The Law of Military Service appears to remain up to the present unmodified. Indeed, a recent decision in the newly established British High Court of the Transvaal has very rigidly construed a provision of the Gold Law, protecting burghers on commando from liability to pay license dues. The Court refuses to allow to Uitlanders the same privilege as that allowed to burghers in arms. The Uitlander, according to that decision, is liable to pay these arrears accruing during the war to the present British administration. IV.--PRINCIPLES OF IMPERIAL POLICY--OBSTACLES IN THE WAY OF THEIR BEING CARRIED OUT Before considering specific suggestions as to actual legislation required in the new Colonies, it is necessary to set clearly before us what are the objects to be aimed at by Imperial statesmen. Most of the errors of the past century of Imperial rule in South Africa are traceable to the fact that no steady and consistent policy has been adopted for any definite period. With every change of government in the United Kingdom the British policy in South Africa altered. As I have written elsewhere, it swung with bewildering inconsistency, according to whether an Imperialist or a Little Englander Government was in power, from an expansionist to a "retrenchment" policy. Alternately negrophilist and anti-Kaffir, alternately conciliatory to the Dutch and aggressively British. "Nothing more fixed than the certainty of Imperial change, unless, indeed, it were the cruelty of Imperial ingratitude." I shall take it, then, that consistency is the least we may expect as the result of the late war. The maintenance of the integrity of the world-wide Empire, plainly bound up with the retention of South Africa, involving the possession of the only secure sea-route to Australia and India; the upholding of the banner of European justice and humanity in Africa, the British portion of the mission of the European race the world over--to this end, the fusion of all strains of the European people in a new nationality to form a constituent part of the Empire--these I take to be the objects of Imperial statesmen in the United Kingdom and the Colonies, and of all loyal citizens of the Empire. Now, these principles being fixed, we have next to consider what are the dangers threatening the successful carrying out of a policy based on these principles.