was auspicious for his attempt, and yet he failed.
How then shall we succeed in winter, and with horses so weak that
they can only go _op-een-stap_?"[344]

[Footnote 344: An onomatopoeic expression for the step of a
tired horse.]

Elsewhere the minutes of the burgher meetings afford even more direct
evidence of the fact that it was the desperate condition of the Boers,
and not any desire to make friends with a generous opponent, that led
them to surrender. "To continue the war," says General Botha on May
30th, "must result, in the end, in our extermination."... The terms of
the English Government "may not be very advantageous to us, but
nevertheless they rescue us from an almost impossible position." And
Acting-President Schalk-Burger: "I have no great opinion of the
document which lies before us: to me it holds out no inducement to
stop the war. If I feel compelled to treat for peace" ... it is
because "by holding out I should dig the nation's grave.... Fell a
tree, and it will sprout again; uproot it and there is an end of it.
What has the nation done to deserve extinction?" De Wet himself and
the majority of the Free State representatives advocated the
continuation of the war at the Vereeniging meetings. But in the brief
description of the final meeting which he gives in his book,[345] he
writes:

[Footnote 345: _The Three Years' War._]

"There were sixty of us there, and each in turn must answer Yes
or No. It was an ultimatum--this proposal of England. What were
we to do? To continue the struggle meant extermination."

[Sidenote: Boer claim to independence.]

Even more significant than these admissions is the spirit in which the
question of submission is discussed. There is no recognition of the
moral obliquity of the Boer oligarchy, or of the generosity of the
British terms. Physical compulsion is the sole argument to which their
minds are open. At the very moment when the sixty representatives
agreed to accept the British terms, and thereby to acknowledge the
sovereignty of the British Crown, they passed a resolution affirming
their "well-founded" claim to "independence." History may well ask,
On what was this claim based? Judged by the ethical standard,[346] the
Boers had shown themselves utterly unworthy of the administrative
autonomy conferred upon them by Great Britain. Judged by the laws of
war,[347] they had been saved from the alternatives of physi