supremacy, and the prevention of redress to the Uitlanders until Great Britain has surrendered her rights. Thus one race is secretly pledged to drive the other out of South Africa, and this other race, the British, is forced (in the view of Sir Alfred Milner among others) to demonstrate its power and its justice by obtaining for the Uitlander the rights to which he is entitled.

The strained relations between the Uitlanders and the Transvaal Boers, and the manifest disinclination of President Kruger to do anything towards remedying what was complained of, led to a conference between the High Commissioner, Sir Alfred Milner, and President Kruger at Bloemfontein, in the Free State.

In May, 1899, Sir Alfred Milner told the President that if he would change his policy toward the Uitlanders before things got worse, and take steps to satisfy the reasonable ones among them, who were, after all, the great majority in his country, the independence of his republic would be strengthened, and it would be easier to settle other questions between the two Governments.

The High Commissioner declared that no proposal he would make should threaten the control of the country by the burghers, but President Kruger showed no inclination to meet any of the offers made to him, except one bearing on the form of oath to be administered to intending citizens.

At the second conference of these ambassadors of their respective countries the wily old Boer President took up much of the time with subjects not proposed to Sir Alfred Milner, or bearing upon those he broached.

Thus he talked of a recent petition of the British in the Transvaal to the Queen as being bogus, complained of the arrival of British troops in the British colonies near by, and declared that the proposition to grant the reasonable requests of the foreigners, who had made his country what it is, would be worse than annexation, and would do away with the independence of his country.

He had the assurance to insist that the interests of foreigners in his State were sufficiently looked after by the second Volksraad, or Lower House of the Boer Parliament—an ineffective, unimportant, makeshift body, established solely to make a hollow pretence of granting a relief which it was powerless even to approach.

The further sittings showed a tendency to be given up to rambling and desultory talks. President Kruger could not be held to the statesmanlike point of the High Commissioner, which was the reconstruction of the franchise laws, so as to give a measure of representation to foreigners by granting a vote upon a five years' residence.

He talked of widely different things-settlement of

the Jameson Raid indemnity, incorporation of Swaziland, and arbitration. Sir Alfred Milner, on the other hand, hoped to crystallise his efforts into an attempt to get a franchise law which would put the Uitlanders in a direct way of settling all other grievances for themselves.

Finally, on the fifth day, President Kruger produced a Reform Bill which had but a faint resemblance to anything the High Commissioner had proposed. In this Bill it was provided that new-comers must register at once, give half a year's notice of intent to apply for naturalisation, which could be obtained in two years thereafter, to be followed in five years by the right of suffrage.

This was unacceptable to Sir Alfred Milner, and nothing more favourable or final resulted from the conference. Autumn followed, the British began to move their troops nearer to the frontiers of the Free State and the Transvaal, and the Boers demanded their return to England. In October they declared it to be their ultimatum that unless the troops were recalled they would resort to war, and thus they, who had been for years preparing for it by equipping themselves with modern weapons and the building of forts, began the fighting. It had been England's plan not to move a great force into Africa until it was needed, and to act upon the defensive until the large body necessary for a speedy solution of the contest should arrive. This

programme she maintained with excessive losses, especially of her officers, at Glencoe and Elandslaagte in mid-October, when the Boers forced the fighting on the Natal frontier.

PART II1

THE BOER ULTIMATUM AND ARMAMENT

WAR became officially inevitable on the 9th of October, 1899. Unofficially, it had been inevitable for nearly twenty years. During the whole of that period the Transvaal and the Free State Governments had been arming themselves, upon a scale entirely inconsistent with any mere purpose of maintaining their position among South African States. They were in no danger of aggression from their white neighbours, and they were already sufficiently armed to safeguard them against native risings.

The warlike preparations assumed, after the Jameson Raid, proportions which told all too plainly the end in view. An enormous number of field guns of the latest Krupp and Creusot patterns, guns of position, such as the famous "Long Tom," Mauser rifles by the hundred thousand, and cartridges by tens of millions, were poured into Pretoria and Bloemfontein, mainly through the ordinary trade avenues of Cape Colony and Natal. The British Government took no notice of all this,

1 This section and Chapter VII, have been prepared in London, under the author's direction, as his absence at the seat of war made it impossible for him to consult the records, and gather the material himself.