dead, than that you burghers should cease the struggle.”  Another woman was so disappointed and disgusted at the surrender of her husband, that when he arrived at the concentration camp where she was confined she would have none of him, and quitted the camp the same night, making her escape to the Boer lines.  Such women are the mothers of the next generation.  Was it quite prudent on the part of the British to tempt them to rear their children in bitter hatred of the English race?

This liberty-loving feature in the Boer character has been beautifully described in the Leek Times:—­

“The old man, the youth and the stripling, are offering their hearts’ blood as a sacrifice; nor do they think the sacrifice too great, strengthened and urged on by all they believe to be the highest and holiest in religion and principle.  The Boer will fight on, giving his last drop of blood and his last breath for his freedom.  And the women-folk of his land are bearing their share of this task; they do not shrink; they are helping their fathers, brothers, and sons in this fight.  They think no distance too great to travel, no burden too heavy to carry.  The wife, with her little children round her knees, bids her husband a tearful but brave God-speed.  The mother, as she gazes with a full heart on the boy who is as the apple of her eye, bids him go forth and fight in Freedom’s Holy War.  The lass bids her lover take his stand for all that she thinks worth having, esteeming him something less than a coward if he fails to the fight.  Woe betide the oppressors when the women of a nation take up the quarrel.”

Ah! thou mighty Christian England, who hast always prided thyself on being the most liberty-loving of all the Powers that be, how couldst thou have crushed the liberty of two small states?  How couldst thou have torn so mercilessly the noble passions and aspirations of being free and independent from the Boer hearts?  Hast thou verily extinguished by force the highest and holiest ambitions of a free-born people?  Can the mountain torrent rushing down the valley be stemmed in its onward course?  If patriotism is the ideal of a race that nourishes the most indestructible of all passions, then ye have indeed contended against an indestructible element of the Boer nature.

Next to and quite as prominent as this all-absorbing passion for freedom is the religious trait in the Boer character.  As a people they are distinguished from all other nations by their religiosity.  Remembering that they are the offshoot of men and women who perished in France, Holland, England and elsewhere for their faith, one does not wonder that they are religious.  The religion of the Boer forms part and parcel of his very existence.  His mind is imbued with the words and thoughts of Holy Writ.  On a Sunday you will find him with his family, as a rule, attending service in his little chapel.  If he cannot go to church, he will gather his family, increased sometimes by the presence of neighbours, round the family altar, and there he will read his Bible, sing his Psalms, bend his knees and lift up his heart in prayerful adoration to the God of his fathers.