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which falls back on its barbaric nature and gives it temporary dominion. Its loss of perspective, inability to test evidence, reversal of normal standards of value, make it a prey to the crudest dupery and bring it to a state of mind which is as humorous as it is pitiful.

There is no plainer evidence of the derationalizing power of the war-spirit than the infantile vanity which it sustains in contradiction of most certain facts. Let me illustrate. A little before the outbreak of war, when it was desirable to show that the Boers were but a small minority of the population in the Transvaal, they were commonly set down at some sixty thousand men, women, and children: the smallness of this number served to enhance the enormity of the tyranny they were held to exercise, while it stimulated interference by making coercion seem easy. After the outbreak, when things went badly with us, the same mob-mind which had swallowed the earlier figures found no difficulty whatever in believing that these Boers, with the Free Staters and rebels, had a force in the field amounting to eighty thousand, or even a hundred thousand adult males. In point of fact, history is likely to arrive at the conclusion that we despatched nearly a quarter of a million men against a foe which never