for the resistance their husbands and fathers were making against
an aggression which in itself nothing could justify.

So far as the Boers themselves were concerned, I think that a good many
among them viewed the subject with far more equanimity than the English
public. For one thing, the fact of their women and children being put in
places where at least they would not die of hunger must have come to them
rather in the light of a relief than anything else. Then, too, one must
not lose sight of the conditions under which the Boer burghers and farmers
used to exist in normal times. Cleanliness did not rank among their
virtues; and, as a rule, hygiene was an unknown science. They were mostly
dirty and neglected in their personal appearance, and their houses were
certainly neither built nor kept in accordance with those laws of
sanitation which in the civilised world have become a matter of course.
Water was scarce, and the long and torrid summers, during which every bit
of vegetation was dried up on the veldt, had inured the population to
certain privations which would have been intolerable to Europeans. These
things, and the unfortunate habits of the Boers, made it extremely
difficult, if not impossible, to realise in the Camps any approach to the
degree of cleanliness which was desirable.

To say that the people in the Concentration Camps were happy would be a
gross exaggeration, but to say that they were martyrs would convey an
equally false idea. When judging of facts one ought always to remember the
local conditions under which these facts have developed. A Russian moujik
sent to Siberia does not find that his life there is very much different
from what it was at home, but a highly civilised, well-educated man,
condemned to banishment in those frozen solitudes, suffers acutely, being
deprived of all that had made existence sweet and tolerable to him. I feel
certain that an Englishman, confined in one of the Concentration Camps of
South Africa, would have wished himself dead ten times a day, whilst the
wife of a Boer farmer would not have suffered because of missing soap and
water and clean towels and nicely served food, though she might have felt
the place hot and unpleasant, and might have lamented over the loss of the
home in which she had lived for years.

The Concentration Camps were a necessity, because without them thousands
of people, the whole white population of a country indeed, amounting to
something ove