seeing a Boer, and the acquaintance of the Boer farmers with their British fellow-citizens is often confined to the occasional visit of an official. The two races do not come into personal contact at very many points of daily life.
The result of this separation is that our view of the present relations of the two races is almost entirely dependent upon the attitude of the Boer leaders to the Government of the Colony. It is not a bad clue. The Boers are extraordinarily amenable as a people to organization, and their traditions are autocratic These leaders—some of them survivors of the old Kruger oligarchy, and some new men thrown into prominence by the war—have undoubtedly got their following well in hand; and their own attitude—there is no disguising the fact—has not up to the present been encouraging. They have refused altogether to help in the administration of their country; they have lost no opportunity of disparaging the efforts of the Government; they have recently established a separate political organization for Boers as such. Bearing in mind the solid allegiance of this people to their self-constituted leaders, it is not putting it too strongly to describe the general Boer frame of mind as one at least of passive hostility to the new régime.
And yet the situation, even in the Transvaal, is not by any means so hopeless as it seems at first sight. People are just beginning to realize that they expected too much of the mere conclusion of peace, and that this attitude of the Boers is not in the least surprising. After all, they say, it is only reasonable that any conquered people should feel its position keenly. A people which began its separate existence, as the Boers did, in a national exodus, and ended it in a national war, must clearly have in an unusual degree the qualities of solidarity and self-respect. Hostility was to be expected for some time to come, and ingratitude and misrepresentation are its natural weapons. This is true enough, and such proper appreciation of the real
