This estimate of Joubert's characteristics is recently confirmed by two sympathetic observers from within the Boer lines. "Mr. Davitt, in a letter from Kroonstad to the Dublin _Freeman's Journal_, declares that the Boers were not at all dismayed by the death of General Joubert, which they agreed was in no sense a misfortune. He was too merciful in his notions of warfare. Ladysmith could easily have been taken on more than one occasion had Joubert not vetoed the proposed assaults."[18] The second correspondent relates that General Joubert overruled the desire of the burghers to assault Ladysmith, saying "at a War Council that the city was not worth to the Boers the lives of 500 burghers." If Joubert really said that, he ought unquestionably to {p.198} have been at once relieved from command; but as the incident is preceded by the statement that "the burghers were confident of their ability to take it in a hand-to-hand fight, _notwithstanding that the English outnumbered them more than two to one_,"[19] the source of the correspondent's information is open to some question. [Footnote 18: London _Times_, June 25, 1900.] [Footnote 19: _Harper's Monthly Magazine_, July, 1900, p. 174.] To make war without running risks--not mere risk of personal danger, but of military failure--has been declared impossible by the highest authority. Yet such a temperament, betrayed in politics, being constitutional, will enter into all actions of life, and one is not surprised to read that "this characteristic of caution was the chief mark of Joubert's conduct in the field as a military commander. His idea of warfare was to act ever on the defensive." Let this be qualified so far as to say that his idea appears always to have been to act within limits of safety, to consider self-preservation--the preservation, that is, of his own forces--more important than the destruction of the enemy, and we have a view, not of Joubert only, but of his race, which goes {p.199} far to explain the failures at Ladysmith, Kimberley, and Mafeking, and likewise the inefficient action at that early period of the war when alone success was locally possible, and, if locally attained, might have even compassed an ultimate victory. If to this idea be linked that which is closely akin to it--of attaining results, not by superior dexterity in the use of means, but by subtlety and ambush--and we have the explanation both of the numerous artful traps into which British detachments were led, like game into the snare of the hunter, and yet also of the sure failure to achieve success in war, for the craft of the hunter is not the skill of the warrior.