nds,
how much more must it lie in mine--the employer of labour? I made up
my mind before dinner, told my wife before going to bed, and here I
am, sir."

Nor was this an extraordinary case. There must have been in South
Africa during the second phase of the war many hundreds of men--one
might almost say thousands--actuated by the same spirit, impelled by
the same feeling, as this rich contractor and his groom. Men who felt
that the nation had desperate need of their services; men who
voluntarily undertook the risks and perils of a soldier's life, not
from any hope of preferment, not from love of adventure or mercenary
advancement, but from true patriotism--a sacrifice to meet the
nation's call in the hour of her need. But that day soon passed. The
tide turned, and clash of arms ceased upon our own frontiers and
within our own dependencies, and the din of war sounded faintly from
the heart of the enemy's country. Then true patriotism failed; the men
who had gone forth with their country's acclamations returned as their
obligations expired. There were no patriots of the same class found to
take their places. Yet the exigencies of the struggle required even
more men than had been in the field when Lord Roberts made his extreme
effort to retrieve the earlier misfortunes. Then it was that we
committed another of those many errors in judgment which have marked
the conduct of the campaign. We believed that in December 1900 the
edifice of the Boer resistance was crumbling to its foundations,--that
it was like a mighty smoke-stack, already mined at its base, and but
requiring fuel at the dummy supports to bring the whole structure in
ruins to the ground. We called for the fuel. The cry went forth for
men--men--men. Any men; only let there be a sufficient quantity. The
war was over. Had not the highest officials said that it was over. The
recruiting-sergeant went out into the highways and hedges to collect
the fuel for Lord Kitchener's final operation. It mattered not the
quality--it was only quantity. The war was over. The gates of the Gold
Reef City would again be open. Then the mass of degraded manhood which
had fled from Johannesburg at the first muttering of thunder in the
war-cloud flocked from their hiding-places on the Cape Colony seaboard
and fell upon the recruiting-sergeant's neck. Mean whites that they
were, they came out of their burrows at the first gleam of sunshine.
Greek, Armenian, Russian, Scandinavian, Levantin