Last Saturday Lord Selborne returned to England after spending five
years in South Africa as High Commissioner. His countrymen would be ungrateful and very blind to merit if they did not acknowledge most heartily the part Lord Selborne, with exceptional wisdom and industry, has played in leading up to the happy consummation of a united South Africa. He was appointed High Commissioner shortly before the General Election of 1906, and Liberals exclaimed angrily that by this appointment Mr. Balfour had tried to force big South African policy upon a new political generation. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, however, very properly decided to bestow his confidence on Lord Selborne until be did any- thing in a political sense to forfeit it. The result was a complete success. Lord Selborne acted never for a single moment as a partisan, but always as an Englishman and a man of character who knew that the prosperity of South Africa was the concern of both parties and of the whole Empire.
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