sionaries.]

This was, however, but the beginning. Under the cloak of religion
British administration continued to display its hate against our people
and nationality, and to conceal its self-seeking aims under cover of the
most exalted principles. The aid of religion was invoked to reinforce
the policy of oppression in order to deal a deeper and more fatal blow
to our self-respect. Emissaries of the London Missionary Society
slandered the Boers, and accused them of the most inhuman cruelties to
the natives. These libellous stories, endorsed as they were by the
British Government, found a ready ear amongst the English, and the
result was that under the pressure of powerful philanthropic opinion in
England our unfortunate people were more bitterly persecuted than ever,
and were finally compelled to defend themselves in courts of law
against the coarsest accusations and insults. But they emerged from the
ordeal triumphantly, and the records of the criminal courts of the Cape
Colony bear indisputable witness to the fact that there were no people
amongst the slave-owning classes of the world more humane than the
Africander Boers. Their treatment of the natives was based on the theory
that natives ought not to be considered as mature and fully developed
people, but that they were in reality children who had to be won over to
civilisation by just and rigid discipline; they hold the same
convictions on this subject to-day, and the enlightened opinion of the
civilised world is inclining more and more to the same conclusion. But
the fact that their case was a good one, and that it was triumphantly
decided in their favour in the law courts, did not serve to diminish,
but rather tended to sharpen, the feeling of injustice with which they
had been treated.

[Sidenote: Emancipation of the slaves.]

A livelier sense of wrong was quickened by the way in which the
emancipation of the slaves--in itself an excellent measure--was carried
out in the case of the Boers.

Our forefathers had become owners of slaves chiefly imported in English
ships and sold to us by Englishmen. The British Government decided to
abolish slavery. We had no objection to this, provided we received
adequate compensation.[4] Our slaves had been valued by British
officials at three millions, but of the twenty millions voted by the
Imperial Government for compensation, only one and a quarter millions
was destined for South Africa; and this sum was payable in Lond