defeat of Majuba Hill, where four hundred infantry upon a mountain were defeated and driven off by a swarm of sharpshooters who advanced under the cover of boulders.  Of all these actions there was not one which was more than a skirmish, and had they been followed by a final British victory they would now be hardly remembered.  It is the fact that they were skirmishes which succeeded in their object which has given them an importance which is exaggerated.  At the same time they may mark the beginning of a new military era, for they drove home the fact—­only too badly learned by us—­that it is the rifle and not the drill which makes the soldier.  It is bewildering that after such an experience the British military authorities continued to serve out only three hundred cartridges a year for rifle practice, and that they still encouraged that mechanical volley firing which destroys all individual aim.  With the experience of the first Boer war behind them, little was done, either in tactics or in musketry, to prepare the soldier for the second.  The value of the mounted rifleman, the shooting with accuracy at unknown ranges, the art of taking cover—­all were equally neglected.

The defeat at Majuba Hill was followed by the complete surrender of the Gladstonian Government, an act which was either the most pusillanimous or the most magnanimous in recent history.  It is hard for the big man to draw away from the small before blows are struck but when the big man has been knocked down three times it is harder still.  An overwhelming British force was in the field, and the General declared that he held the enemy in the hollow of his hand.  Our military calculations have been falsified before now by these farmers, and it may be that the task of Wood and Roberts would have been harder than they imagined; but on paper, at least, it looked as if the enemy could be crushed without difficulty.  So the public thought, and yet they consented to the upraised sword being stayed.  With them, as apart from the politicians, the motive was undoubtedly a moral and Christian one.  They considered that the annexation of the Transvaal had evidently been an injustice, that the farmers had a right to the freedom for which they fought, and that it was an unworthy thing for a great nation to continue an unjust war for the sake of a military revenge.  It was the height of idealism, and the result has not been such as to encourage its repetition.

An armistice was concluded on March 5th, 1881, which led up to a peace on the 23rd of the same month.  The Government, after yielding to force what it had repeatedly refused to friendly representations, made a clumsy compromise in their settlement.  A policy of idealism and Christian morality should have been thorough if it were to be tried at all.  It was obvious that if the annexation were unjust, then the Transvaal should have reverted to the condition in which it was before the annexation, as defined by the Sand River Convention.  But the Government