ucceeded General Wolseley as governor of Natal and high commissioner
for south-east Africa, had been so little prepared for this, that at the
end of August he had recommended a reduction of the Transvaal
garrisons,(20) and even now he thought the case so little serious that he
contented himself (December 4) with ordering four companies to march for
the Transvaal. Then he and Lanyon began to get alarmed, and with good
reason. The whole country, except three or four beleaguered British posts,
fell into the hands of the Boers.

The pleas for failure to take measures to conciliate the Boers in the
interval between Frere's recall and the outbreak, were that Sir Hercules
Robinson had not arrived;(21) that confederation was not yet wholly given
up; that resistance to annexation was said to be abating; that time was in
our favour; that the one thing indispensable to conciliate the Boers was a
railway to Delagoa Bay; that this needed a treaty, and we hoped soon to
get Portugal to ratify a treaty, and then we might tell the Boers that we
should soon make a survey, with a view at some early date to proceed with
the project, and thus all would in the end come right. So a fresh page was
turned in the story of loitering unwisdom.

IV

On December 6, Mr. Brand, the sagacious president of the Orange Free
State, sent a message of anxious warning to the acting governor at Cape
Town, urging that means should be devised to avert an imminent collision.
That message, which might possibly have wakened up the colonial office to
the real state of the case, did not reach London until December 30.
Excuses for this fatal delay were abundant: a wire was broken; the
governor did not think himself concerned with Transvaal affairs; he sent
the message on to the general, supposing that the general would send it on
home; and so forth. For a whole string of the very best reasons in the
world the message that (M15) might have prevented the outbreak, arrived
through the slow post at Whitehall just eleven days after the outbreak had
begun. Members of the legislature at the Cape urged the British government
to send a special commissioner to inquire and report. The policy of giving
consideration to the counsels of the Cape legislature had usually been
pursued by the wiser heads concerned in South African affairs, and when
the counsels of the chief of the Free State were urgent in the same
direction, their weight should perhaps have been decisive. Lord