horses, which was not
already at sea speeding for Cape Town. To what was known officially as
the First Colonial Contingent the Australasian colonies contributed
1,491 officers and men.

It is impossible to an American reading these facts not to recall that
there was a day when troops, from what were then North American
colonies, fought for Great Britain in the trenches at Havana, and
before Louisburg in {p.078} Cape Breton, as well as in the more
celebrated campaigns on the lines of Lake Champlain and the St.
Lawrence. But--and herein is the contrast between past and present
that makes the latter so vitally interesting--neither mother country
nor colonies had then aroused to consciousness of world-wide
conditions, for which indeed the time was not yet ripe, but by which
alone immediate and purely local considerations can be seen in their
true proportions, and allowed proper relative weight. From those old
wars the mother country expected but an addition to her colonial
system, to be utilised for her own advantage; the colonists, outside
the love of adventure inherent in their blood, were moved almost
wholly by the jealousies and dangers of the immediate situation, as
the South African colonists have in part been in the present instance.
American concern naturally, inevitably as things then were, did not
travel outside the range of American interests, American
opportunities, American dangers, while the British Government regarded
its colonies as all mother countries in those days did. Consequently,
when the wills of {p.079} the one and the other clashed, there was no
common unifying motive, no lofty sentiment--such as that of national
Union was in 1861 to those who experienced it--to assert supremacy, to
induce conciliation, by subordinating immediate interest and
conviction of rights to its own superior claim.

After making due allowance for mere racial sympathy, which in the
present contest has had even in the neutral United States so large a
share in determining individual sympathies, the claim of an English
newspaper is approximately correct, that the universal action of the
colonies, where volunteering far exceeded the numbers first sent,
"indicates what is the opinion of bodies of free men, widely separated
by social and geographical conditions, concerning the justice and
necessity of the quarrel in which we are now engaged." But this takes
too little account of the much more important political fact that cold