37 2 Return of the City Volunteers [ l 9°° 



' when men quarrel and one receives a gvfle, he is expected to beat him- 

 self.' 



" 22nd Sept. — Politically much has happened in the last week. 

 Kruger has abandoned the Transvaal, and the Boer army, though never 

 yet beaten in battle, seems to have broken up into small bands, so that 

 our Government has some ground for saying the war is over. On this, 

 Parliament has been dissolved. I shall take no part whatever in the 

 new elections, as neither political party has the slightest claim on my 

 sympathy. It is difficult to say between Rosebery and Chamberlain 

 which would be the more dangerous in power. 



' 1st Nov. — I left home on Monday for Egypt, this being Thursday. 

 London, when I passed through, was in an absurd uproar on account of 

 the return of the City Volunteers from South Africa. People have be- 

 come idiotic over this war, to the extent that they really think something 

 chivalrous and noble has been achieved, while we have been making our- 

 selves not only detested, but a laughing-stock the whole world over. I 

 found George getting ready for a speech he is to make at Dover. He 

 talked very scornfully of Rosebery and the Imperial Radicals, who had 

 dished the chances of their party by supporting the war, and had put his 

 own party in power for another fifteen years. ' There will be a reaction, 

 of course, some day,' he said, ' but they won't profit by it. Rosebery will 

 have to join us altogether, as Burke did Pitt, or be left out permanently 

 in the cold. He talked of his own prospects of promotion, which he 

 said had been a little injured by his candour in admitting defects in 

 the conduct of the war, though he had saved the Government by the 

 line he took last Spring. ' But it does not matter,' he said, ' politics 

 are a long game, and I shall not lose in the end by telling the truth.' 

 As it was, he had some chance, he said, of being shifted to Ireland, and 

 he said I must write and tell him what I thought of it if it came to pass. 

 I said the Irish remembered he was Lord Edward Fitzgerald's great- 

 grandson, and it would be something to start on, but would not carry 

 him far. George's political hard work has aged him and he is much 

 greyer than I am, though only thirty-seven. Hampden, who expresses 

 Chamberlain's ideas about the war, said to-day, ' It looks as if the only 

 way of ending it will be to deport all the Boer women and hang all the 

 Boer men. Roberts will come home and leave Kitchener behind him 

 to do the butcher work.' He argued quite seriously that this was not 

 only necessary but implied nothing disgraceful to us as a nation, yet 

 Hampden was a Gladstonian Radical M.P. of the most advanced non- 

 intervention type twenty years ago, and is now a respected Liberal 

 nobleman and ex-Governor of a Colony. 



" 6th Nov. — On board the P. and O. Valetta. Among the pas- 

 sengers is a Mr. Seton Karr, a lion shooter, who showed me photographs 

 of his victims in various parts of the world. These amateur killers for 



