The mobilisation of the burghers, which had been secretly on foot for some time, was forthwith carried on apace, and later--much too tardily--British patience gave way, and troops were despatched to South Africa. Then followed, on the 9th of October, an insulting ultimatum from President Kruger, demanding the immediate withdrawal of British troops from the Transvaal border, and an assurance that no more should be landed. In default of this assurance, he declared that at 5 P.M. on the 11th of October a state of war would exist. To such an ultimatum only one answer was possible. British troops at once started for the Cape. Naturally the whole of Great Britain was in a state of turmoil, and the vast multitude of people--"the men in the street," so to say--were inclined to express surprise that the question of two years' difference in the terms of obtaining the franchise should have been made into a _casus belli_. To all thinking men it was patent, however, that the quibble about the franchise was merely a Boer _ruse_ to obtain time for the carrying out of a long-concerted scheme for the elimination of the British from the Cape to the Zambezi. These were aware that the military methods of the Transvaal were under process of reorganisation, and indeed had been readjusted gradually ever since 1896, and that the simple methods of 1881 had been superseded by newer and more modern principles of warfare. It was known that great additions had been made to the warlike resources of the Republic, and that the President of the Free State was, if anything, more bitter than Mr. Kruger in his hatred of Great Britain and all things British, and that the two Republics would make common cause with each other against a mutual enemy. It was also known that foreign experts were imported, and foreign stocks of war material--material of the newest and most expensive kind--were prepared in anticipation of war, and that even such a thing as tactical instruction--a thing hitherto ignored among the Transvaalers--had been acquired from accomplished German sources, and all this for one sole purpose--war with Great Britain. In order that there may be no doubt that the Boers were completely prepared and determined to fight long before the insolent Ultimatum was published, it is desirable to read a letter which appeared in the _Times_ of the 14th of October 1899. This epistle, which was appropriately headed "Boer Ignorance," emanated from a Dutch writer, whose address was in a well-known part of Cape Colony. It runs:--