descendants, an untrained army
of farmers.

A revelation of the Boer character, therefore, is an index to the South
African tangle. His enemies call the Boer "a combination of cunning and
childishness." As a matter of fact the Boer is distinct among
individualists. "Oom Paul" Kruger was a type. A fairly familiar story
will concretely illustrate what lies within and behind the race. On one
occasion his thumb was nearly severed in an accident. With his
pocket-knife he cut off the finger, bound up the wound with a rag, and
went about his business.

The old Boer--and the type survives--was a Puritan who loved his
five-thousand-acre farm where he could neither see nor hear his
neighbors, who read the Good Word three times a day, drank prodigious
quantities of coffee, spoke "_taal_" the Dutch dialect, and reared a
huge family. Botha, for example, was one of thirteen children, and his
father lamented to his dying day that he had not done his full duty by
his country!

Isolation was the Boer fetich. This instinct for aloofness,--principally
racial,--animates the sincere wing of the Nationalist Party today. Men
like Botha and Smuts and their followers adapted themselves to
assimilation but there remained the "bitter-end" element that rebelled
in arms against the constituted authority in 1914 and had to be put down
with merciless hand. This element now seeks to achieve through more
peaceful ends what it sought to do by force the moment Britain became
involved in the Great War. The reason for the revolt of 1914, in a
paragraph, was Britain's far-flung call to arms. The unreconstructed
Boers refused to fight for the Power that humbled them in 1902. They
seized the moment to make a try for what they called "emancipation."

To go back for a moment, when the British conquered the Cape and
thousands of Englishmen streamed out to Africa to make their fortunes,
the Boer at once bristled with resentment. His isolation was menaced. He
regarded the Briton as an "_Uitlander_"--an outsider--and treated him as
an undesirable alien. In the Transvaal and the Orange Free State he was
denied the rights that are accorded to law-abiding citizens in other
countries. Hence the Jameson Raid, which was an ill-starred protest
against the narrow, copper-riveted Boer rule, and later the final and
sanguinary show-down in the Boer War, which ended the dream of Boer
independence.

In 1910 was established the Union of South Africa, comprising the
Transv