Hitherto we have been engaged with the past, with the slow growth across the centuries of those political or religious ideals which now control the destinies of this Empire, a movement towards an ever higher conception of man's relations towards the Divine, towards other men, and towards the State. To-day a subject of more pressing interest confronts us, but a subject more involved also in the prejudices and sympathies which the violence of pity or anger, surprise or alarm, arouses, woven more closely to the living hopes, regrets, and fears which compose the instant of man's life. We are in the thick of the deed--how are we to judge it? How conjure the phantoms inimical to truth, which Tacitus found besetting his path as he prepared to narrate the civil struggles of Galba and Otho thirty years after the event? Yet one aspect of the subject seems free and accessible, and to this aspect I propose to direct your attention. The separate incidents of the war, and the actions of individuals, statesmen, soldiers, politicians, journalists, and officials, civil or military, the wisdom or the rashness, the energy or the sloth, the wavering or the resolution, ancient experience grown half prophetic with the years, alert vigour, quick to perceive, unremitting in pursuit, or ingenuous surprise tardily awaking from the dream of a world which is not this--all these will fall within the domain of History some centuries hence when what men saw has been sifted from what they merely desired to see or imagined they saw. But the place of the war in the general life of this State, and the purely psychological question, how is the idea of this war, in Plato's sense of that word, related to the idea of Imperial Britain?--these it is possible even now to consider, _sine ira et studio_. What is its historical significance compared with the wars of the past, what is the presage of this great war--if it be a great war--for the future? § I. THE HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA Now the magnitude of a war does not depend upon the numbers, relative or absolute, of the opposing forces. Fewer men fell at Salamis than at Towton, and in the battle of Bedr[1] the total force engaged did not exceed two thousand, yet Mohammed's victory changed the history of the world. The followers of Andreas Hofer were but a handful compared with the army which marched with de Saxe to Toumay, but the achievement of the Tyrolese is enduring as Fontenoy. War is the supreme act in the life of a State, and it is the motives which impel, the ideal which is pursued, that determine the greatness or insignificance of that act. It is the cause, the principles in collision which make it for ever glorious, or swiftly forgotten. What, then, are the principles at issue in the present war?