THE TRANSVAAL. 149 



or palliation unless, indeed, abject panic can be 

 pleaded as such ; it was a flight from imaginary 

 dangers very terrible to the eminently nervous 

 constitution of the then Prime Minister, but at 

 which a Lord Palmerston would have laughed. 



Mr. Gladstone's rubbishy cant expression of his 

 extreme desire to avoid blood-guiltiness at the 

 expense of the Boers, and of his own magnanimity 

 to an enemy by whom he had been ignominiously 

 " sat upon," deceived none but those of his own 

 "goody-goody" admirers, whose supreme pride is, 

 it seems, to listen to and obey the eloquent and 

 generally mysterious utterances of his unmatched 

 capacity in casuistic dialectics. One of the " betes 

 noirs " which precipitated the cowardly action of 

 the Administration was a visionary idea that 

 possible action in the only right direction would 

 cause a rebellious rising of the Africander popula- 

 tions of the Cape Colony and the Free State. 

 This was simply a " bogey " dressed up for a pur- 

 pose. Even upon the assumption that racial ten- 

 dencies might to a certain extent have influenced 

 the sympathies of Africander relationship, the 

 natural canniness of the race would in itself have 

 been sufficient to confine hostile demonstration 



