s Government to return such an answer before or upon
Wednesday, October 11th, 1899, not later than five o'clock p.m.,
and it desires further to add that, in the event of unexpectedly
no satisfactory answer being received by it within that interval,
it will with great regret be compelled to regard the action of
Her Majesty's Government as a formal declaration of war, and will
not hold itself responsible for the consequences thereof, and
that in the event of any further movements of troops taking place
within the above-mentioned time in the nearer directions of our
borders, the Government will be compelled to regard that also as
a formal declaration of war.

"I have, etc.,
"F. W. REITZ, _State Secretary_."[178]

[Footnote 178: C. 9,530.]

[Sidenote: An appeal to Afrikanders.]

The war had come; and come in the almost incredible form of a naked
assertion of the intention of the South African Republic to oust Great
Britain from its position of paramount Power in South Africa. And the
declaration of war,[179] published two days later by President Steyn,
was no less definite. It referred to Great Britain's "unfounded claim
to paramountcy for the whole of South Africa, and thus also over this
State," and exhorted the burghers of the Free State to "stand up as
one man against the oppressor and violator of right." Even greater
frankness characterised the appeal to "Free Staters and Brother
Afrikanders" issued by Mr. Reitz. In this document[180] not only was
the entire Dutch population of South Africa invited to rid themselves,
by force of arms, of British supremacy, but the statement of the Boer
case took the form of an impeachment that covered the whole period of
British administration. Great Britain--

[Footnote 179: Cd. 43.]

[Footnote 180: _Ibid._]

"has, ever since the birth of our nation, been the oppressor of
the Afrikander and the native alike.

"From Slagter's Nek to Laing's Nek, from the Pretoria Convention
to the Bloemfontein Conference--they have ever been the
treaty-breakers and robbers. The diamond fields of Kimberley and
the beautiful land of Natal were robbed from us, and now they
want the gold-fields of the Witwatersrand.

"Where is Waterboer to-day? He who had to be defended against the
Free State is to-day without an inch of ground. Where lies