produced. Hatred
of England rose in inverse ratio to the evidence of the justness of
her cause. When the Boers were victorious, or seemed to be most
capable of defying the efforts of the largest fighting force that
Great Britain had ever put into the field; when, that is to say, it
was most clearly demonstrated that British supremacy in South Africa
could only have been maintained by force of arms against the
formidable rival which had risen against it, then the wave of popular
hatred surged highest. When the British arms prospered, the clamour
sank; but only to rise again until it was finally allayed by the
knowledge that the Boer resistance was at an end, and that the British
Empire had emerged from the conflict a stronger and more united power.

[Sidenote: Attitude of the United States.]

The case of the United States was somewhat different. Here was an
industrial nation like our own; and one, moreover, whose people were
qualified alike by constitutional and legal tradition, habits of
thought, and identity of language, to have discerned the reality of
the reluctance displayed by the British Government to employ force
until every resource of diplomacy and every device of statecraft had
been exhausted, and to have drawn the conclusion that the power which
drove the Government into war was a sense of duty, and not greed of
territory. Moreover, there was at this time, at any rate among the
more cultivated classes, a feeling of gratitude for the action of
Great Britain in preventing European intervention during the
Spanish-American war, and a genuine desire, on that ground alone, to
show sympathy with the English people in the conflict in which they
had become involved. In these circumstances it is somewhat strange
that public opinion in the United States was unmistakably inclined to
favour the Boers during almost the entire period of the war. It is
perfectly true that the United States Government was consistently
friendly; but this did not alter the fact that the dominant note in
nearly all public expressions of the sentiment of the United States'
people was one of sympathy with the Boer, and of hostility to the
British cause. It might have been thought that, just as most
Englishmen, in the case of the conflict between the United States and
Spain, were prepared to assume that a nation imbued with the
traditions and principles of the Anglo-Saxon race would not have
undertaken to enforce its will upon a weak Power withou