For purposes of comparison we may give some idea of the forces which Mr. Kruger and Mr. Steyn could put in the field, for by this time it was evident that the Orange Free State, with which we had had no shadow of a dispute, was going, in a way which some would call wanton and some chivalrous, to throw in its weight against us.  The general press estimate of the forces of the two republics varied from 25,000 to 35,000 men.  Mr. J. B. Robinson, a personal friend of President Kruger’s and a man who had spent much of his life among the Boers, considered the latter estimate to be too high.  The calculation had no assured basis to start from.  A very scattered and isolated population, among whom large families were the rule, is a most difficult thing to estimate.  Some reckoned from the supposed natural increase during eighteen years, but the figure given at that date was itself an assumption.  Others took their calculation from the number of voters in the last presidential election:  but no one could tell how many abstentions there had been, and the fighting age is five years earlier than the voting age in the republics.  We recognise now that all calculations were far below the true figure.  It is probable, however, that the information of the British Intelligence Department was not far wrong.  According to this the fighting strength of the Transvaal alone was 32,000 men, and of the Orange Free State 22,000.  With mercenaries and rebels from the colonies they would amount to 60, 000, while a considerable rising of the Cape Dutch would bring them up to 100,000.  In artillery they were known to have about a hundred guns, many of them (and the fact will need much explaining) more modern and powerful than any which we could bring against them.  Of the quality of this large force there is no need to speak.  The men were brave, hardy, and fired with a strange religious enthusiasm.  They were all of the seventeenth century, except their rifles.  Mounted upon their hardy little ponies, they possessed a mobility which practically doubled their numbers and made it an impossibility ever to outflank them.  As marksmen they were supreme.  Add to this that they had the advantage of acting upon internal lines with shorter and safer communications, and one gathers how formidable a task lay before the soldiers of the empire.  When we turn from such an enumeration of their strength to contemplate the 12,000 men, split into two detachments, who awaited them in Natal, 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.