African Republic, which terminated in the Peace
concluded at Vereeniging on May 31, 1902, I do not wish in this
introduction to enter into details, but merely to confine my remarks
to the great responsibility which rested upon us and to the question,
"Was it necessary to conclude Peace?"

If it was a task of supreme importance to decide to enter upon the
struggle which had been waged, if it was an arduous and difficult duty
to carry on the struggle, it was much harder and more difficult to
foresee what the result of that struggle would be, and still harder
and more difficult to decide to give it up. With how much hope, fear,
and anxiety was not the end looked forward to! And when the end came,
what did it not cost us to persuade the head to do what the heart
refused to perform? What was realised of that hope for which there had
been such a struggle, for which so much had been suffered, so much
endured, so much sacrificed--the Reader will find in this book. He
will also find in it the correspondence which led up to, and was
carried on during, the Peace Negotiations; the proceedings at our
meetings at Klerksdorp, Pretoria, and Vereeniging; the opinions,
views, and grounds upon which the leaders of the people acted, in so
far as those were expressed. You will not, however, find here the
struggle that took place at Vereeniging within every Delegate between
the heart and the head; the intense effort which it cost us to bring
ourselves to acknowledge to our powerful enemy that we had been
overpowered, exhausted, and were unable to continue the struggle any
longer; to acknowledge to ourselves and posterity that our sacrifices,
the blood and tears that had been shed, the indescribable anxiety for
wife and children, the suffering and death of the thousands of
innocent women and children, the awful evils which had fallen to the
lot of the rebels, had been all in vain; that we were about to lose
all for which we had suffered and sacrificed. All this, I say, you do
not find recorded here, but you may read it in the grey hairs of the
Delegates to Vereeniging and of our people, in the deep wrinkles on
their faces, and in the expression on the countenance of every
Boer--that expression which cannot conceal what the soul had to
endure. We had already sacrificed much, yet, in spite of all, the hope
had inseparably clung to us that no sacrifice, no privation, no loss
would be in vain. There at Vereeniging, however, we had to surrender