ng suggestion, but with the concurrence
of General Penn Symons, that the defending force was divided, and a
detachment of between three and four thousand sent to Dundee, about
forty miles from the main body, which remained under General Sir George
White at Ladysmith. General Symons underrated the power of the invaders,
but it is hard to criticise an error of judgment which has been so
nobly atoned and so tragically paid for. At the time, then, which our
political narrative has reached, the time of suspense which followed the
dispatch of the Cabinet message of September 8th, the military situation
had ceased to be desperate, but was still precarious. Twenty-two
thousand regular troops were on the spot who might hope to be reinforced
by some ten thousand colonials, but these forces had to cover a great
frontier, the attitude of Cape Colony was by no means whole-hearted and
might become hostile, while the black population might conceivably throw
in its weight against us. Only half the regulars could be spared to
defend Natal, and no reinforcements could reach them in less than a
month from the outbreak of hostilities. If Mr. Chamberlain was really
playing a game of bluff, it must be confessed that he was bluffing from
a very weak hand.

For purposes of comparison we may give some idea of the forces which
Mr. Kruger and Mr. Steyn could put in the field, for by this time it was
evident that the Orange Free State, with which we had had no shadow of
a dispute, was going, in a way which some would call wanton and some
chivalrous, to throw in its weight against us. The general press
estimate of the forces of the two republics varied from 25,000 to 35,000
men. Mr. J. B. Robinson, a personal friend of President Kruger's and
a man who had spent much of his life among the Boers, considered the
latter estimate to be too high. The calculation had no assured basis to
start from. A very scattered and isolated population, among whom large
families were the rule, is a most difficult thing to estimate. Some
reckoned from the supposed natural increase during eighteen years, but
the figure given at that date was itself an assumption. Others took
their calculation from the number of voters in the last presidential
election: but no one could tell how many abstentions there had been,
and the fighting age is five years earlier than the voting age in the
republics. We recognise now that all calculations were far below the
true figure. It is proba