would be unfair to disguise so
clear an impression as this that I received, who went to South Africa
with so little political bias that eager partisans of neither colour in
Cape Town would own me. To appear lukewarm amongst people who are
red-hot is not always pleasant, but it has its compensations; one has at
least a foothold--inglorious, perhaps, but safe and desirable in a dizzy
world.

It was impossible to be in Kimberley and not to become involved in the
endless political discussions of clubs and dinner tables. I used to try
very hard to discover what it was that made the average Briton living in
South Africa hate the Boers so bitterly. The Colonial despises the Boer,
but one does not hate a man only because one despises him. Jealousy is
the best blend with contempt, and there is no doubt that the Boer's not
unnatural desire to be paramount in his own land was what English
colonists with whom I talked chiefly resented. We might talk for an hour
or for a day--the same old grievances always came round: the inferior
political position of the Uitlanders, the primitive, not to say dirty
and slovenly, habits of many Boer farmers, and their lack of energy.
These are the grievances of the man in the street, and they appear grave
enough--when once one has invested oneself with the right of censorship.
Then the rebels--wretched, unsuccessful farmers, who found themselves
misled and their ideas of duty confounded--these were the chief objects
of the lust for revenge. A rebel, as a man who has tried unsuccessfully
to overthrow by force the Government to which he owes allegiance, must
expect to suffer; but even in the case of these miserable creatures
there is surely a scale of responsibility to be observed and a measure
of justice to be meted. If Kimberley or Cape Town had ruled the matter
by their mass meetings nearly every rebel would have been hanged--a very
poor way, one would think, of making loyal subjects. But the reasons
that were urged in support of such drastic punishment were astonishingly
frank: "It doesn't pay to be loyal," one was told; "we might as well
have been rebels." Not a very lofty form of patriotism.

One came to shrink from using that grand word, so plausible a cloak did
it become for much that is mean and degrading. For example, when I was
riding from Bloemfontein to Kimberley I and my companion descried a
farmhouse two miles in front of us near Koodoesrand Drift; when we had
come within about a mile