Sir Edward Grey, in the course of a speech delivered
on Wednesday in support of Lord Rosebery's candidature for the Rectorship of Glasgow University, declared that as the result of careful study and earnest thought, his fixed convic- tion was that the war was inevitable. He had been through the Blue-books, and it was clear to his mind that all through President Kruger never meant to grant real reforms. We were fighting for the right to protect our own fellow-subjects in the Transvaal, negotiations having failed, and to maintain our paramountcy, a question which the Boers were the first to raise. The Boers, on the other hand, were fighting not merely for their independence, but in order to maintain that race ascendency which we had forgone in Cape Colony, and if we had rejected the appeal of the Outlanders it would have alienated their affections, and in the end would have lost us South Africa. He did not like the way in which the 1881 preamble had been introduced into the question, but the dispute went much deeper than preambles. The vital point was the spirit in which these Conventions had been framed, and the Boers while violating that spirit had strained the letter of the Conventions.
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