These People Were As Near Akin To Us As Any Race Which Is Not
Our Own.
They were of the same Frisian stock which peopled our own
shores.
In habit of mind, in religion, in respect for law, they
were as ourselves. Brave, too, they were, and hospitable, with
those sporting instincts which are dear to the Anglo-Celtic race.
There was no people in the world who had more qualities which we
might admire, and not the least of them was that love of
independence which it is our proudest boast that we have encouraged
in others as well as exercised ourselves. And yet we had come to
this pass, that there was no room in all vast South Africa for both
of us. We cannot hold ourselves blameless in the matter. 'The evil
that men do lives after them,' and it has been told in this small
superficial sketch where we have erred in the past in South Africa.
On our hands, too, is the Jameson raid, carried out by Englishmen
and led by officers who held the Queen's Commission; to us, also,
the blame of the shuffling, half-hearted inquiry into that most
unjustifiable business. These are matches which helped to set the
great blaze alight, and it is we who held them. But the fagots
which proved to be so inflammable, they were not of our setting.
They were the wrongs done to half the community, the settled
resolution of the minority to tax and vex the majority, the
determination of a people who had lived two generations in a
country to claim that country entirely for themselves.
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