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, nor from the Nonconformist Radicals of Upper Canada.  It would have been well if a small fraction of the abuse lavished on the tyrannical Boer oligarchy six thousand miles away had been diverted into criticism of the government of a country within sixty miles of our shores, where a large majority of the inhabitants had been for generations asking for the same thing as the Uitlander minority in the Transvaal—­Home Rule—­and were stimulated to make that demand by grievances of a kind unknown in the Transvaal.

But the British blood was up; the Boer blood was up.  Such an atmosphere is not favourable to far-seeing statesmanship, and it would have taken statesmanship on both sides little short of superhuman to avert another war.  The silly raid of 1895 and its condonation by public opinion in England hastened the explosion.  Can anyone wonder that public opinion in Ireland was instinctively against that war?  Only a pedant will seize on the supposed paradox that a war for equal rights for white men should have met with reprobation from an Ireland clamouring for Home Rule.  Irish experience amply justified Irishmen in suspecting precisely what the Boers suspected, a counter-ascendancy in the gold interest, and in seeing in a war for the conquest of a small independent country by a mighty foreign power an analogy to the original conquest of Ireland by the same power.  It is hard to speak with restraint of the educated men—­men with books and time to read them, with brains and the wealth and leisure to develop them—­who