t
peace commissioners and kept offering terms which steadily increased in
liberality, entire freedom from taxation, in fact almost everything the
rebel colonists had demanded, up even to a sort of semi-independence.
Your great grandfather voted down everyone of them. He attended with
Franklin the famous peace meeting with Lord Howe on Staten Island and
rejected Lord Howe's terms. And why? Because none of them contained the
one essential condition, absolute independence. Your great grandfather
was a Kruger.

But let us pass from him. Let us see what others thought and what was
the general situation during the revolution.

At the very beginning of that contest our forces were of an irregular
and guerilla character. The farmers, who attacked the British regulars
at Lexington and followed them back to Boston picking them off from
behind stone fences and trees, were the most irregular fighters it is
possible to imagine. They were not acting under the authority of any
legitimate or even a _de facto_ government. They were not even
officered, directed or authorized by the rebel Continental Congress,
which had met the year before in Philadelphia. They were acting in a
purely voluntary manner in obedience to a mere sentiment of that faction
of the colonists who resented an invasion from Great Britain and wanted
this country for their own. They were acting in the same manner and on
the same sentiment by which the Boers now act and which you say is a
crime.

It is very important to remember that the moral position of the Boers is
vastly stronger than was ours. Before the present Boer war began the
Boers were two independent nations whose independence had been
acknowledged by England on two or three different occasions and in two
or three different documents. We were not independent and never had
been. We were colonies and some of our communities were not even
charter colonies; they were crown colonies; and one of the charter
colonies, Pennsylvania, had a clause in its charter acknowledging the
right of parliament to tax as it pleased. Our revolution was an out and
out rebellion against legitimate control because we wanted to govern
ourselves; because we did not want to be governed by people who lived
three thousand miles away in another and far separated country; because
we did not want to be taxed by the outsider; because we did not want him
to maintain an army amongst us to keep us in order, because we did not
want him to reg