ir feelings. They frankly
said the British people were just beginning the same old game of
meddlesomeness. `Here,' they said, `are rebels whom we have caught in
the act of fighting against us, raiding and murdering our
fellow-colonists. We pay for the forces to suppress that rebellion; we
have taken hold of the prisoners who have surrendered. We do not know
what to do with them better than to distribute them, with their own
consent, among the farmers for a term of five years, instead of
imprisoning them, and thereby making them non-productive and a burden to
the State. If we had sent them back to their own country, they would
simply have died, or made it very dangerous for anyone with property to
go near their country, and we should have had to begin again. You
English say it is a form of slavery. We deny it. It is no more than
Sir Charles Warren did in 1878. What the British Government did in 1878
we are doing now. Don't you suppose that, having given us an almost
independent Government, we have got plenty of pious, well-educated,
intelligent men as capable of looking after our morals as the civilised
people of England? Why do you all the time place English sentiment in
opposition to us, with a view of tyrannising over us? We make our laws,
and can correct them if they are wrong. We do not want you to interfere
all the time. Our lives and our property, the welfare of our wives and
children, depend upon good government. But immediately we do anything
you raise the cry that we are barbarous and wicked, and are reducing
rebels to the state of slaves, and thus you excite and disturb the
people.' `Supposing,' said one of the speakers, `that the majority of
the British nation were inclined to that opinion, and believed that we
were so wickedly disposed as to subject our coloured people to a
condition of slavery, Parliament would raise the question, and very
possibly, if the sentiment has taken deep hold of your people, would
pass a law to prevent it. Then a collision of interests would take
place--Boers against English. The English would probably follow the
British Government, except a few who have been resident in South Africa
and understand those questions as well as the born Colonists. Thus the
Colonists would become divided. The Boers and Afrikanders could not
trek again, as Bechuanaland and Rhodesia shut them off from the north.
They therefore would demand a republic, to cut themselves adrift from
the