There has been abroad in the Army for a great many years an earnest desire on the part of a large section, certainly, to make themselves worthy of the Army and worthy of the nation by whom they were paid, and for whose good they existed.  That feeling has become more intensified every year, and at the present moment, if you examine the Army List, you will find that almost all the Staff Officers recently gone out to South Africa have been educated at the Staff College, established to teach the higher science of our profession and to educate a body of men who will be able to conduct the military affairs of the country when it comes to their turn to do so.  Those men are now arriving at the top of the tree, thank God! while many of those magnificent old soldiers under whom I was brought up have disappeared from the face of the earth, and others who are to be seen at the clubs have come round—­they have been converted in their last moments [laughter]; they have the frankness to tell you they made a mistake.  They recognize that they were wrong and that we were right. [Cheers.]

I quite endorse what the Chairman says about the success of the mobilization, and I will slightly glance at the state of affairs as they at present exist in South Africa.  I have the advantage of having spent some time in South Africa, and of having been—­not only General Commanding, but Governor and High Commissioner, with high-sounding titles given me by her Majesty.  I know, consequently, not only a little of South Africa, but a good deal of Boer character.  During my stay as Governor of the Transvaal, I had many opportunities of knowing people whom you have recently seen mentioned as the principal leaders in this war against us.  There are many traits in their character for which I have the greatest possible admiration.  They are a very strongly conservative people—­I do not mean in a political sense at all, but they were, I found, anxious to preserve and conserve all that was best in the institutions handed down to them from their forefathers.  But of all the ignorant people in that world that I have ever been brought into contact with, I will back the Boers of South Africa as the most ignorant.  At the same time they are an honest people.  When the last President of the Transvaal handed over the government to us—­and I may say, within parentheses, that the last thing an Englishman would do under the circumstances would be to look in the till—­there was only 4_s._ 6_d._ to the credit of the Republic. [Laughter.] Within a few weeks or days of the hoisting of the British flag in the Transvaal a bill for L4 10_s._ 4_d._ came in against the Boer Government, and was dishonored. [Renewed laughter.] The Boers at that time—­perhaps we did not manage them properly—­certainly set their face against us, and things have gone on from bad to worse, until the aspiration now moving them is that they should rule not only the Transvaal, but that they should rule the whole of South Africa.