This was a period of confidence on the part of the British, mitigated only by occasional furtive suggestions of misgiving. It was almost universally held throughout the British Empire that the divisions on the way would be equal to the demands upon them. The arrival of Sir Redvers Buller to take supreme command was to be a signal for the display of imperial power--the auspicious beginning of the speedy end. It was reasonable that spectators not jealous of the British, and inclined to some form of hatefulness towards them, should accept the information and conclusions of the intelligence of the people of the dominant British Island. The general judgment of the world outside the British Empire--excepting the specialists in detailed knowledge who had made close studies of the shifting situation with growing apprehension of its seriousness, political as well as military--was that the war was to be charged to the account of the land greed of Englishmen, and their persecution of the religious and Republican Boers instead of to the fact that the Transvaal Republicans made up one barbary state, and the alleged Orange Free State another, in a lesser degree wanting in civility, and that these allies were resolute and aggressive in their determination to enslave both the original occupants of the soil and those who had within a few years developed its exceedingly great riches, and the worth to the world of the astounding revelation of the most precious stones and metals. When we form the intimate acquaintance of the facts we find the friction between the strangely mixed races of the Transvaal was not caused by British expansionists, or occasioned by British aggression, but by the stolid abominable ambition of the Boer race--the same for whom Great Britain had broken the Zulu power in a war that was most expensive in blood and money. The trouble in Africa did not grow from the anxiety of the British for extensions of territory or of privileges. The Boers held all others to be according to the Gospel their inferiors, and the protestation of the British Government that there should be for the sake of peace a very moderate reform amounting to the insertion of an admixture of justice, according to all testimony denied disdainfully, in the administration of the laws, customs and habits of the caste of burghers. [Sidenote: Two Popular Illusions]