point.

"The war," said Mr. A. B. de Villiers, at the People's Congress,
"was the most unrighteous war that was ever pursued. The simple
aim was to seize the Republics. If that was persisted in,
Afrikanders would not rest.... Britain would efface the Republics
and make the people slaves. Race hatred would then be prolonged
from generation to generation."

To publish abroad such opinions as these was obviously to invite
rebellion in the Cape Colony, to encourage the resistance of the
Boers, and to embarrass the British authorities, both civil and
military, throughout South Africa. This was precisely what the
Afrikander nationalist desired to do. But what is to be thought of the
Englishmen who, both in the Cape Colony and in England, took part in
this "conciliation" movement? Surely they did not desire these same
results. Were they, then, the comrades or the dupes of the Afrikander
nationalists? This is a question upon which the individual reader may
be left to form his own judgment.

[Sidenote: Comrades or dupes.]

This much, at least, is certain. What gave the Afrikander nationalists
the power to bring about the second invasion of the Cape Colony, and
to inflict a year and a half of guerilla warfare upon South Africa,
was the co-operation of these Englishmen--whether comrades or
dupes--who opposed the annexation of the Republics. The intense
sympathy felt by the Afrikanders for their defeated kinsmen was
natural; but the means by which it was enflamed were artificial. Lord
Milner himself, with his accustomed serenity of judgment, refused to
take a "gloomy view" of the question of racial relations in the
Colony, still less in South Africa as a whole.

"If it is true," he wrote on June 6th, "as the 'conciliators' are
never tired of threatening us, that race hatred will be eternal,
why should they make such furious efforts to keep it up at the
present moment? The very vehemence of their declarations that the
Afrikanders will never forgive, nor forget, nor acquiesce, seems
to me to indicate a considerable and well-justified anxiety on
their part lest these terrible things should, after all, happen."

But while the Cape Colony was in the throes of this agitation, British
soldiers were gallantly fighting their way to Johannesburg and
Pretoria. During the six weeks of Lord Roberts's "prolonged and
enforced halt" at Bloemfontein (March 13th--May 1st), and