Sir Henry Wolff was not to be persuaded into such a course. He reminded his friend of the events of 1857, when Palmerston, confronted on the China War by an adverse majority of Radicals and Conservatives, raised the cry of the ‘Honour of England,’ dissolved Parliament, and was returned to power by ‘a rattling majority.’ His counsels prevailed, and the thunderbolt remained unexpended; but the sentiments expressed by Lord Randolph, although partly concealed under the form of partisan tactics, are not to be mistaken. And even the forecast that ‘the question of reducing the Boers will divide the Liberal party by a sharper and more insuperable line than any Irish question’ was in the end to prove not wholly unfounded. His opinions seem to have been strengthened by time, and ten years later, when he visited South Africa, Lord Randolph wrote[11]:-- [Sidenote: 1881 ÆT. 32] ‘The surrender of the Transvaal and the peace concluded by Mr. Gladstone with the victors of Majuba Hill were at the time, and still are, the object of sharp criticism and bitter denunciation from many politicians at home--_quorum pars parva fui_. Better and more precise information, combined with cool reflection, leads me to the conclusion that had the British Government of that day taken advantage of its strong military position and annihilated, as it could easily have done, the Boer forces, it would indeed have regained the Transvaal, but it would have lost Cape Colony.... The actual magnanimity of the peace with the Boers concluded by Mr. Gladstone’s Ministry after two humiliating military reverses suffered by the arms under their control became plainly apparent to the just and sensible mind of the Dutch Cape Colonist, atoned for much of past grievance, and demonstrated the total absence in the English mind of any hostility or unfriendliness to the Dutch race. Concord between Dutch and English in the Colony from that moment became possible.’ Lord Randolph could not foresee in 1891 the Raid of 1896 or the greater catastrophe that lay behind it. Yet the forces which produced both were steadily, though subterraneously, at work; and the Jameson incursion--surprising, detached, eccentric though it appeared at the time--was itself only one vicious consequence of a fatal past. Let us return to the session of 1881.