o often roused
the British nation to an indignant protest, and to repeated efforts to
banish the slave trade from the world. The Boers have not only fallen
on unsuspecting kraals simply for the purpose of obtaining the women and
children and cattle, but they have carried on a traffic through natives
who have kidnapped the children of their weaker neighbours, and sold
them to the white man. Again, the Boers have sold and exchanged their
victims among themselves. Waggon-loads of slaves have been conveyed
from one end of the country to the other for sale, and that with the
cognisance of, and for the direct advantage of, the highest officials of
the land. The writer has himself seen in a town, situated in the south
of the Republic, the children who had been brought down from a remote
northern district. One fine morning, in walking through the streets,
he was struck with the number of little black strangers standing about
certain houses, and wondered where they could have come from. He learnt
a few hours later that they were part of loads which were disposed of
on the outskirts of the town the day before. The circumstances connected
with some of these kidnapping excursions are appalling, and the
barbarities practised by cruel masters upon some of these defenceless
creatures during the course of their servitude are scarcely less
horrible than those reported from Turkey. It is no disgrace in this
country for an official to ride a fine horse which was got for two Kafir
children, to procure whom the father and mother were shot. No reproach
is inherited by the mistress who, day after day, tied up her female
servant in an agonising posture, and had her beaten until there was no
sound part in her body, securing her in the stocks during the intervals
of torture. That man did not lose caste who tied up another woman and
had her thrashed until she brought forth at the whipping-post. These
are merely examples of thousands of cases which could be proved were
an Imperial Commission to sit, and could the wretched victims of a
prolonged oppression recover sufficiently from the dread of their old
tyrants to give a truthful report."

To come to some evidence more recently adduced. On the 9th May 1881, an
affidavit was sworn to by the Rev. John Thorne, curate of St. John the
Evangelist, Lydenburg, Transvaal, and presented to the Royal Commission
appointed to settle Transvaal affairs, in which he states:--"That I
was appointed to the charge of