From that point of view, all the argument seems to be on the Boers' side. But there is another point of view. These diamond searchers had come in in a perfectly peaceful way. They brought much wealth to the Boer Government which taxed them very severely, and really did not give them fair and decent treatment. The result was the breaking out, in 1899, of the great Boer War which went for a while so hardly for Great Britain that it looked at one moment as if her armies might be forced right back to the sea. Not only the Transvaal Boers but those of the Free State, and of Natal, joined together. Fortunately for Great Britain, Cape Colony, where the British element was largest, stood firmly for the Empire. At length the fortune of war turned, as more and more British troops arrived from oversea. By 1903 it was ended: the Boers surrendered at discretion. And then was done one of the noblest and most generous and most courageous acts that the whole of this Greatest Story is able to show in the way of the treatment of a vanquished people by the victors: a very large part of the independent rule for which the vanquished foe had been fighting was voluntarily given to him. It was a tremendous experiment--tremendous, in the most literal sense of the word; {223} that is to say, an experiment to be feared. It seemed an immense risk to take--thus to rely on the sense of gratitude of a beaten foe. But that foe showed himself as generous in acceptance of the experiment as Great Britain in making it. He proved his gratitude by devoted service for the Empire in the Great War. It was a tremendous experiment, wonderfully justified. [Sidenote: The division of Africa] It is not needful, for the purposes of this story, to go over in detail the possessions, and their boundaries, of the various white nations in Africa. The French have a huge area in the north-west, reaching right down from Algeria to a junction with the Congo River. The Belgian Congo lies between that French area and British Rhodesia, which joins the other British colonies farther south. Great Britain has Nigeria on the west coast and British East Africa on the east. Portugal has Angola on the one side and Mozambique on the other, with the large island of Madagascar, which is French, lying off it. Abyssinia, easterly of the Sudan and bounded on the east again by the British and the Italian Somalilands, is by far the greatest and most interesting of the African countries still in the possession of a coloured race. Even Morocco, just westerly of Algiers, is now under French protection, and on either side of it lies a territory that is under Spain.