r sixty thousand people, would have died of hunger and cold.

The only means of existence the country Boers had was the produce of their
farms. This taken away from them, they were left in the presence of
starvation, and starvation only. This population, deprived of every means
of subsistence, would have invaded Cape Colony, which already was overrun
with white refugees from Johannesburg and the Rand, who had proved a
prolific source of the greatest annoyance to the British Government. To
allow this mass of miserable humanity to wander all over the Colony would
have been inhuman, and I would like to know what those who, in England and
upon the Continent, were so indignant over the Concentration Camps would
have said had it turned out that some sixty thousand human creatures had
been allowed to starve.

The British Government, owing to the local conditions under which the
South African War came to be fought, found itself in a dilemma, out of
which the only escape was to try to relieve wholesale misery in the most
practical manner possible. There was no time to plan out with deliberation
what ought to be done; some means had to be devised to keep a whole
population alive whom an administration would have been accused of
murdering had there been delay in feeding it.

There was also another danger to be faced had the veldt been allowed to
become the scene of a long-continued migration of nations--that of
allowing the movements of the British troops to become known, thereby
lengthening a war of already intolerable length, to say nothing of
exposing uselessly the lives of English detachments, which, in this
guerrilla kind of warfare, would inevitably have occurred had the Boer
leaders remained in constant communication with their wandering
compatriots.

Altogether the institution of the Concentration Camps was not such a bad
one originally. Unfortunately, they were not organised with the
seriousness which ought to have been brought to bear on such a delicate
matter, and their care was entrusted to people who succeeded, unwittingly
perhaps, in making life there less tolerable than it need have been.

I visited some of the Concentration Camps, and looked into their interior
arrangements with great attention. The result of my personal observations
was invariably the same--that where English officials were in charge of
these Camps everything possible was done to lighten the lot of their
inmates. But where others were entruste