and ended, after a display of energy and resource by the enemy which none of our responsible statesmen had expected, in the annexation of both the Republics. The events of the war are of little importance for this book. A Liberal, who witnessed this display of national egoism, with its boastful beginnings, its slovenly neglect of preparations for its own work, the bestial ferocity of language with which it assailed its enemy, and its hysterical exultation at its final triumph, can find no pleasure in the recollection of it. Posterity will pass its final judgment in its own time, and if it sees virtue in the conduct of our soldiers in the field and in the colonial zeal for the common interest of the Empire, it will doubtless see more in the stubbornness of the Dutch and in the devotion with which the people of the Orange Free State sacrificed life, property, and independence in a cause which was not their own. The actual event was probably more beneficial to us than either the thorough defeat which our vanity deserved, or the easy and overwhelming triumph which it anticipated, would have been. The one might have broken up the Empire. The other might have led us into further exploits of the same kind, which could only have ended in {322} our final overthrow. The chastisement was serious enough to reform without destroying. The violent emotions produced by the war, and the distress consequent on its waste of life and treasure, roused the common people, whose attention had been diverted by conceptions of Imperial magnificence to other parts of the world, once more to the contemplation of their own affairs. Even before the end of the fighting the reaction had begun, and when the Imperialists were driven out of office in 1905, it was the despised and discredited Pro-Boer, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, who was at the head of their successors.