e_ of the Dutch East India Company twenty years before
(against which the Boers had twice risen in rebellion) there were
many things which were not as they should have been. A generation
had grown up which knew nothing of the arbitrary and oppressive rule
of the old Dutch Company. Simple folks have long memories, and all
the world over injuries make a deeper and more lasting impression
than benefits; and the older generation of Boers, which could recall
a condition of things contrasting unpleasantly with British rule,
also remembered the executions of Slagters Nek--a vindication of the
law which, when all allowance has been made for disturbed times, and
the need of strong measures to stop rebellion in a newly-acquired
country, seems to us to-day to have been harsh, unnecessary, and
unwise in policy, and truly terrible in the manner of fulfilment.

The Boers have produced from their own ranks no literary champion to
plead or defend their cause, and their earlier history is therefore
little known, and often misunderstood; but to their aid has come Mr.
George McCall Theal, the South African historian, whose years of
laborious research have rescued for South Africa much that would
otherwise have been lost. In his 'History of the Boers' Mr. Theal
records the causes of the great emigration, and shows how the Boers
stood up for fair treatment, and fought the cause, not of Boers
alone, but of all colonists. Boers and British were alike harshly and
ignorantly treated by high-handed Governors, and an ill-informed and
prejudiced Colonial Office, who made no distinction on the grounds
of nationality between the two; for we read that Englishmen had been
expelled the country, thrown in gaol, had their property
confiscated, and their newspapers suppressed for asserting their
independence, and for trifling breaches of harsh laws. The following
extract gives the best possible synopsis of the causes, and should
whet an appetite which can be gratified by the purchase of Mr.
Theal's book:

Why, then, did these men abandon their homes, sacrifice whatever
property could not be carried away, and flee from English rule as
from the most hateful tyranny? The causes are stated in a great mass
of correspondence addressed by them to the Colonial Government, and
now preserved, with other colonial records, in declarations published
by some of them before leaving, in letters to their relatives and to
newspapers, and in hundreds of pages of printed m