All of these elements find a place in the South African War. The policy of President Kruger, President Steyn and the Afrikander Bund, of Cape Colony, has been developing for years into a dangerous and combined effort for the creation of a United Dutch South Africa and the seizure of Cape Town--one of the chief stations of British commercial and maritime power. Mr. Chamberlain precipitated matters, so far as the Cape Colony Dutch were concerned, by a policy of firmness to which they were unaccustomed at the hands of the Colonial Office and which, cautious and conciliatory as it was, forced the hand of the Transvaal President before his general policy was quite matured. As the diplomatic negotiations proceeded and the war itself developed it became a struggle for Imperial unity as truly and fully as was the American Civil War. Two great Colonies of the Empire were threatened, the principles of equal right and equal liberty upon which its entire self-governing portions have been built up and maintained were spurned, and the feeling of unity which has latterly grown so amazingly amongst its various countries was openly flouted by the treatment of the Uitlanders and the attack upon Cape Colony and Natal. Backed by the undoubted ability of President Kruger, the sentiment of racial unity amongst the Dutch of all South Africa, the swords and science of European officers and experts, the immense sums drawn from the Uitlanders and possibly from Europe, the armaments prepared during a long term of years with skill and knowledge, the characteristics of a people admirably adapted through both knowledge and experience for warfare on South African soil, the Boer cry of "On to Durban" was really more menacing to British interests and conditions of unpreparedness than was the cry of the Parisian populace, in 1870, to the Kingdom of Prussia. A war with France might not have been nearly as difficult or as serious a matter to Great Britain under existing conditions as the war with the Boer Republics has turned out to be.