attacks. During the Spanish-American war we made most uncomplimentary
remarks concerning our short-lived enemy, and more recently we have been
emphasising the vices of our _protégés_, the Filipinos, with a scornful
disregard of their virtues. The Boers, however, have had a greater burden
to bear. They have had cast at them the shafts of British vituperation and
the lyddite of American venom. In a few instances the lyddite was far more
harrowing than the shafts, and in the vast majority of instances both were
born of ignorance. There are unclean, uncouth, and unregenerate Boers, and
I doubt whether any one will stultify himself by declaring that there are
none such of Britons and Americans. I have been among the Boers in times
of peace and in times of war, and I have always failed to see that they
were in any degree lower than the men of like rank or occupation in
America or England. The farmers in Rustenburg probably never saw a dress
suit or a _décolleté_ gown, but there are innumerable regions in America
and Great Britain where similarly dense ignorance prevails. I have been in
scores of American and British homes which were not more spotlessly clean
than some of the houses on the veld in which it was my pleasure to find a
night's entertainment, and nowhere, except in my own home, have I ever
been treated with more courtesy than that which was extended to me, a
perfect stranger, in scores of daub and wattle cottages in the Free State
and the Transvaal. I will not declare that every Boer is a saint, or that
every one is a model of cleanliness or virtue, but I make bold to say that
the majority of the Boers are not a fraction less moral, cleanly, or
virtuous than the majority of Americans or Englishmen, albeit they may be
less progressive and less handsome in appearance than we imagine ourselves
to be.

As I have stated, the politics of the war has found no part in the
following pages, and an honest effort has been made to give an impartial
account of the proceedings as they unfolded themselves before the eyes of