The raid made things awkward all round. For some time England had learnt with anxiety that arms were being freely imported into the Transvaal. After the raid it was impossible to make any expostulation, and from now onwards until the war the Uitlanders—like the Israelites of old—groaned under Kruger. Their plight was indeed a very hapless one. They had attempted by great patience and industry, and without protesting unduly when the Boers grew rich upon their labours, to win some legal recognition, and had failed. They had then planned for a rising with a view to winning their own freedom by their own arms. This, too, had failed. Finally, they had so embarrassed the mother-country that she could do nothing to help them. At last they decided that they would openly petition the Queen, and in a moment the whole quarrel was lifted from Pretoria to the throne of England. A conference took place between Sir Alfred Milner and President Kruger at Bloemfontein on May 30, 1899. It is doubtful whether the Boer President desired that any agreement should be come to; it is more probable that he was playing for time—at any rate no conclusion was reached, and later on Sir Alfred Milner brought it home, perhaps for the first time, to England that she must take action. “The case for intervention,” he said, “is overwhelming, the only attempted answer is that things will right themselves if left alone. But, in fact, the policy of leaving things alone has been tried for years, and it has led to their going from bad to worse. It is not true that this is owing to the raid. They were going from bad to worse before the raid. We were on the verge of war before the raid, and the Transvaal was on the verge of revolution....”[9] Still, the British Government struggled to maintain peace, and to come to some amicable arrangement. But the Boers, like the Amir of Afghanistan, did not believe England would ever face trouble. They were also contemptuous of the British soldier.