persecuted sectaries from Piedmont. The two stocks, although one was of
Teutonic and the other of Celtic origin, easily came together, and under
the pressure of common interests and common dangers were consolidated
and vulcanized: and if in the previous generation the English Pilgrim
Fathers of the _Mayflower_ had directed their course to the south
instead of to the west, and had cast anchor off the shore of that
distant region of Good Hope, it is probable that a mighty nation would
have been founded in South Africa.

Cromwell as the military leader of the Commonwealth Boers is, at least
in England where the military art has not been scientifically studied,
one of the suppressed characters of history. His political achievements,
as is perhaps natural in a community which courts the voter and despises
the soldier, have put out of sight the means by which he mainly won
them; namely his genius as a cavalry and partisan commander. An
ungainly, narrow-minded, bigoted, bucolic squireen of Huntingdon,
lacking in every quality which we are accustomed to associate with a
cavalry officer, inaugurated an era in the history of Mounted Troops.
His methods are studied on the Continent, and the German Staff has
recently discovered that he was the first leader to use cavalry as a
screen to hide the movements of the main body. Yet there is no evidence
that he ever studied the military art, and he did not become a soldier
until he had reached his fourth decade. In the Royalist Army opposed to
him were soldiers by profession and experience; officers and men who had
been under Gustavus Adolphus in the Thirty Years' War; for in the XVIIth
century the services of aliens were in request on the Continent, and at
one time no less than eighty-seven senior officers of British
nationality were serving in the Swedish Army, then the most renowned in
Europe. Yet Cromwell with his "Eastern Association," his Ironsides, his
yeomen and raw levies, beat the Royalist Army, officered from the same