PART II
THE DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN
LECTURE IV
THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA
[Tuesday, May 29th, 1900]
Hitherto we have been engaged with the past, with the slow growth across the centuries of those political or religious ideals which now control the destinies of this Empire, a movement towards an ever higher conception of man's relations towards the Divine, towards other men, and towards the State. To-day a subject of more pressing interest confronts us, but a subject more involved also in the prejudices and sympathies which the violence of pity or anger, surprise or alarm, arouses, woven more closely to the living hopes, regrets, and fears which compose the instant of man's life. We are in the thick of the deed—how are we to judge it? How conjure the phantoms inimical to truth, which Tacitus found besetting his path as he prepared to narrate the civil struggles of Galba and Otho thirty years after the event?
Yet one aspect of the subject seems free and accessible, and to this aspect I propose to direct your attention. The separate incidents of the war, and the actions of individuals, statesmen, soldiers, politicians, journalists, and officials, civil or military, the wisdom or the rashness, the energy or the sloth, the wavering or the resolution, ancient experience grown half prophetic with the years, alert vigour, quick to perceive, unremitting in pursuit, or ingenuous surprise tardily awaking from the dream of a world which is not this—all these will fall within the domain of History some centuries hence when what men saw has been sifted from what they merely desired to see or imagined they saw.
But the place of the war in the general life of this State, and the purely psychological question, how is the idea of this war, in Plato's sense of that word, related to the idea of Imperial Britain?—these it is possible even now to consider, sine ira et studio. What is its historical significance compared with the wars of the past, what is the presage of this great war—if it be a great war—for the future?