e been
taken on more than one occasion had Joubert not vetoed the proposed
assaults."[18] The second correspondent relates that General Joubert
overruled the desire of the burghers to assault Ladysmith, saying "at
a War Council that the city was not worth to the Boers the lives of
500 burghers." If Joubert really said that, he ought unquestionably
to {p.198} have been at once relieved from command; but as the
incident is preceded by the statement that "the burghers were
confident of their ability to take it in a hand-to-hand fight,
_notwithstanding that the English outnumbered them more than two to
one_,"[19] the source of the correspondent's information is open to
some question.

[Footnote 18: London _Times_, June 25, 1900.]

[Footnote 19: _Harper's Monthly Magazine_, July,
1900, p. 174.]

To make war without running risks--not mere risk of personal danger,
but of military failure--has been declared impossible by the highest
authority. Yet such a temperament, betrayed in politics, being
constitutional, will enter into all actions of life, and one is not
surprised to read that "this characteristic of caution was the chief
mark of Joubert's conduct in the field as a military commander. His
idea of warfare was to act ever on the defensive." Let this be
qualified so far as to say that his idea appears always to have been
to act within limits of safety, to consider self-preservation--the
preservation, that is, of his own forces--more important than the
destruction of the enemy, and we have a view, not of Joubert only, but
of his race, which goes {p.199} far to explain the failures at
Ladysmith, Kimberley, and Mafeking, and likewise the inefficient
action at that early period of the war when alone success was locally
possible, and, if locally attained, might have even compassed an
ultimate victory. If to this idea be linked that which is closely akin
to it--of attaining results, not by superior dexterity in the use of
means, but by subtlety and ambush--and we have the explanation both of
the numerous artful traps into which British detachments were led,
like game into the snare of the hunter, and yet also of the sure
failure to achieve success in war, for the craft of the hunter is not
the skill of the warrior.

The cognate words "stratagem" and "strategist" sufficiently indicate
that craft and wile are part of the professional equipment of great
warriors, but wi