of firmness.  In a sense, however, the action of the Germans on the coast of Damaraland (August-October 1884) helped to save the situation.  The imperious need of keeping open the route to the interior, which would be closed to trade if ever the Boers and Germans joined hands, spurred on the Gladstone Ministry to support the measures proposed by Mr. Rhodes and the loyalists of Cape Colony.  When the whole truth on that period comes to be known, it will probably be found that British rule was in very grave danger in the latter half of the year 1884.

Certainly no small expedition ever accomplished so much for the Empire, at so trifling a cost and without the effusion of blood, as that which was now sent out.  It was entrusted to Sir Charles Warren.  He recruited his force mainly from the loyalists of South Africa, though a body named Methuen’s Horse went out from these islands.  In all it numbered nearly 5000 men.  Moving quickly from the Orange River through Griqualand West, he reached the banks of the Vaal at Barkly Camp by January 22, 1885, that is, only six weeks after his arrival at Cape Town.  At the same time 3000 troops took their station in the north of Natal in readiness to attack the Transvaal Boers, should they fall upon Warren.  It soon transpired, however, that the more respectable Boers had little sympathy with the raiders into Bechuanaland.  These again were so far taken aback by the speed of his movements and the thoroughness of his organisation as to manifest little desire to attack a force which seemed ever ready at all points and spied on them from balloons.  The behaviour of the commander was as tactful as his dispositions were effective; and, as a result of these favouring circumstances (which the superficial may ascribe to luck), he was able speedily to clear Bechuanaland of those intruders[447].

[Footnote 447:  Sec Sir Charles Warren’s short account of the expedition, in the Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute for 1885-86, pp. 5-45; also Mackenzie’s Austral Africa, vol. ii. ad init., and John Mackenzie, by W.D.  Mackenzie (1902).]

On September 30 it became what it has since remained—­a British possession, safeguarding the route into the interior and holding apart the Transvaal Boers from the contact with the Germans of Damaraland which could hardly fail to produce an explosion.  The importance of the latter fact has already been made clear.  The significance of the former will be apparent when we remember that Mr. Rhodes, in his later and better-known character of Empire-builder, was able from Bechuanaland as a base to extend the domain of his Chartered Company up to the southern end of Lake Tanganyika in the year 1889.

It is well known that Rhodes hoped to extend the domain of his company as far north as the southern limit of the British East Africa Company.  Here, however, the Germans forestalled him by their energy in Central Africa.  Finally, the Anglo-German agreement of 1890 assigned to Germany all the hinterland of Zanzibar as far west as the frontier of the Congo Free State, thus sterilising the idea of an all-British route from the Cape to Cairo, which possessed for some minds an alliterative and all-compelling charm.