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
Briton knew that Great Britain claimed to be the paramount power in
South Africa, and so he felt as if his own land, to which he might
have looked for protection, was conniving at and acquiescing in his
ill treatment. As citizens of the paramount power, it was
peculiarly galling that they should be held in political
subjection. The British, therefore, were the most persistent and
energetic of the agitators.
But it is a poor cause which cannot bear to fairly state and
honestly consider the case of its opponents.
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