How little they knew of the actual situation in South Africa, and of the real character of the Boers may be seen from what happened on September 15th. On this day a meeting was held at Manchester to protest against the mere idea of England having to make war upon the Transvaal. Lord (then Mr.) Courtney "hailed with satisfaction" the British despatch of September 8th, which, having been published in the Continental papers on the 13th, had appeared a day later (14th) in those of Great Britain. "It was a rebuke to the fire-eaters," he said, "and a rebuke most of all to one whom I must designate as a lost man, a lost mind--I mean Sir Alfred Milner." And Mr. John Morley, like Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, was convinced that there was no need of any preparations for war; the Transvaal Government "could not withdraw from the five years' franchise." The day on which these words were uttered was the day on which the note containing President Krüger's determination to "withdraw" from the five years' franchise, and his refusal even to consider the British offer of September 8th--hailed with satisfaction by his old ally, Lord Courtney--was handed to Sir William Greene. CHAPTER VI THE ULTIMATUM The British people were destined to pay a heavy penalty for the ignorance and irresolution that caused them to withhold, from June to September, the mandate without which the Government was unable to prepare for war. What that penalty was will be made sufficiently clear when we come to consider the position of grave disadvantage in which the British forces designated for the South African campaign were placed at the outbreak of the war. For the moment it is enough to notice that, just as the real source of the military weakness of England in the war was the fact that only a very small proportion of her adult male population had received an elementary training in arms, so the futility of her peace strategy must be traced to the general ignorance of the bitter hatred with which British supremacy was regarded, not only by the Boers, but also by the Dutch subjects of the Crown in the Cape Colony and Natal. In a world-wide and composite State such as the British Empire, it is, of course, natural that the people of one component part should be unfamiliar, in a greater or lesser degree, with the conditions of any other part. What makes this mutual unfamiliarity dangerous is the circumstance that the control of the foreign relations, and of the effective military and naval forces, of the Empire as a whole, remains exclusively in the hands of the people of one part--the United Kingdom. In the absence of any administrative body in which the over-sea Britains are represented, the power, thus possessed, of moulding the destiny of any one province of the Empire lays upon the island people the duty of informing themselves adequately upon the circumstances and conditions of all its component parts. It is obvious that the likelihood of this duty being