nvolved England and South Africa
in a year and a half of costly, destructive, and unnecessary war.

CHAPTER X

THE DISARMAMENT OF THE DUTCH POPULATION

The new year (1901) opened with a full revelation of the magnitude of
the task which lay before the Imperial troops. Lord Roberts had
frankly recognised that the destruction of the Governments and
organised armies of the Republics would be followed by the more
difficult and lengthy task of disarming the entire Boer population
within their borders.

"Recent events have convinced me," he wrote from Pretoria on
October 10th, 1900, "that the permanent tranquillity of the
Orange River Colony and Transvaal is dependent on the complete
disarmament of the inhabitants; and, though the extent of the
country to be visited, and the ease with which guns, rifles, and
ammunition can be hidden, will render the task a difficult one,
its accomplishment is only a matter of time and patience."

That this task proved altogether more lengthy and more arduous than
Lord Roberts at this time expected, was due mainly, though not
exclusively, to the same cause as that which had placed the British
army in a position of such grave disadvantage at the outbreak of the
war--the play of party politics in England. Lord Roberts had foreseen
that the process of disarming the Boers would be slow and difficult;
but he had not anticipated that the Imperial troops would be hindered
in the accomplishment of this task by the political action of the
friends of the Boers in England, or that the public utterances of
prominent members of the Liberal Opposition would re-act with such
dangerous effects upon the Afrikander nationalists that, after more
than a year of successful military operations, the process of
disarmament would have to be applied to the Cape Colony as well as to
the territories of the late Republics.

Looking back to the year 1900, with the events of the intervening
period before us, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the
decision of the Boer leaders to continue the struggle was determined
by political, and not by military considerations. More than one
circumstance points to the fact that both the Boer generals and the
civilian members of the Executives of the late Republics recognised
that their position was practically hopeless from a military point of
view.[234] And while Louis Botha, the Commandant-General of the
Transvaal, urged his