d with surveillance, every kind of
annoyance, indignity and insult was offered to poor people obliged to
submit to their authority.

In this question, as in many others connected with the Boer War, it was
the local Jingoes who harmed the British Government more than anything
else, and the Johannesburg Uitlanders, together with the various Volunteer
Corps and Scouts, brought into the conduct of the enterprises with which
they were entrusted an intolerance and a smallness of spirit which
destroyed British prestige far more than would have done a dozen
unfortunate wars. The very fact that one heard these unwise people openly
say that every Boer ought to be killed, and that even women and children
ought to be suppressed if one wanted to win the war, gave abroad the idea
that England was a nation thirsting for the blood of the unfortunate
Afrikanders. This mistaken licence furnished the Bond with the pretext to
persuade the Dutch Colonists to rebel, and the Boer leaders with that of
going on with their resistance until their last penny had been exhausted
and their last gun had been captured.

Without these detestable Jingoes, who would have done so much harm not
only to South Africa, but also to their Mother Country, England, it is
certain that an arrangement, which would have brought about an honourable
peace for everybody, could have come much sooner than it did. A
significant fact worth remembering--that the Boers did not attempt to
destroy the mines on the Rand--goes far to prove that they were not at all
so determined to hurt British property, or to ruin British residents, or
to destroy the large shareholder concerns to which the Transvaal owed its
celebrity, as was credited to them.

When the first rumours that terrible things were going on in the
Concentration Camps reached England there were found at once amateurs
willing to start for South Africa to investigate the truth of the
accusations. A great fuss was made over an appeal by Lady Maxwell, the
wife of the Military Governor of Pretoria, in which she entreated America
to assist her in raising a fund to provide warm clothing for the Boer
women and children. Conclusions were immediately drawn, saddling the
military authorities with responsibility for the destitution in which
these women and children found themselves. But in the name of common
sense, how could one expect that people who had run away before what they
believed to be an invasion of barbarians determin