'Joseph Chamberlain has brought into English politics the habits and criterions of a commercial traveller,' an eminent Englishman wrote to me the other day. 'And of a commercial traveller not burdened by scruples.' Now, the man of trade may have considerable qualities, great intelligence, and great enterprise, but his mind and his acts are those of a tradesman, not those of a gentleman, or of a statesman. Chamberlain boasted in public one day that he belonged to the Party of Gentlemen; now no gentleman would ever have so expressed himself. The tradesman inevitably brings into public life the traditions of his counting-house; those traditions are to try, invariably, _de rouler les autres_. Now public life should be something more than, and very different to, the pursuit of speculation; and its aims should be higher than the mere desire to trick a rival and send shares up or down. True, statecraft in our day is chiefly 'land-grabbing' and an effort to bridle democracy by taxation. Still it is a different art to the art of the merchant's or manufacturer's office. When Chamberlain endeavours to be diplomatic he becomes inane: a person (who must have been very _naïf_) wrote to him the other day to ask if it were true that it had always been his wish and intention to make war on the Boers, he replied to this simpleton of a correspondent, 'I fear there will always be those who will attribute to me the worst motives. Tennyson has said that every man attributes to another the motives which would actuate himself'--and that was all! I imagine he thought this reply very ingenious and tactful.