What retribution overtook those nations is also on record. Those
enslaved peoples were forced to accept the religion of their conquerors.
Can true converts be made to order by constraint, motives of
self-interest, or by baptizing them _en bloc_? What else but deepest
aversion and mistrust could a religion inspire which is professed and
taught by a people who practise spoliation, murder, and other
descriptions of wickedness abhorrent even to a savage mind? The
aborigines would daily behold their own land and possessions enjoyed by
usurpers and "would be teachers," who subjected them besides to slavery
and abject misery. Could the religion of such teachers ever find favour
with their victims? How could doctrines of righteousness and love be
understood when so glaringly violated by their preceptors?

It presents a sad paradox to see that the Boers, who are in many
respects consistently religious and even exemplary, could uphold
principles which place coloured people out of caste, not only in regard
to political rights but also as to the common religious standing before
the Creator. It would be unjust to charge the Boers with actually
barbarous practices towards the natives--what they do enforce is their
submission to the condition of servants.

The Boer people ever chafed against the restraining action of the
British Government as to their practice of slavery, and they have not
hesitated either to exhibit their hostility to missionary enterprise.
The confiscation of Protestant mission sites in the Orange Free State is
one of the instances; another was exemplified in a raid perpetrated
about forty years ago by the Transvaal Boers upon the inoffensive
Bechuana tribe, whose chief and many of his people had accepted the
Christian faith through the teaching of Moffat, David Livingstone, and
other evangelists. The pretext for that raid was a lying report that