With the intervention of France the war enters on a new phase. Thenceforward England had to deal with more powerful enemies than the Americans. The war had lasted for three years and the rebellion was not crushed. Was it too much for England to expect that she would subdue a people of her own stock, as the Americans were then, separated from her by 3,000 miles of sea, and spread over a vast and difficult country? Had she trusted to her navy, as Barrington and others desired, shut the American ports, and held the towns on the coast and the navigable rivers, the insurgents might possibly have been driven to submission without any severe struggle. Conquest by land was decided on. Was Chatham right in declaring in May, 1777, that England could not conquer the Americans? Six months later a capable French officer serving in their army wrote to the French minister of war that, unless his country declared war against England, the Americans would fail to obtain independence; so little enthusiasm for the cause was there among them, so keenly did they feel the privations of the war.[132] In our war in South Africa of 1899-1902 the Boers showed themselves better soldiers than the Americans, and were not less brave; they were akin to us in race, and their country was at least as difficult as America. In both wars our well-drilled troops constantly found their previous training useless or worse; in both we received loyal support from numerous colonials on the spot. While improved means of transport brought South Africa far nearer to us than America was in the eighteenth century, the Boers were better prepared for war than the Americans, and were a more martial people. Yet England conquered them. So far, then, as the Americans alone were concerned, Chatham's assertion must be denied. [Sidenote: _ENGLAND'S CONDUCT OF THE WAR._]