at were raised, among both the
republican and colonial Dutch, in favour of more moderate counsels. In
the preceding month (November) Mr. Melius de Villiers, the late Chief
Justice of the Free State, wrote to a Dutch Reformed minister in the
Cape Colony to beg him to use all his influence against the efforts
being made in the Cape Colony to encourage the Boers to continue the
struggle. "However much I loved and valued the independence of the
Free State," he says, "it is now absolutely certain that the struggle
on the part of the burghers is a hopeless and useless one." And he
then suggests that the Dutch Reformed ministers in the Cape Colony,
instead of petitioning the Queen to grant the independence of the
Republics, should intercede with ex-President Steyn and the Federal
leaders and induce them to discontinue the fight. Women's Congresses
and People's Congresses, held to denounce the barbarities perpetrated
in the war, will avail nothing; but the Dutch Reformed Church could
fulfil no higher mission than this genuine peace-making. "It may go
against their grain to urge our people to yield," he adds, "but it
seems to me a plain duty."[233] But such voices were powerless to
counteract the effect produced upon the Boers by the demonstrations of
hatred against the British Government, manifested by men whose minds
had been inflamed by the infamous slanders of the Imperial troops to
which the "conciliation" movement had given currency.

[Footnote 233: Cd. 547.]

[Sidenote: Second invasion of the colony.]

On the morning of December 16th, five days after he had received the
Worcester Congress deputation, Lord Milner heard that the burgher
forces had again crossed the Orange River between Aliwal North and
Bethulie. Before them lay hundreds of miles of country full of food
and horses, and inhabited by people who were in sympathy with them. On
the 20th martial law was proclaimed in twelve additional districts. On
the 17th of the following month the whole of the Cape Colony, with the
exception of Capetown, Simon's Town, Wynberg, Port Elizabeth, East
London, and the native territories, was placed under the same
military rule. In the words of a protest subsequently addressed by the
Burgher Peace Committee to their Afrikander brethren, the "fatal
result of the Worcester Congress had been that the commandos had again
entered the Cape Colony." The friends of the Boers in England, duped
by the Afrikander nationalists, had i