ment would have made for itself, among the Dutch
population of South Africa, a name for vindictive oppression, which no
generosity in other affairs could efface."

There is more in this determination of the Commissioners, or rather of
the majority of them--for Sir E. Wood, to his credit be it said, refused
to agree in their decision--than meets the eye, the fact of the matter
being that it was privately well known to them, that, though the Boer
leaders might be willing to allow a few of the murderers to undergo the
form of a trial, neither they nor the Boers themselves, meant to
permit the farce to go any further. Had the men been tried by a special
tribunal they would in all probability have been condemned to death, and
then would have come the awkward question of carrying out the sentence
on individuals whose deeds were looked on, if not with general approval,
at any rate without aversion by the great mass of their countrymen. In
short, it would probably have become necessary either to reprieve them
or to fight the Boers again, since it was very certain that they
would not have allowed them to be hung. Therefore the majority of
the Commissioners, finding themselves face to face with a dead wall,
determined to slip round it instead of boldly climbing it, by referring
the cases to the Transvaal High Court, cheerfully confident of what the
result must be.

After all, the matter was, much cry about little wool, for of all the
crimes committed by the Boers--a list of some of which will be found in
the Appendix to this book--in only three cases were a proportion of the
perpetrators produced and put through the form of trial. Those three
were, the dastardly murder of Captain Elliot, who was shot by his Boer
escort while crossing the Vaal river on parole; the murder of a man
named Malcolm, who was kicked to death in his own house by Boers, who
afterwards put a bullet through his head to make the job "look better;"
and the murder of a doctor named Barber, who was shot by his escort on
the border of the Free State. A few of the men concerned in the first
two of these crimes were tried in Pretoria: and it was currently
reported at that time, that in order to make their acquittal certain
our Attorney-General received instructions not to exercise his right of
challenging jurors on behalf of the Crown. Whether or not this is true
I am not prepared to say, but I believe it is a fact that he did
not exercise that right, though the c