Should Dutch ideas or English ideas of government prevail throughout that huge country?
The one means freedom for a single race, the other means equal rights to all white men beneath one common law.

What each means to the coloured races let history declare.

This was the main issue to be determined from the instant that the clock struck five upon the afternoon of Wednesday, October the eleventh, eighteen hundred and ninety-nine.

That moment marked the opening of a war destined to determine the fate of South Africa, to work great changes in the British Empire, to seriously affect the future history of the world, and incidentally to alter many of our views as to the art of war.

It is the story of this war which, with limited material but with much aspiration to care and candour, I shall now endeavour to tell..