The new hysterical creed of 'Imperialism' doubtless gained an impetus, Home Rule equally certainly lost, by the change of front of 'Birmingham Joe.' But the aristocratic party was harnessed like a cab-horse to the triumphal car of the New Unionist, and has ever since then remained thus harnessed. In the history of English politics these passages will contribute a chapter which will not edify the readers of the next generation; especially if its climax be, as it will be almost certainly, the apotheosis of Chamberlain after a campaign of aggression and conquest conceived and carried out by him and the Yellow Press which he inspires. It is he who is responsible for the financiers' war in South Africa; he might call it proudly, '_my war_,' as the Empress Eugénie called the war with Germany, '_ma guerre à moi_.' If he had never been anything higher than Mayor of Birmingham the farmers of the Transvaal would still be ploughing their lands in peace. The war was desired, conceived, and imposed on his colleagues by the Minister of the Colonies, without any appeal to or sanction of Parliament. He denies this, but it is clearly proved by his famous speech at Highbury and by the text of his irritating and provocative despatches; and it was only when that war was begun, beyond all possibility of alteration, that the Prime Minister, after long silence, accepted the responsibility of it in his speech at the Guildhall. Lord Salisbury, in that Mansion House speech, of course, denied the allegation then made by the President of the French Chamber of Commerce as to the motives and causes of the war; but no one who has attentively followed the actions and expressions of Chamberlain before and after the Jameson Raid, and his conduct at the enquiry held upon the conduct therein of Cecil Rhodes, can for a moment doubt the intimate relations which united the Colonial Secretary and the founder of Rhodesia and the Chartered. Chamberlain, who, at the close of the Committee of Enquiry of 1897, had, in common with other signatories, signed a statement that Rhodes was culpable, declared a few days later in the House of Commons that Rhodes was a man whose honour was untarnished! This, more than any other fact, shows to what depths it is now possible to descend in English politics. Certainly, in the time of Peel or of the earlier Governments of Gladstone, a Minister capable of such conduct would have lost alike office and seat in Parliament. Chamberlain, living in times of more elastic morality, did not lose even a single follower.