2,6 Princess Louise on South Africa [1902 



rooms, which had been newly cleaned and decorated, looked bare and 

 uncomfortable. He complained of having no one to look after him or 

 hang his pictures, or arrange his furniture — the misery of never 

 having married. ' You see me,' he said, ' in my sixty-fourth year, 

 and I have never proposed to any woman in the way of marriage, 

 and there is no one who will care whether I live or die.' He has 

 been through a terrible time, having one of his ribs cut out by Bennett 

 at St. George's Hospital. ' It was a question of life or death in 

 twenty-four hours, and I said " Do it." ' He asked me what I had 

 myself felt when at the point of death, and I told him, ' A great in- 

 difference.' ' It was the same with me,' he said, ' I did not care which 

 way it might go.' It is strange to see a man with so many friends 

 yet apparently so little loved. There is nobody who looks after him, 

 no woman who spends her time with him, not even a nurse, nobody 

 he thinks that loves him. This must be terrible. Neither has he 

 any religion to give him a false hope, nor even a belief in his own 

 philanthropic work. His nearest thing to a creed is his worship of 

 his old master, Disraeli. 



" Then I went on to see John Dillon, and had a long talk about 

 Ireland. He is rather sceptical of George Wyndham's Nationalist 

 sympathies, and says that he is putting the Coercior. Act in force 

 more vigorously in some ways than Arthur Balfour did formerly. He 

 gives hard labour now as well as imprisonment, with a view to dis- 

 qualifying men from serving on County Councils. Dillon also talked 

 much about the peace in South Africa, as to which his views are 

 much the same as mine. He was pleased at my calculation that each 

 Boer, man, woman, and child annexed will have cost the British Gov- 

 ernment just £1,000. He talked strongly of the ineptitude of the 

 Liberal leaders in the House of Commons. 



" Had tea with Princess Louise of Schleswig-Holstein, whom I had 

 met at Clouds in the autumn. She is living in a very small house 

 in Queensbury Place, which she has decorated with an enormous 

 Union Jack in honour of the peace. With her I found an old friend, 

 Mary Hughes, her lady-in-waiting, and a visitor, one Landon, who 

 has been ' Times ' correspondent for the last five years in South 

 Africa. Landon gave us a long acount of the origin and rise of the 

 war, which was extremely interesting. Inspired by the Princess's 

 sympathy, who interjected at every mention of a Boer or of a pro-Boer, 

 ' He ought to have been shot — he ought to have been hanged,' he 

 unfolded all his budget, and let us into many secrets. ' I am per- 

 haps,' he said, 'the only man who has ever ventured to ask Mr. 

 Chamberlain directly, whether he knew of the Jameson Raid before it 

 happened. I had myself known it was intended nearly a year before, 



