we may recognise that, far from bewailing our disasters, we should
rather congratulate ourselves upon our escape from losing that
great province which, situated as it is between Britain, India, and
Australia, must be regarded as the very keystone of the imperial
arch.

At the risk of a tedious but very essential digression, something
must be said here as to the motives with which the Boers had for
many years been quietly preparing for war. That the Jameson raid
was not the cause is certain, though it probably, by putting the
Boer Government into a strong position, had a great effect in
accelerating matters. What had been done secretly and slowly could
be done more swiftly and openly when so plausible an excuse could
be given for it. As a matter of fact, the preparations were long
antecedent to the raid. The building of the forts at Pretoria and
Johannesburg was begun nearly two years before that wretched
incursion, and the importation of arms was going on apace. In that
very year, 1895, a considerable sum was spent in military
equipment.

But if it was not the raid, and if the Boers had no reason to fear
the British Government, with whom the Transvaal might have been as
friendly as the Orange Free State had been for forty years, why
then should they arm? It was a difficult question, and one in
answering which we find ourselves in a region of conjecture and
suspicion rather than of ascertained fact. But the fairest and most
unbiased of historians must confess that there is a large body of
evidence to show that into the heads of some of the Dutch leaders,
both in the northern republics and in the Cape, there had entered
the conception of a single Dutch commonwealth, extending from Cape