The campaign continued to be a story of humiliating defeats until December, when Lord Roberts assumed supreme command, with Lord Kitchener as his chief of staff. {186} England thoroughly aroused was sending men and supplies in unstinted measure for the great emergency, and the world looked on in amazement as 200,000 British soldiers under the greatest British commanders were kept at bay for something less than three years by 30,000 untrained Boers. The British Government had forgotten that these South African colonists were the children of a French Huguenot ancestry which had defied Louis XIV., and of the men who cut the dykes when the Netherlands were invaded by that same tyrant. Some one had wittily said that no member of the Cabinet should be allowed to cast his vote for the war, until he had read Motley's "Rise of the Dutch Republic." And, indeed, it appeared to many that the view of the Government was focussed upon one single point, the establishing of British authority at any cost in South Africa. At the same time many eminent Englishmen believed it was not to be expected that a community so long established in a home of its own {187} choosing, should upon demand be ready to bestow upon foreigners all the rights of citizenship; and many also believed that the grievances of the "Outlanders" were not greater than ordinarily existed when a mass of foreign immigrants were pressing in upon a people who suspected and disliked them. The sympathy of foreign states was strongly with the Boers; and in England itself the cause evoked a languid enthusiasm, until aroused by disaster, and until the pride of the nation was touched by loss of prestige. The danger, the enormous difficulties to be overcome, the privations and suffering of their boys, these were the things which awoke the dormant enthusiasm in the heart of the nation. And when the only son of Lord Roberts had been offered as a sacrifice, and then a son of Lord Dufferin, and then, Prince Victor, October 29, 1900, grandson of the Queen herself, the cause had become sacred, and one for which any loyal Briton would be willing to die. By September 1, 1900, the Orange Free {188} State and the Transvaal had been formally proclaimed by Lord Roberts, "Colonies of the British Empire." This was the beginning of the end, and when the victorious commander (December 2, 1900) arrived in England amid the plaudits of a grateful nation, the victory was practically won, and the time was at hand when not far from twenty thousand British soldiers would be lying under the sod six thousand miles away, in a land, which no longer disputed the sovereignty of England!