‘It is nothing of the sort,’ said the other. ‘You know it is your great curse, my dear Lucian, that you never get a clear notion of the truth. You have a trick of seeing things as you think they ought to be; you will not see them as they are. Just because the Boers happen to be numerically small, to lead a pastoral life, and to have gone into the desert like the Israelites of old, you have brought that far too powerful imagination of yours to bear upon them, and have elevated them into a class with the Swiss and the Italians, who fought for their country.’ ‘What are the Boers fighting for?’ asked Lucian. ‘At present to grab somebody else’s property,’ returned the other. ‘Don’t get sentimental about them. After all, much as you love us, you’re only half an Englishman, and you don’t understand the English feeling. Are the English folk not suffering, and is a Boer widow or a Boer orphan more worthy of pity than a Yorkshire lass whose lad is lying dead out there, or a Scottish child whose father will never come back again?’ Lucian swept these small and insignificant details aside with some impatience. ‘You are the mightiest nation the world has ever seen,’ he said. ‘You have a past--such a past as no other people can boast. You have a responsibility because of that past, and at present you have thrown all sense of it away, and are behaving like the drunken brute who rises gorged with flesh and wine, and yells for blood. This is an England with vine-leaves in her hair--it is not the England of Cromwell.’ ‘I thank God it is not!’ said the other man with heartfelt reverence. ‘We wish for no dictatorship here. Come, leave off slanging us in this bloodthirsty fashion, and try to arrive at a sensible view of things. Turn your energies to a practical direction--write a new romantic play for Harcourt, something that will cheer us in these dark days, and give the money for bandages and warm socks and tobacco for poor Tommy out at the front. He isn’t as picturesque--so it’s said--as Brother Boer, but he’s a man after all, and has a stomach.’