At Peebles on Friday, November 3rd, Lord Selborne made a
speech on the war marked not only by moderation and good feeling, but by the sense of statesmanship that has been apparent in all his utterances in regard to the crisis in the Transvaal. Lord Selborne is not the most showy or self- assertive of our younger politicians, but in our opinion he is distinctly one of the most promising. President Kruger, he de- clared, never intended to grant the franchise, as could be shown from the fact that he always attached to his Franchise Laws impossible conditions. No man in the world, he went on, ever profited more by a blunder than President Kruger and his Government had done by the Raid, and the result was that when he found the reform question being raised and saw himself once more confronted by difficulties of the kind which confronted him in 1895, and no Jameson came to his rescue, "he tried to invent a Jameson for himself. It was strictly true. Just before the Bloemfontein Conference he was startled by a telegram from Pretoria of a conspiracy against the State with many British officers involved. The British officers consisted of seven men, of whom six, he thought, certainly the majority, were agents of the Transvaal Police." We can- not find space for any further summary of the speech, but it was throughout sound and reasonable.
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