e Government offered a second contingent.
Already it was becoming clear that there would be no 'Christmas dinner
in Pretoria.' Mafeking, Kimberley, and Ladysmith were besieged, and
the British were retiring in Natal. Six weeks passed before the
British Government accepted. This time the Canadian authorities
decided to send a regiment of Mounted Rifles and three batteries of
artillery. Later a battalion of infantry was raised to garrison
Halifax and thus release the Leinster regiment for the front, {191}
while Lord Strathcona provided the funds to send the Strathcona Horse.
In the last year of the war five regiments of Mounted Rifles and a
Constabulary Force, which saw active service, were recruited. All
told, over seven thousand Canadians went to South Africa.

The course of the war was followed with intense interest in Canada.
Alike in the anxious days of December, the black week of Stormberg,
Magersfontein, and Tugela, and in the joyful reaction of the relief of
Kimberley and Ladysmith and Mafeking and the victory of Paardeberg,
Canadians felt themselves a part of the moving scene. Perhaps the part
taken by their own small force was seen out of perspective; but with
all due discount for the patriotic exaggeration of Canadian newspaper
correspondents and for the generosity of Lord Roberts's high-flown
praise, the people of Canada believed that they had good reason to feel
more than proud of their representatives on the veldts of Africa.
After Zand River and Doornkop, Paardeberg and Mafeking, it was plain
that the Canadian soldier could hold his own on the field of battle.
In the words of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, replying to an attack made by Mr
Bourassa:

When we heard that our volunteers had justified fully the confidence
placed in them, that they had {192} charged like veterans, that their
conduct was heroic and had won for them the encomiums of the
Commander-in-Chief and the unstinted admiration of their comrades, who
had faced death upon a hundred battlefields in all parts of the world,
is there a man whose bosom did not swell with pride, the noblest of all
pride, that pride of pure patriotism, the pride of the consciousness of
our rising strength, the pride of the consciousness that on that day it
had been revealed to the world that a new power had arisen in the west?
Nor is that all. The work of union and harmony between the chief races
of this country is not yet complete.... But there is no bond of union