 

 seventy-five minutes. I was riding Mahruss, who carried me in the 

 front rank all the way, the only heavy weight that went fairly with the 

 hounds. 



" yth Jan. — Cromer has made a speech to the Soudanese Sheykhs at 



