322 England's Overlordship of the World [ x 899 



" 2&th May. — George Wyndham came down last night to dine and 

 sleep, and to-day I drove him to Worthing, where we lunched with 

 Henley. On our way over the Downs we stopped and walked up to 

 Chanclebury Ring, which George had never done, and found some 

 white dog-violets nearly at the highest point. George has told me a 

 good deal about the internal rivalries in the Cabinet, which may well 

 break out if anything happens to Lord Salisbury. What he calls the 

 reactionary Tories are headed by Hicks Beach, but the young Tories, 

 including himself, would not serve under Beach. As long as Arthur 

 Balfour is there they will follow him, but if any accident sent him too 

 out of the leadership they would revolt from the main Tory body and 

 form a third party of ultra-imperialists with Chamberlain. About 

 foreign politics George says that it is now simply a triangular battle 

 between the Anglo-Saxon race, the German race, and the Russian, 

 which shall have the hegemony of the whole world. France he con- 

 siders gone as a great Power, as much gone as Spain or Austria, but 

 the Emperor William means to be supreme overlord. He is holding his 

 hand for the moment till he can get an efficient navy, but as soon as 

 this is ready there will be a coalition against England. He, George and 

 the young Imperialists are going in for England's overlordship and 

 they won't stand half-measures or economy in pushing it on. 



" 3rd June. — ■ Young Winston Churchill has made a speech in which, 

 while condemning the desecration of the Mahdi's tomb, he excuses 

 Kitchener on the ground that it was done in his absence and that he 

 was keeping silence in order not to incriminate his subordinates. This 

 throws the odium of the deed on young Gordon, a quite innocent per- 

 son, for both Anne and Judith, who have been seeing Gordon and his 

 wife at Cairo all through the winter, assure me that he repudiates the 

 deed with absolute disgust. I have consequently written to the ' Daily 

 News ' telling the truth about it. 



" 4th June (Sunday). — Lunched at Sir Wilfrid Lawson's where I 

 found John Morley. We had a long two hours' talk about the Kitch- 

 ener vote which is to come off to-morrow. Morley is very fierce 

 against Kitchener, and I gave him what help I could, besides what I 

 wrote to him on the subject. But he is hampered by all sorts of condi- 

 tions. I urged him not to admit the capture of Omdurman as a great 

 feat of arms. It was a trumpery affair for which to give a peerage, 

 but he would not take this line, though it really invalidates his whole 

 argument. He is already in a depressed frame of mind, for Campbell 

 Bannerman is to second the vote, and he thinks the result of the debate 

 will be to make a further cleavage between the two sections of the Lib- 

 eral party, his own anti-military section being left with a small minority. 

 Even Harcourt's vote he thought was doubtful. I proposed to go and 

 see Harcourt and try and persuade him to vote against the grant, but 



