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With Steyn and De Wet by Philip Pienaar
page 64 of 131 (48%)
the latter unflinchingly beat back the tremendous horde of maddened
blacks that flung themselves against the hastily drawn circle of
waggons. Does not one old lady still bear the scars of the nineteen
stabs she received on that day? Our women are women indeed, and worthy
mothers of the race that yet shall people all Africa and rule itself.

Do not think I am flying too high. The average Boer family numbers ten
children. Boys are in the majority. If at present we have thirty
thousand warriors (I am not counting the wasters), it follows that in
two generations we shall have three hundred thousand. Taking the
proportion then, as now, of ten to one, Britain will have to employ
against us in 1940 no less than three million men! And when that time
comes, the children of to-day will have the recollection of the
concentration camps and of a few other little trifles to strengthen
their backbone.

The concentration camps! Fit subject for Dante, who in the _Divina
Comedia_ portrays as no other can the maddened heart of a father doomed
to see his children waste away before his very eyes. There are many
relentless Ugolins among the Boers to-day.

I firmly believe that a steady process of infanticide was never intended
to be the _raison d'ĂȘtre_ of these camps; no civilised nation could
deliberately sanction a system cemented with the bones and blood of
innocent babes. And the British are a civilised nation.

No, the fault does not lie in the system itself, but in its application.
It is a humane idea carried out inhumanely, so inhumanely that when the
Black Hole of Calcutta is forgotten Englishmen will still hang their
heads for shame at the mention of concentration.
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