previous day. Under the first article of the treaty with the United States the King of England acknowledged the thirteen colonies then forming the United States to be ‘free sovereign and Independent States’. [Sidenote: Comparison of the American War of Independence with the late war in South Africa.] [Sidenote: Effect on war of submarine cables.] At the time of the late war in South Africa an analogy was sometimes drawn between that war and the War of American Independence. In some respects there was similarity. In either case a group of British colonies was primarily concerned, and in either case the British Government was faced with the difficulty of transporting large bodies of troops across the sea to a distant scene of war, America in the eighteenth century before the days of steam being for all practical purposes more remote than South Africa in our own time. There were two distinct spheres of operations in America in the earlier years of the war, Canada and the Atlantic states, just as in South Africa the war was divided between Natal and the Cape Colony; and the Boer invasion of Natal and investment of Ladysmith to some extent recalls the overrunning of Canada by Montgomery’s troops and the hemming up of Carleton inside Quebec. In both cases there was the same kind of half knowledge of the country and its conditions in the public mind in Great Britain, and, curiously enough, in either case the estimate seems to have been most at fault where fighting had been most recent; in Natal, where less than twenty years had elapsed since the previous Boer war, and on the line of Lake Champlain and the Hudson, presumed to be well known to many who had served at a somewhat shorter interval of time under Abercromby and Amherst, and who encouraged Germain to give his confident instructions to Burgoyne for a march to Albany. Distance, transport, supplies, communications, rather than hard fighting, were the main elements of either war; and the description of the American war given in the _Annual Register_ for 1777, which has been already quoted,[161] that it was ‘a war of posts, surprises, and skirmishes instead of a war of battles’, would apply equally to the South African war. But here the likeness ceases, and no real parallel can be drawn between the two contests. The American war was a civil war, Englishmen were fighting Englishmen. The war in South Africa was a war between two rival races. In the earlier war the great forces which have been embodied in British colonization, mental and physical vigour, forwardness and tenacity, the forces of youth, which have the keeping of the future, were in the main ranged against the mother country: in the later war they contributed, as never before, to the sum of national patriotism. In the earlier war foreign nations intervened, with fatal effect, and the sea power of England was crippled. In the later, the struggle was kept within its original