But there is one great pledge, a solemn warrant of her resolve to swerve not, to blench not, which England has already offered. That pledge is Elandslaagte, it is Enslin, the Modder, and the bloody agony of Magersfontein. For it grows ever clearer as month succeeds month that it is by the invincible force of this ideal, this of Imperial Britain, that we have waged this war and fought these battles in South Africa. If it be not for this cause, it is for a cause so false to all the past, from Agincourt to Balaklava, that it has but to be named to carry with it its own refutation. There is a kind of tragic elevation in the very horror of the march of Attila, of Ginghis Khan, or of Timour. But to assemble a host from all the quarters of this wide Empire, to make Africa, as it were, the rendezvous of the earth, for the sake of a few gold, a few diamond mines, what language can equal a design thus base, ambition thus sordid? And if we call to memory the dead who have fallen in this war, those who at its beginning were with us in the radiance of their manhood, but now, still in the grave, all traces of life's majesty not yet gone from their brow, and if those dead lips ask us, "Why are we thus? And in what cause have we died?" were it not a hard thing for Britain, for Europe, indeed for all the world, if the only answer we could make to the question should be, "It is for the mines, it is for the mines!" No man can believe that; no man, save him whose soul faction has sealed in impenetrable night! The imagination recoils revolted, terror-struck. Great enterprises have ever attracted some base adherents, and these by their very presence seem to sully every achievement recorded of nations or cities. But to arraign the fountain and the end of the high action because of this baser alloy? To impeach on this account all the valour, all the wisdom long approved? Reply is impossible; the thing simply is not British.