atal, 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. 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 probable, however, that the information of the
British Intelligence Department was not far wrong. No branch of the
British Service has come better out of a very severe ordeal than this
one, and its report before the war is so accurate, alike in facts and in
forecast, as to be quite prophetic.

According to this the fighting strength of the Transvaal alone was
32,000 men, and of the Orange Free State 22,000. With mercenaries and
rebels from the colonies they would amount to 60,000, while a
considerable rising of the Cape Dutch would bring them up to 100,000.
Our actual male prisoners now amount to 42,000, and we can account for
10,000 casualties, so that, allowing another 10,000 for the burghers at
large, the Boer force, excluding a great number of Cape rebels, would
reach 62,000. Of the quality of this large force there is no need to
speak. The men were brave, hardy, and fired with a strange religious
enthusiasm. They were all of the seventeenth century, except their
rifles. Mounted upon their hardy little ponies, they possessed a
mobility which practically doubled their numbers and made it an
impossibility ever to outflank them. As marksmen they are supreme. Add
to this that they had the advantage of acting upon internal lines