g to his burghers.
He thought it a shame that big hills should be made on ground under
which there might be rich reefs, and which in future might be required
for a market or outspan. He would support the recommendation on
condition that the name of the quartz should be translated into Dutch,
as there might be more in this than some of them imagined.'

Such debates as these may be amusing at a distance, but they are less
entertaining when they come from an autocrat who has complete power over
the conditions of your life.

From the fact that they were a community extremely preoccupied by their
own business, it followed that the Uitlanders were not ardent
politicians, and that they desired to have a share in the government of
the State for the purpose of making the conditions of their own industry
and of their own daily lives more endurable. How far there was need of
such an interference may be judged by any fair-minded man who reads the
list of their complaints. A superficial view may recognise the Boers as
the champions of liberty, but a deeper insight must see that they (as
represented by their elected rulers) have in truth stood for all that
history has shown to be odious in the form of exclusiveness and
oppression. Their conception of liberty has been a narrow and selfish
one, and they have consistently inflicted upon others far heavier wrongs
than those against which they had themselves rebelled.

As the mines increased in importance and the miners in numbers, it was
found that these political disabilities affected some of that
cosmopolitan crowd far more than others, in proportion to the amount of
freedom to which their home institutions had made them accustomed. The
Continental Uitlanders were more patient of that which was unendurable
to the American and the Briton. The Americans, however, were in so great
a minority that it was upon the British that the brunt of the struggle
for freedom fell. Apart from the fact that the British were more
numerous than all the other Uitlanders combined, there were special
reasons why they should feel their humiliating position more than the
members of any other race. In the first place, many of the British were
British South Africans, who knew that in the neighbouring countries
which gave them birth the most liberal possible institutions had been
given to the kinsmen of these very Boers who were refusing them the
management of their own drains and water-supply. And again, every