interposition of the United States, or some other providential aid, would secure the abrogation of that British suzerainty which was the bane of his life and the chief apparent element in preventing the supremacy in South Africa of the Dutch race in general and the Transvaal Republic in particular. [Sidenote: Chamberlain's Strong Policy] But he knew not Mr. Chamberlain or the changed conditions of British thought. He did not realize that the days of indifference to the Colonies had passed away, and that the Colonial Office had become one of the greatest posts in the British Government and had been deliberately selected by one of the most ambitious and able of modern statesmen as a suitable field for achievement and labor. He had no idea that the retention and extension of British territory was no longer a party question, and that the days of Granville at the Foreign Office had as completely passed away as had those of Derby at the Colonial Office. His very knowledge of British political life and its see-saw system was turned into a source of error through the rapid developments of an epoch-making decade. It must have been a shock to him to find that an insult to the Imperial Government in the form of his ultimatum was looked upon as an insult to a dozen other British Governments throughout the world, and that the invasion of the soil of Natal and Cape Colony was regarded as an assault upon the interests of Canada and Australia as well as of Great Britain. The days of weakness had indeed departed, and despite all the conciliatory slowness and caution of Mr. Chamberlain during weary months of controversy the iron hand was concealed beneath the glove of velvet and there was nowhere a thought of surrendering that right of suzerainty which preserved and ensured British supremacy in South Africa. The inevitable war has now come--the struggle which the Gladstone Government shrank from in days when the Boer Power was weak, and which Sir George Grey spoke of in its wider sense when he declared, in 1858, after the abandonment of the Orange River State, that "many questions might arise, in which it might be very doubtful which of the two Governments the great mass of the Dutch population (in Cape Colony) would obey." [Sidenote: Uitlander's Many Grievances]