The fact was that gradually, very gradually, the eyes of the Boers were being opened, though they still tried to persuade themselves that Lord Roberts' presence in the capital of the Free State had no decisive effect on the game of war. They began to look anxiously towards the Continental Powers, who, they had been led to believe, were in sympathy with them, and to wonder when some intervention would save them from the doom they had brought on themselves. In one respect they were beginning to see clearly and to understand, that the great ideal of sweeping the British into the sea was a chimera, and that they must limit their aim to retaining their own freedom, the sole one that could be indulged in and clung to with any shadow of success. The Dutchmen still hoped against hope for victory, but their scorn for the British was fast dying a natural death. Our repeated fights, had they served no other purpose, succeeded in educating those who had dared to flout us, and after the capture of Cronje the effect of the somewhat brusque lesson was very conspicuous. Before the battle of Elandslaagte, a resident of Cape Town indulged in argument with an obstinate Boer in terms somewhat similar to these:-- "We are going to send 50,000 or 60,000 troops into the field." "They will be all shot!" he bragged. "We shall send another 50,000 or 60,000." "They, too, will all be shot!" he repeated. "We shall send more." "Almighty! am I to keep on shooting the Englishman all my life!" sighed the Dutchman, with his best air of braggadocio. Such bumptiousness was not confined to himself. All his compatriots started on the campaign with identical bombast, for they took their cue from the attitude of those Continental nations with which they had lately become associated. Our neighbours across the Channel had found it convenient to persuade themselves we were a decadent race, that the Old Country was played out and her children effete. As with the empires of Xerxes, Alexander, Augustus, so with that of Victoria, they said to themselves; and since the wish is father to the thought, the idea was rapidly propagated that Great Britain was fast becoming a second-rate Power.