owd a tent is
hygienically almost impossible, for the atmosphere of a tent, however
crowded, will never become tainted in the same sense as a room.

All these things are of human contrivance, and the authorities were
doing their best to set them right, as Miss Hobhouse herself
acknowledged. 'They are, I believe, doing their best with very limited
means,' said she, and in so saying reduced her whole report to nothing.
For if they are really doing their best, then what more can be said? The
only alternative is the breaking up of the camps and the dispersal of
the women. But in that case Mr. Stead is waiting for us with some 'Blood
and Hell' broadsheet to tell us of the terrible fate of those women upon
the veldt. It must be one or the other. Of the two I prefer Miss
Hobhouse and the definite grievances which she reports, to the infinite
possibilities of Mr. Stead. As to the suggestion that this enormous
crowd of women and children should be quartered upon their kinsmen in
the Colony, it is beyond all argument. There has been no offer of such
wholesale hospitality nor have we any means for enforcing it.

But then we come to the great and piteous tragedy of the refugee camps,
the mortality, and especially the mortality among the children. That is
deplorable--more deplorable even than the infant mortality in Mafeking,
Ladysmith, and Kimberley. But is it avoidable? Or is it one of those
misfortunes, like that enteric outbreak which swept away so many British
soldiers, which is beyond our present sanitary science and can only be
endured with sad resignation? The nature of the disease which is mainly
responsible for the high mortality shows that it has no direct
connection with the sanitary conditions of the camps, or with anything
which it was in our power to alter. Had the deaths come from some
filth-disease, such as typhus fever, or even from enteric or diphtheria,
the sanitation of the camps might be held responsible. But it is to a
severe form of measles that the high mortality is due. Apart from that
the record of the camps would have been a very fair one. Now measles
when once introduced among children runs through a community without any
regard to diet or conditions of life. The only possible hope is the
segregation of the sufferer. To obtain this early quarantine the
co-operation of the parent is needed: but in the case in point the Boer
mothers, with a natural instinct, preferred to cling to the children and
to make