n--'Are our officials exerting themselves to make the
Camps as little oppressive as possible?'--can also be answered in the
affirmative, judging from the evidence supplied by Miss Hobhouse herself.
This does not imply that at the date of Miss Hobhouse's visit, or at any
time, there were not matters capable of improvement. But it is confessed
even by hostile witnesses that the Government had a very difficult task,
and that its officials were applying themselves to grapple with it with
energy, kindness and goodwill. Miss Hobhouse complains again and again of
the difficulty of procuring soap. May I quote, as throwing light upon the
fact that the Boer women were no worse off than the English themselves,
that Miss Brooke-Hunt, who was in Pretoria to organise soldiers'
institutes a few months earlier than Miss Hobhouse was at Bloemfontein,
says in her interesting book, 'A Woman's Memories of the War': 'Captain
---- presented me with a piece of Sunlight soap, an act of generosity I
did not fully appreciate till I found that soap could not be bought for
love or money in the town.' A Boer woman of the working-class said to Miss
Brooke-Hunt: 'You English are different from what I thought. They told us
that if your soldiers got inside Pretoria they would rob us of everything,
burn our houses, and treat us cruelly; but they have all been kind and
respectable. It seems a pity we did not know this before.' Miss Hobhouse
supplies some rather similar testimony. In her Report she says: 'The
Mafeking Camp folk were very surprised to hear that English women cared a
rap about them or their suffering. It has done them a lot of good to hear
that real sympathy is felt for them at home, and I am so glad I fought my
way here, if only for that reason.'

"In what particular way Miss Hobhouse had to fight her way to the Camps
does not appear, for she acknowledges the kindness of Lord Kitchener and
Lord Milner in enabling her to visit them; we must therefore suppose that
they provided her with a pass. But the sentence just quoted is enough in
itself to furnish the answer to the third question--'Is it right for the
public at home to supplement by gifts of additional comforts and luxuries
the efforts of our officials to make Camp life as little intolerable as
possible?' All kinds of fables have been told to the Boer men and women of
the brutality and ferocity of the British. Let them learn by practical
experience, as many of them have learnt already, t