It may be considered a matter of regret that the State did not undertake the annexation of Zululand, as it did the absorption of Indian tribes a century ago. Our brave but bitter enemies, the Sikhs, have become our most reliable soldiers in India. Similarly there was no personal hostility when war ceased between the Zulu and the English soldier; rather the reverse. They had received the elements of military organisation, and had shown themselves apt pupils in applying them. To have substituted for Panda’s discipline and training that of our own army under able and skilful officers, accustomed to make of native levies regiments more or less irregular but of the highest military value, would have been easy with our Eastern experience. A Zulu militia, well trained, well armed, and led by whites, would have conduced to the peace of South Africa as much as Sikhs, Beloochees, and Ghoorkas do to the preservation, by military means, of peace among the discordant elements, both national and theological, which go to make up our great Eastern satrapy. Such a force would have fought for brave leaders, and with them, as the hastily raised levies of the Mutiny fought for Fane, or Probyn, or Hodson. Such an army, created mainly for defensive, and not necessarily offensive, purposes, would have created a military peace. Fear of it would have kept turbulent and restless peoples in wholesome fear. Trained and led by British officers, it would have been the police of South Africa at the smallest possible cost to the English State. To have kept alive the military instinct of the Zulu, to have instilled into him the soldier’s habit of discipline and cleanliness, would have saved him. We have won South Africa purely and simply by the sword and so must we keep it. But we could keep it best--as we keep the peace in India--by not ignoring the military spirit of the people, but by showing the justice of our rule, and keeping alive the soldier feeling as a national police. Any other course is impossible with savage or semi-barbarous people. Nothing is despised more than a weakness which they translate as fear. It is a fatal day when a nation, whose history throughout is one of conquest, forgets how she has made the empire, and thinks to hold it by other means, such as by a popular opinion which it takes centuries to create and make good. To forget the traditions of the race is equally fatal. Our empire was never made by concessions; it was made by forcible possession, and that, as a general rule certainly, for the eventual benefit, as far as civilisation is concerned, of the people we have conquered. The neglect of this is at the bottom of the disastrous campaign that followed the destruction of the Zulu power.