respect for personal
rights, have dealt more fairly with their opponents than we did in our
revolution. They are the superiors of both ourselves and the English and
they are inferior to us and the English only in numbers.

There is a great deal of talk of England's success in ruling
dependencies. She rules no doubt successfully enough over the servile,
over toadies, flunkeys and weaklings or those who have no spirit or love
of independence. Wherever she has attempted to rule an
independence-loving people as in the case of the Irish, ourselves or the
Boers, she has made a most shocking failure of it. Few people trouble
themselves to read the long history of England's dealings with the South
Africans for nearly a hundred years previous to the present war. It is
all detailed in Theal's admirable volumes of the history of South
Africa. Theal was himself an Englishman, an official in South Africa,
and he prints all documents in full. I must confess I was astonished to
read this long record of atrocious injustice, inhumanity, stupidity and
cruelty which generation after generation has hammered the Boers into a
separate people, given them a long list of martyrs and anniversaries of
ferocity and built up in them a fell hatred of the English, which now
astonishes men like yourself, who suppose this to be a mere sudden
outbreak, and who have not the time, or will not take the trouble, to
investigate the long chain of causes which led up to it.

With an independence loving people England has only two methods of
success, extermination or banishment. She always rules with complete
success over the dead. When with Martinis and Lee Metfords she has
slaughtered over 27,000 black or brown men, carrying spears or
old-fashioned guns, with a loss on her side of only 387, and with a vast
crop of medals and Victoria crosses for the supposed heroes of this
supposed wonderful victory, she has unquestionably solved a "problem" in
her way.

When, after 700 years of conquests, "colonization," reform bills, final
settlements, coercion acts, land acts, hangings, confiscations,
corruptions, treachery and broken promises, a large part of the native
Irish are living in the United States, where by their steadiness,
industry, bright minds and success they contradict and disprove every
charge and statement made against them by pottering English statesmen,
England may undoubtedly be said to have successfully solved the problem
of her "white man's burd