“In answer to an inquiry with respect thereto, addressed to His Excellency, the High Commissioner, this government received, to its great astonishment, in answer a veiled insinuation that from the side of the republic an attack was being made on Her Majesty’s colonies, and, at the same time, a mysterious reference to possibilities whereby this government was strengthened in its suspicion that the independence of this republic was being threatened. “As a defensive measure this government was, therefore, obliged to send a portion of the burghers of this republic in order to offer requisite resistance to similar possibilities.” It will be seen from this correspondence that the British government had failed to send the formulation of “its own proposals for a final settlement” promised in the note of September 25, and that active preparations for war, even to the mobilization of troops, had been going on—on both sides—for some weeks. On the 7th of August, forty-nine days before the British cabinet engaged to prolong friendly diplomatic correspondence on the subjects at issue by promising a later dispatch containing its own proposals for a final settlement, Mr. Chamberlain delivered a speech in the House of Commons which has become historic—a speech which signified past all possibility of mistake that at that early date war was a foregone conclusion. After deprecating the use of the word “war” unless it were absolutely necessary, he went on to say: “The government had stated that they recognized the grievances under which their subjects in Africa were laboring. They had stated that they found those grievances not only in themselves a serious cause for interposition, but a source of danger to the whole of South Africa. “They (the government) said that their predominance, which both sides of the House had constantly asserted, was menaced by the action of the Transvaal government in refusing the redress of grievances, and in refusing any consideration of the requests hitherto put in the most moderate language of the suzerain power. They said that that was a state of things which could not be long tolerated. They had said: ‘We have put our hands to the plow and we will not turn back,’ and with that statement I propose to rest content.” Language could not be plainer. It was the British government’s demand that the South African Republic must accept British control of her internal affairs—of affairs so purely domestic as the franchise and the representation of her citizens—or fight. It is not a little remarkable in this connection that Germany, France, the United States of America and other powerful nations whose subjects were mingled with the English in that vast foreign population in the Transvaal, heard of no grievances inflicted on their subjects by the South African Republic sufficient to call forth even a friendly diplomatic representation and request for redress.