saw quite well that
it would not have been opportune or politic to put himself into open
opposition to Rhodes. Sir Alfred therefore did not contradict the rumours
which attributed to him the desire to reduce the Cape to the condition of
a Crown Colony, but bent his energy to the far more serious task of
negotiating a permanent peace with the leading men in the Transvaal, a
peace for which he did not want the protection of Rhodes, and to which an
association with Rhodes might have proved inimical to the end in view--the
ideal of a South African Federation which Rhodes had been the first to
visualise, but which Providence did not permit him to see accomplished.

CHAPTER XII.

THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS

It is impossible to speak or write about the South African War without
mentioning the Concentration Camps. A great deal of fuss was made about
them, not only abroad, where all the enemies of England took a particular
and most vicious pleasure in magnifying the so-called cruelties which were
supposed to take place, but also in the English Press, where long and
heartrending accounts appeared concerning the iniquities and injustices
practised by the military authorities on the unfortunate Boer families
assembled in the Camps.

In recurring to this long-forgotten theme, I must first of all say that I
do not hold a brief for the English Government or for the administration
which had charge of British interests in South Africa. But pure and simple
justice compels me to protest, first against the use which was made for
party purposes of certain regrettable incidents, and, more strongly still,
against the totally malicious and ruthless way in which the incidents were
interpreted.

It is necessary before passing a judgment on the Concentration Camps to
explain how it came about that these were organised. At the time of which
I am writing people imagined that by Lord Kitchener's orders Boer women,
children and old people were forcibly taken away from their homes and
confined, without any reason for such an arbitrary proceeding, in
unhealthy places where they were subjected to an existence of privation as
well as of humiliation and suffering. Nothing of the kind had taken place.

The idea of the Camps originated at first from the Boers themselves in an
indirect way. When the English troops marched into the Orange Free State
and the Transvaal, most of the farmers who composed the bulk of the
population of the two Republics