ABSTRACT
“The best settlement that can be made for all parties than the settlement which could have been effected by tact and self-restraint had the Boers never been goaded into war. A blunder on the part of the post-office clerk turned this trenchant enough original version into: “A seat lost to the Government is seat sold to the Boers.” An army was a last touch of “little England” malice in Harcourt to deny, correctly as it proved, that any help in bearing these burdens could reasonably be expected by the British taxpayer from the Boers or the Rand mine-owners. Caithness-shire, too, gave evidence of this swing of opinion though in the milder form of ejecting the “pro-Boer”, Dr. Clark, to make way for an “Imperialist Liberal” of the Rosebery school, Leicester Harmsworth, brother of the Conservative founder of the strongly Imperialist Daily Mail. The news from South Africa, made it cheerlessly plain that the Boers were as far from capitulation as ever.
