At home the classes were groaning over the collapse of their most remunerative investments, and the masses writhing under a fall of wages, which, in many trades, amounted to fifty per cent. To complete the popular feeling of depression, it was plain that the Government were fast drifting into another Kaffir War. On the 3rd of February, 1879, in fact, it was officially announced that hostilities with the Zulus had begun. There is no difficulty in understanding the causes of the Zulu War. The Zulu king (Cetewayo) had ever been a staunch ally of England. But he had a blood-feud with the Boers of the Transvaal, and he claimed part of their territory as having been originally stolen by them from his race. When England in an evil moment annexed the Transvaal, she found that she took over with it the quarrel of the Boers with the Zulus. Cetewayo pressed his claims all the more confidently that a friendly Power now held the land which had been taken from him. In every colony there is a clique of land-speculators, who also, as a rule, form the War Party, and, by a singular coincidence, net most of the profits that are to be derived from a colonial war waged at the expense of the British taxpayer. This Party in Natal ridiculed the notion of giving Cetewayo his land. They also stirred up a war panic, vowing that the Zulus were only waiting for a favourable opportunity to pounce upon Natal and exterminate the Europeans. Sir Bartle Frere--“a prancing pro-consul,” as Sir William Harcourt called him--was High Commissioner at the Cape, and the Commander-in-Chief of the Forces there was Lord Chelmsford. A more ominous combination could hardly be imagined. Sir Bartle Frere even in India had been a hot annexationist. He had the restless brain to devise schemes of conquest, whilst his military colleague had neither the brain nor nerve to carry them out. The Blue-books indicate that Sir Bartle Frere had been preparing beforehand a grand project of conquest in South Africa.[141] Unfortunately, Sir M. Hicks-Beach was not sharp enough to detect and blight this scheme in the bud, and it is doubtful if he even suspected its existence till he was galvanised into vigilance by the startling ultimatum which Sir Bartle Frere suddenly sent to the Zulu king. The award of the British Boundary Commissioners on the dispute between the Zulus and the Boers had been in favour of the Zulus. It was given in June, 1878. Yet it had been kept back by Sir Bartle Frere, apparently to stimulate the War Party among the Zulus with the provocation of delay. Then when it was communicated to King Cetewayo, there was tacked on to it an irrelevant and menacing demand that King Cetewayo should immediately disband his whole army. “To make the case our own,” wrote Lord Blachford, one of the highest living authorities on Colonial Policy, “it is as if the Emperor of Germany, in concluding with us a Treaty of Commerce, suddenly annexed a notice that he would make war on us in six weeks