o places of security, where they
were fed, housed, and generally maintained, in as little discomfort as
circumstances permitted. If the lesser suffering of the Burgher Camps
was the only alternative to greater suffering, and possibly
starvation, on the veld, the Boers had only their own leaders to thank
for the position in which they found themselves. The death-rate of the
Burgher Camps was exceptionally high as compared with that of any
ordinary European community. But the population of the camps was no
less exceptional. It consisted of women and children, with a small
proportion of adult males; and of all these the majority had come to
the camps as refugees, insufficiently clothed, weakened by exposure
and often by starvation. Obviously the death-rate of such a refugee
community would be much higher, under the most favourable conditions,
than that of an ordinary European town; and, in order to find a valid
point of comparison, we must seek statistics provided by similar
collections of refugees, brought together under the like exceptional
circumstances. We are unable to find any such parallel case, for the
sufficient reason that history records no other example of a nation at
war which, at the risk of impairing the efficiency of its own forces
in the field, has endeavoured, not merely to feed and clothe, but to
house, nurse, and even educate the non-combatant population of its
enemy.

[Sidenote: Reduction of the death-rate.]

What we do know, however, is that, of the total deaths in these camps
of refuge, the great majority were those of infants and children.
This is a circumstance which in itself goes far to make the excess of
the camp death-rate apparent rather than real; since, in the first
place, the Boer mothers, owing to their insanitary habits and
ignorance,[263] are not accustomed to bring more than one out of every
two children to maturity; and in the second, the rate of infant
mortality is abnormally high, as compared with that of a given
community as a whole, even in the most highly developed countries. The
highest monthly death-rate was that of October, 1901, when, out of a
population of 112,109 in all camps, there were 3,205 deaths, or 344
per thousand per annum.[264] But of these deaths, 500 only (in round
numbers) were those of adults, and 2,700 were those of children. That
is to say, in this worst month we have in the refugee camps an adult
death-rate of (roughly) 50 per thousand, as compared with a E