ulate our commerce or our manufacturing industries;
because in short, we wanted to keep house for ourselves and believed
that the colonial position was at its best essentially a degradation to
manhood or as we called it at that time "political slavery." If the
Boers are wrong in defending against England by guerilla methods an
independence long since acknowledged, then we were ten thousand times
wrong in supporting by the same methods a rebellion for independence
against that same country which it is said can rule any people better
than those people can rule themselves.

The Boers at the beginning of the present war had the regularly
organized armies of an independent nation. With the money obtained from
the gold mines they had bought the most modern artillery, small arms and
ammunition. We on the other hand being mere rebels had none of these
things. Our guns were at first antiquated or blacksmith-made muskets and
shot guns; and we were the ridicule of the British regulars because we
had no bayonets. Whenever we had a chance we used the superior weapons
taken from British prisoners just as the Boers now use the Lee-Metford
rifles taken from their prisoners. We never were decently armed until
France sent us shiploads of guns and ammunition. Many of the straps and
cartouche boxes worn by our people had the British army letters G. R.
stamped on them. Graydon relates in his memoirs how when he was taken
prisoner a cartouche box with those letters on it was instantly wrenched
with violence off his person.

As our first meeting in arms with the British was irregular so was our
second. Bunker Hill was so much of a guerilla battle so far as we were
concerned that it is disputed to this day whether Putnam or Prescott was
in command. As a matter of fact there was nobody in particular in
command. It was a voluntary sort of affair; and the description of it
reads exactly like a Boer battle.

About fifteen hundred men, mostly farmers like the Boers, suddenly
seized an important hill or kopje dangerously close to the British
lines. They fortified themselves with breast works made of fence rails
and hay in such a bucolic manner that all the regulars in Boston
laughed. They could have been defeated very easily by sending a force on
their flank and rear. But General Gage thought that would be ridiculous
and unnecessary. A force of three thousand regulars could easily by a
front attack sweep off these farmers, show them the uselessnes