proper only to be dominated
and exploited.

Boers could walk or ride about armed to the teeth, whilst Uitlanders
were forbidden to possess arms under penalty of confiscation and other
punishments (except sporting-guns under special permit). The like
irritations became rampant by 1890 already.

The alien population were at first too much occupied with their
prosperous vocations to combine in the way of protesting against such
prevailing usage. The Press was, however, eventually employed, and the
Government was approached with respectful petitions praying for redress
of the most glaring causes of discontent; but those were invariably
either disdainfully rejected or ignored, or, if some matter was
relieved, other more exasperating enactments were defiantly substituted.
They were cynically told that they had come to their (the Boer's)
country unasked, and were at liberty, and in fact invited, to leave it
if the laws did not please them. This was said, well knowing that to
leave would involve too great sacrifices of homes and investments. The
Uitlanders could not, however, be brought to the belief that the
Government of a conscientious people could persist in dealing with them
as if a previous design had existed--first to inveigle them and their
capital into their midst, with the object of goading and despoiling them
afterwards. The course of petitioning and respectful remonstrances was
therefore persevered in, but all to no purpose. Indignation and
resentment were the natural result of those failures. There appeared no
alternative but to submit or else to abandon all and leave the country.

It is true that numerous Uitlanders acquired competences, and some were
amassing fortunes, but such prizes were comparatively few. The majority
just managed, with varying success, to reap a reasonable return for
their outlays and energies, or only to live more or less comfortably.
The fashion of luxurious and unthrifty living, so prevalent among the
"_nouveaux riches_" and the section who vied with them, impressed the
Boers with the notion that all were getting rich, and that soon there
would be nothing left for them in the race. In their Hollander Press
they were reminded that the gold, in reality belonging to them, was
rapidly being exhausted, and the wealth appropriated by aliens, whose
hewers of wood and drawers of water they would finally become. All this
galled them to the heart, and the Government readily lent itself to
procee