England cannot afford to give up Egypt or South Africa, and, of course, will not do it, for there she fights for India, and for every form and feature of her imperialism. The world could not afford to have her give up Africa. If she was weak enough to be willing to do it, that weakness would mark her decline and declare her fall. The British Empire is the chosen instrument of Providence that rough-hews the ends of the earth, and that includes the conquest of Africa, for the sake of mankind. That Empire is the only one that has the enabling equipment to do the work, and the advancement will be the achievement of one of the proudest and most beneficent of all victories of men for man. A great deal of the journalism of the world is wickedly and wretchedly wrong and extremely misleading in its treatment of this superb and lofty theme. The Boers have been cruelly deceived by interludes of feebleness displayed in the government of England, permitting a halting interference with the perpetuation of the policy that has made the British Empire what it is. It was this unfaithfulness that sacrificed Gordon at Khartoum. It is the same sort of moral malady, a choice of that which is inadequate, that would have surrendered the Philippines to an impostor and prevented the expansion of American commerce in Asia. The Boers are men of strength and generously sustained with many virtues, but they have had the misfortune to be trained in narrow ways and are forced by deplorable circumstances of environment to fight for a cause without hope, for it is one that is against the courses of the stars and the irresistible currents of the forward movements of our generation--against the mastery of the world by man for man's own sake. This awful war is the bitter fruit of a want of candor among the nations and the races that have enlightenment, and of the incapacity of the obstructionists in South Africa to resist the blandishments of the crude vanity and the criminality of the tyranny that is based upon the ignorance whose violent presumption sheds the blood of heroes, but may not change the majestic progress of the twentieth century, in which all the living nations and vital people, the Boers and the British, shall participate--for it is duty and destiny. [Sidenote: Opinions of the Canadians]