Hold ye the Faith--the Faith our fathers sealed us; Whoring not with visions--overwise and overstale. Except ye pay the Lord Single heart and single sword, Of your children in their bondage shall he ask them treble-tale! RUDYARD KIPLING. The learned German, Professor Elberfeld, has told the world, in sentences of portentous length and complication, that "the petty trader's instincts which form the most typical characteristic of the British race" came notably to the fore in our treatment of the German prisoners of war who were held under military surveillance in the British ports which they had garrisoned. The learned professor notes with bitter contempt that no wines, spirits, cigars, or "other customary delicacies" were supplied to our prisoners, and that the German officers received very little more than the rations served to their men. The professor makes no mention of one or two other pertinent facts in this connection; as, for example, that none of these "customary delicacies" were supplied to the British troops. We may endure his reproaches with the more fortitude, I think, when we remember that the German Government absolutely ignored our invitation to send weekly shipments of supplies under a white flag for the towns they had garrisoned on British soil. It is known that the officers in command of the German forces in England had previously maintained a very lavish and luxurious scale of living; in the same way that, since the invasion of England, extravagance was said to have reached unparallelled heights in Germany itself. But the British Government which had reached depletion of our own supplies, by assisting our prisoners to maintain a luxurious scale of living while held as hostages, would certainly have forfeited the confidence of the public, and justly so. Upon the whole, it is safe to say that German sneers at British parsimony and Puritanism may fairly be accepted as tribute, and, as such, need in no sense be resented. As soon as we received Germany's cynical reply to Britain's demand for a complete withdrawal of all the invasion claims, it became evident that the war was to be a prolonged and bitter one, and that no further purpose could be served by the original British plan of campaign, which, as its object had been the freeing of our own soil, had been based on the assumption that the defeat and capture of the invader's forces would be sufficient. Troops had to be despatched at once to South Africa, where German overlordship had aroused the combined opposition of the Boers and the British. This opposition burst at once into open hostility immediately the news of England's declaration of war reached South Africa. While the Boers and the British, united in a common cause, were carrying war into German Southwest Africa, troops from German East Africa were said to have landed in Delagoa Bay, and to be advancing southward.