So it might have been had there been greater firmness and more tact displayed after he left. But there was friction between the British and the Dutch settlers, who had refused to remain under our rule long years before. In 1845, three companies of the 91st and some Cape Mounted Rifles defeated 500 Boers, who fled after making but a faint resistance. Collision again occurred in 1848 at Boomplatz, the second of a series of small conflicts which one by one have sought to wrest from the Boers the territories they had conquered and in part reclaimed. The tendency throughout had been to treat them as only another sort of semi-barbarous occupant, to be got rid of when their land was wanted by others. In this skirmish were engaged some companies of the 45th, 91st, and Rifle Brigade, with two squadrons and two guns, and they routed a Boer command, estimated at 1000 strong, though strongly entrenched behind breastworks of piled stones. There was but little loss on either side, and it is said that a drummer of the 91st, tired of the long waiting, while the men were lying down firing, himself beat the charge, and the men went in with cheers, and the enemy fled without an effort to rally. Then they retired behind the Vaal to form the Transvaal Republic, and in 1851 the Orange River Territory, which had been annexed by us in 1848, was relinquished to form the “Orange Free State.” But now for reasons that the future historian will wonder at, we annexed the Transvaal. Our past experience of the Boer had taught us nothing. Anyone who will read the Parliamentary Blue Book and Colonel Brackenbury’s despatches must see that war was inevitable. Yet, with a fair knowledge of what Boers were, and with an idea of superiority which was to have a rude awakening, we entered into a serious war with a light heart and with a force that was insufficient to meet even a Zulu impi. The war is remarkable in every way, primarily as the first instance, since the firearm was introduced, in which regular soldiers came under careful, well-directed, aimed, rifle fire, and were in every case beaten. The only parallel instance is that of the war of American Independence. There also a people goaded into fighting by wrong were victorious; and succeeded both because the justice of their cause strengthened their moral fibre, and their guerilla warfare, for it was often little else, was in many cases accompanied by careful shooting. But the difference in the nature of the weapons at the end of the eighteenth and that of the nineteenth century is so great as to mark, by the heavy loss the defeated troops sustained, the terrible nature of modern rifle fire when carefully directed.