“Some people assumed that the growth of the Zulu power in the neighbourhood of a British colony constituted such a danger that, in a common phrase, it had to be got rid of, and that, when a thing had to be done, it was idle and inconvenient to examine too closely into the pretexts which were set up. And this was summed up in a phrase which is used more than once by the High Commissioner, and had obtained currency in what he might call the light literature of politics. We might be told to obey our ‘instincts of self-preservation.’ No doubt the instinct of self-preservation was one of the most necessary of our instincts. But it was one of those which we had in common with the lowest brute—one of those which we are most frequently called on to keep in order. It was in obedience to the ‘instinct of self-preservation’ that a coward ran away in battle, that a burglar murdered a policeman, or, what was more to our present purpose, that a nervous woman jumped out of a carriage lest she should be upset; or that one man in a fright fired at another who, he thought, meant to do him an injury, though he had not yet shown any sign of an intention of doing so. The soldiers who went down in the _Birkenhead_—what should we have thought of them if, instead of standing in their ranks to be drowned, they had pushed the women and children into the hold and saved themselves? A reasonable determination to do that which our safety requires, so far as it is consistent with our duty to others, is the duty and interest of every man. To evade an appeal to the claims of reason and justice, by a clamorous allegation of our animal instinct, is to abdicate our privileges as men, and to revert to brutality.” CHAPTER XII. THE ULTIMATUM, DECLARATION OF WAR, AND COMMENCEMENT OF CAMPAIGN. On December 11th the boundary award was delivered to the Zulus by four gentlemen selected for the purpose, who, by previous arrangement, met the king’s envoys at the Lower Tugela Drift. The award itself, as we already know, was in favour of the Zulus; nevertheless it is impossible to read the terms in which it was given without feeling that it was reluctantly done. It is fenced in with warnings to the Zulus against transgressing the limits assigned to them, without a word assuring them that _their_ rights also shall in future be respected; and, while touching on _Zulu_ aggressions on _Boers_ in the late disputed territory, it says nothing of those committed _by_ Boers. But perhaps the most remarkable phrase in the whole award is that in which Sir Bartle Frere gives the Zulus to understand that _they_ will have to pay the compensation due to the ejected Transvaal farmers, while he entirely ignores all that can be said on the other side of injuries to property and person inflicted on Zulus in the disputed territory (of which the Blue-books contain ample proof), not to speak of the rights and advantages so long withheld from them, and now decided to be their due.