vement--without a pass too? That's what they do in your British
Colonies. Brother! Equal! Ugh! Free! Not a bit. We know how to treat
Kaffirs.'

Probing at random I had touched a very sensitive nerve. We had got down
from underneath the political and reached the social. What is the true
and original root of Dutch aversion to British rule? It is not Slagters
Nek, nor Broomplatz, nor Majuba, nor the Jameson Raid. Those incidents
only fostered its growth. It is the abiding fear and hatred of the
movement that seeks to place the native on a level with the white man.
British government is associated in the Boer farmer's mind with violent
social revolution. Black is to be proclaimed the same as white. The
servant is to be raised against the master; the Kaffir is to be declared
the brother of the European, to be constituted his legal equal, to be
armed with political rights. The dominant race is to be deprived of
their superiority; nor is a tigress robbed of her cubs more furious than
is the Boer at this prospect.

I mused on the tangled skein of politics and party principles. This
Boer farmer was a very typical character, and represented to my mind all
that was best and noblest in the African Dutch character. Supposing he
had been conducting Mr. Morley to Pretoria, not as a prisoner of war,
but as an honoured guest, instead of me, what would their conversation
have been? How excellently they would have agreed on the general
question of the war! I could imagine the farmer purring with delight as
his distinguished charge dilated in polished sentences upon liberty and
the rights of nationalities. Both would together have bewailed the
horrors of war and the crime of aggression; both would have condemned
the tendencies of modern Imperialism and Capitalism; both would have
been in complete accord whenever the names of Rhodes, Chamberlain, or
Milner were mentioned. And the spectacle of this citizen soldier, called
reluctant, yet not unwilling, from the quiet life of his farm to fight
bravely in defence of the soil on which he lived, which his fathers had
won by all manner of suffering and peril, and to preserve the
independence which was his pride and joy, against great enemies of
regulars--surely that would have drawn the most earnest sympathy of the
eminent idealist. And then suddenly a change, a jarring note in the duet
of agreement.

'_We_ know how to treat Kaffirs in _this_ country. Fancy letting the
black filth walk on the p