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Truly, this must have been an interesting meeting. Before leaving these unsavoury subjects, I must touch on the question of slavery. It has been again and again denied, on behalf of the Transvaal Boers, that slavery existed in the Republic. Now, this is, strictly speaking, true; slavery did not exist, but apprenticeship did the rose was called by another name, that is all.

He is inspector of schools, and his history is a text-book whose purpose is the instruction of the Natal English youth. After the seizure of the Transvaal and the suppression of the Boer government by England in 1877, the Boers fretted for three years, and made several appeals to England for a restoration of their liberties, but without result.

The mail train from the Transvaal to Cape Town was stopped at Vereeniging, and the week's shipment of gold for England, amounting to about half a million pounds, was taken by the Boer Government. In a debate at Cape Town upon the same day the Africander Minister of the Interior admitted that as many as 404 trucks had passed from the Government line over the frontier and had not been returned.

"England just wants to annex the Transvaal, and no doubt the Orange Free State too. This we know; but what she does not know is, that we can at this moment reverse the tale we can seize in one day Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, East London, and Durban, and within a very short time turn every Englishman out of the Colonies, out of the land which England has robbed us of."

They had gathered far too much experience concerning the state of things in South Africa to nurse illusions as to the results of a war which was bound to put an end to the corruption of the Transvaal Republic.

The right was reserved to revoke any and all privileges to receive letters, papers, parcels and money, which were enjoyed by British prisoners in the Transvaal, should the fact be sufficiently proved that Boer or Afrikander prisoners in the hands of the English authorities were not receiving kind and humane treatment, or were being denied privileges similar to those enjoyed by British prisoners in the Republic.

Even so in the Transvaal it is said that some English scouts came upon a peaceful valley with a settlement of Dutch farmers therein, who had to be told about the War to check their embarrassing hospitality. The parallel fails, however, for the wild white cattle of Ancester Park paw the earth up and charge, when they see strangers.

The permanence and security of British sovereignty in South Africa is not a matter of indifference to his Majesty's Ministers. Surely no honourable Member believes that we could wish to cheat the British race in the Transvaal of any numerical preponderance which may properly belong to them. Equally with our political opponents we desire to see the maintenance of British supremacy in South Africa.

One-tenth of the thunderstorms that broke over my luckless head would, had they but visited the mountain saddle a couple of weeks previously, have made an independent man of me. This was quite typical of my luck. Mosquitoes were a terrible plague in the Transvaal. I shall never forget my experiences one night close to the source of the Vaal River.

To the east they raided Zululand, and succeeded, in defiance of the British settlement of that country, in tearing away one third of it and adding it to the Transvaal. To the west, with no regard to the three-year-old treaty, they invaded Bechuanaland, and set up the two new republics of Goshen and Stellaland.