an, an American or a Briton, the constant irritation of
being absolutely ruled by a body of twenty-five men, twenty-one of
whom had in the case of the Selati Railway Company been publicly and
circumstantially accused of bribery, with full details of the bribes
received, while to their corruption they added such crass ignorance that
they argue in the published reports of the Volksraad debates that using
dynamite bombs to bring down rain was firing at God, that it is impious
to destroy locusts, that the word 'participate' should not be used
because it is not in the Bible, and that postal pillar boxes are
extravagant and effeminate. Such obiter dicta may be amusing at a
distance, but they are less entertaining when they come from an autocrat
who has complete power over the conditions of your life.

From the fact that they were a community extremely preoccupied by
their own business, it followed that the Uitlanders were not ardent
politicians, and that they desired to have a share in the government of
the State for the purpose of making the conditions of their own industry
and of their own daily lives more endurable. How far there was need of
such an interference may be judged by any fair-minded man who reads the
list of their complaints. A superficial view may recognise the Boers as
the champions of liberty, but a deeper insight must see that they (as
represented by their elected rulers) have in truth stood for all
that history has shown to be odious in the form of exclusiveness and
oppression. Their conception of liberty has been a selfish one, and they
have consistently inflicted upon others far heavier wrongs than those
against which they had themselves rebelled.

As the mines increased in importance and the miners in numbers, it
was found that these political disabilities affected some of that
cosmopolitan crowd far more than others, in proportion to the amount of
freedom to which their home institutions had made them accustomed. The
continental Uitlanders were more patient of that which was unendurable
to the American and the Briton. The Americans, however, were in so great
a minority that it was upon the British that the brunt of the struggle
for freedom fell. Apart from the fact that the British were more
numerous than all the other Uitlanders combined, there were special
reasons why they should feel their humiliating position more than the
members of any other race. In the first place, many of the British were
Bri