there are a great number, have not shown themselves in any way unworthy of
their forbears. South Africa has its statesmen and politicians who, having
been born there, understand perfectly well its necessities and its wants.
Unfortunately, for a time their voices were crushed by the new-comers who
had invaded the country, and who considered themselves better able than
anyone else to administer its affairs. They brought along with them fresh,
strange ambitions, unscrupulousness, determination to obtain power for the
furtherance of their personal aims, and a greed which the circumstances in
which they found themselves placed was bound to develop into something
even worse than a vice, because it made light of human life as well as of
human property.

In any judgment on South Africa one must never forget that, after all,
before the war did the work of a scavenger it was nothing else but a vast
mining camp, with all its terrifying moods, its abject defects, and its
indifference with regard to morals and to means. The first men who began
to exploit the riches of that vast territory contrived in a relatively
easy way to build up their fortunes upon a solid basis, but many of their
followers, eager to walk in their steps, found difficulties upon which
they had not reckoned or even thought about. In order to put them aside
they used whatever means lay in their power, without hesitation as to
whether these answered to the principles of honesty and
straightforwardness. Their ruthless conduct was so far advantageous to
their future schemes that it inspired disgust among those whose ancestors
had sought a prosperity founded on hard work and conscientious toil. These
good folk retired from the field, leaving it free to the adventurers who
were to give such a bad name to England and who boasted loudly that they
had been given full powers to do what they liked in the way of conquering
a continent which, but for them, would have been only too glad to place
itself under English protection and English rule. To these people, and to