herself, with the burden of more than eighty years of life and more than sixty-two years of empire her shoulders, is giving up her! Christmas rest at Osborne, that she may at Windsor be close to the! heart of her people. We, have noi nudge against the Boers of the} Sfransvaal or even of the Orange Free State. They are confessedly'a most ignorant folk, and they have allowed themselves to be misled by ad-* venturers from Holland into thinking that their personal independence was threatened and that the necessity and opportunity had come for them to turn South Africa into a great Dutch Republic. To attempt to trace any parallel between the rising of the American colonists against England in the 18th century and the present struggle of the Boers is ridiculous. The Dutch Republics are struggling, as Mr. Balfour said the other day, for empire not for independence.
It is a splendid thing, this crisis, if it prevents our military authorities, as it will, from neglecting the militia and despising the volunteers in the future as they have done in the past. They cannot ignore the fact that it is by volunteers they are being beaten. Our men do not volunteer for the purpose of playing at soldiers, for their ranks are thinned in times of peace and swell rapidly in times of trouble, and the call to foreign service will be the making of our Volunteer Force. The mingling in South Africa of volunteers from the homeland, from Australia, from Canada, from the hundreds of stations where the British flag flies all over the world, will bind the empire together closer than ever. Nor would we refuse—though there are some weighty objections—the assistance of our Indian fellow-subjects; will not our Indian lancers and our Ghoorka infantry feel themselves still more menibers of one great empire if they have fought side by side with us on equal terms in South We ae fighting this to ald refuse ni Tt will be another good thing if j this is crisis involves uiplote re= organisation of our Intelligence De artment. Che reverses which have stirred us up would never happened if our Intelligence Department had known what every German military journal knew and published go about the Boer preparations fur war, We need, it seems. a stirring up every fifty years or let us now as a nation determine that those who are lying silent for ever on the hillsides in Natal and Cape Colony, whose fate will make hundreds of English firesides sad this Christmas, shall not have died in ain. We in Shanghai can do our part in helping to provide for the women and children left unprotected. Singapore and Hongkong, as the telegram we publish this morning shows, are doing bravely, and Shang: hai must not lag behind them.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.