With the Boer Forces | Page 2

no indication that the Boer nation will be extinguished so
completely or so suddenly, unless the leaders of the burghers yield to
their enemy's forces before all their powers and means of resistance
have been exhausted. If they will continue to fight as men who struggle
for the continued existence of their country and government should
fight, and as they have declared they will go on with the war, then it
will be three times eight months or three times a year before peace

comes to South Africa. Presidents Kruger and Steyn have declared that
they will continue the struggle for three years, and longer if necessary.
De Wet will never yield as long as he has fifty burghers in his
commando, and Botha will fight until every British soldier has been
driven from South African soil. Hundreds of the burghers have made
even firmer resolutions to continue the war until their cause is crowned
with victory. There may be some among them who fought and are
fighting because they despise Britons and British rule, but the vast
majority are on commando because they firmly believe that Great
Britain is attempting to take their country and their government from
them by the process of theft which we enlightened Anglo-Saxons of
America and England are wont to style "benevolent assimilation." They
feel that they have the right to govern their country in accordance with
their own ideas of justice and equality, and, naturally, they will
continue to fight until they are victorious, or might asserts itself over
their conception of right. If they have the power to make Great Britain
feel that their cause is just, as our forefathers in America did a hundred
years ago, then the Boers have vindicated themselves and their actions
in their own eyes and in the eyes of the world. If they lack in the
patriotism which men who fight for the life of their country usually
possess, then the Boers of South Africa will be exterminated from
among the nations of the world and no one will offer any sympathy to
them.
We Anglo-Saxons of America and Great Britain have a habit of calling
our enemies by names which would arouse the fighting blood of the
most peaceable individual, and when there is a Venezuelan question to
be discussed we do not hesitate to practice this custom, born of our
blood-alliance, by making each other the subjects of the vituperative
attacks. During the Spanish-American war we made most
uncomplimentary remarks concerning our short-lived enemy, and more
recently we have been emphasising the vices of our _protégés_, the
Filipinos, with a scornful disregard of their virtues. The Boers, however,
have had a greater burden to bear. They have had cast at them the shafts
of British vituperation and the lyddite of American venom. In a few
instances the lyddite was far more harrowing than the shafts, and in the
vast majority of instances both were born of ignorance. There are

unclean, uncouth, and unregenerate Boers, and I doubt whether any one
will stultify himself by declaring that there are none such of Britons
and Americans. I have been among the Boers in times of peace and in
times of war, and I have always failed to see that they were in any
degree lower than the men of like rank or occupation in America or
England. The farmers in Rustenburg probably never saw a dress suit or
a _décolleté_ gown, but there are innumerable regions in America and
Great Britain where similarly dense ignorance prevails. I have been in
scores of American and British homes which were not more spotlessly
clean than some of the houses on the veld in which it was my pleasure
to find a night's entertainment, and nowhere, except in my own home,
have I ever been treated with more courtesy than that which was
extended to me, a perfect stranger, in scores of daub and wattle cottages
in the Free State and the Transvaal. I will not declare that every Boer is
a saint, or that every one is a model of cleanliness or virtue, but I make
bold to say that the majority of the Boers are not a fraction less moral,
cleanly, or virtuous than the majority of Americans or Englishmen,
albeit they may be less progressive and less handsome in appearance
than we imagine ourselves to be.
As I have stated, the politics of the war has found no part in the
following pages, and an honest effort has been made to give an
impartial account of the proceedings as they unfolded themselves
before the eyes of an American. The struggle is one which was brought
about by the politicians, but it will probably be ended by the layman
who wields a sword, and who knows nothing of the