When Sir Theophilus Shepstone went up to Pretoria it was, ostensibly, merely to advise the President and Volksraad of the Transvaal Republic as to the best means of extricating themselves and the country from the difficulties into which they were plunged, and with the expressed intention of endeavouring to produce a peaceful settlement with Sikukuni, which should protect him and his people for the future from the tyranny of the Boers. Up to the last the notion that there was any intention of forcibly annexing the country was indignantly repudiated by the members of the expedition, although their chief meanwhile was in possession of his commission as Administrator of the British Government in the Transvaal. There were some who suspected that there was more in the movement than was confessed to by those concerned. It was argued that, were Sir Theophilus Shepstone’s visit of a purely friendly nature, no armed force would have been sent to escort him, as he was going, not into a savage country, but into one which, at all events, professed to have a civilised government and an educated class. The unsettled state of feeling amongst the Boers was pleaded in answer to this argument, but was commonly met by the suggestion that if, under the circumstances, the armed force of mounted police which accompanied the important visitor might be looked upon as a justifiable precaution, yet the possible danger to strangers from the violence of a few lawless men in a country in which the government was not strong enough to keep them in check, was not great enough to account for the fact that a regiment of British infantry was hastily moved up to Newcastle, from whence they could speedily be summoned into the Transvaal. The presence of a Zulu army upon the other border, where it lay quiet and inoffensive for weeks during Sir Theophilus Shepstone’s proceedings in the Transvaal, was naturally looked upon as a suspicious circumstance. There can be little doubt that—whether or no Cetshwayo obeyed a hint from his old friend the Secretary for Native Affairs, and sent his army to support him, and to overawe the Boers by a warlike demonstration—the Zulus were present in a spirit, however inimical to the Boers, entirely friendly to the English. The mere fact that the army lay there so long in harmless repose, and dispersed promptly and quietly _immediately_ upon receiving orders to do so from Sir Theophilus Shepstone, proves that, at all events, they and their king thought that they were carrying out his wishes. The feeling expressed at the time by a British officer,[57] in speaking of this Zulu army, and recommending that it should be dispersed, that “it were better the little band of Englishmen (including, of course, himself) should fall by the hand of the Boers than that aught should be done by the former to bring about a war of races,” can hardly have been shared by Sir Theophilus Shepstone himself, or the message to