s fitted for such a peculiar campaign, and could have
counted with far less certainty upon that assistance from mounted
colonial troops without which the war of 1899-1902 could never have been
finished at all. Our command of the sea was less secure; the Egyptian
War of 1882 was brewing, and Ireland, where the Great Land Act of 1881
was not yet law, was seething with crime and disorder little
distinguishable from war itself, and demanding large bodies of troops.

If the further course of a war in 1881 is a matter of speculation, what
we all know for certain is, first, that the conditions which led to war
were produced by seventy years of vacillating policy, and, second, that
war itself would have been a useless waste of life and treasure, unless
success in it had been followed, as in 1906, by the grant of that
responsible Government which all along had been the key to the whole
difficulty, the condition precedent to a Federal Union of the South
African States, and to their closer incorporation in the Empire.

Few persons realized this at the time. The whole situation changed
disastrously for the worse. Arrogance and mutual contempt embittered the
relations of the races. Then came a crucial test for the Boer capacity
for enlightened and generous statesmanship. Gold was discovered in the
Transvaal, and a large British population flocked in. The same problem,
with local modifications, faced the Boers as had been faced in Upper and
Lower Canada, and for centuries past in Ireland. Were they to trust or
suspect, to admit or to exclude from full political rights, the
new-comers? Was it to be the policy of the Duke of Wellington or of the
Earl of Durham, of Fitzgibbon or the Volunteers? They chose the wrong
course, and set up an oligarchical ascendancy like the "family compact"
of Upper Canada and Nova Scotia. Can we be surprised that they, a rude,
backward race, failed under the test where we ourselves, with far less
justification, had failed so often? Their experience of our methods had
been bad from first to last. Their latest taste of our rule had been the
coercive system of Lanyon, and they feared, with only too good reason,
as events after the second war proved, that any concession would lead to
a counter-ascendancy of British interests in a country which was legally
their own, not a portion of the British dominions. We had suffered
nothing, and had no reason to fear anything, from the Irish and
French-Canadian Catholics,