and the Englishmen who fled were not poltroons. There ran in them blood
as brave as any in England, and if to-morrow a hostile force attacked
their birth-land, those very Cornish miners and English working men
would die in the last ditch defending their land. Those men were
strangers here; they came to earn the bread they could with difficulty
win in their own land; they were friendly treated by South Africa and
made money here; but were they bound to die in a foreign land for
causes which they neither knew nor cared for?
One thing only can possibly justify war and the destruction of our
fellows to the enlightened and humane denizen of the nineteenth
century; the unavoidable conviction that by no other means can we
preserve our own life and freedom from a stronger power, or defend a
weaker state or individual from a stronger. Nothing can even palliate
it but so intense a conviction of a right so great to be maintained
that we are willing, not merely to hire other men to fight and die for
us, but to risk our own lives,