“A VOTE for the Liberals is a vote for the Boers!”

That’s about as tough as a campaign slogan can get. It was the rallying cry of the Lord Salisbury-Joe Chamberlain forces in Great Britain’s Khaki election of 1900. The war with the Boers had begun to go well after shocking, initial defeats, and the Tory-Liberal Unionist alliance called for an election and made it a referendum on the conduct of the conflict. In “Dreadnought,” Robert Massie provides a sense of the campaign’s tenor: