294 
VISIT TO SOUTH AFRICA. 
From Rhodesia I went to Kimberley, and from there into the Trans¬ 
vaal. There, for the first time for a long period, I saw signs of grass ; 
there had been a little rain, and the green country was very pleasant to 
the eye. The farms comprise there five or six thousand acres, and 
every man must have an amount of land quite out of proportion to his 
stock, otherwise these starve ; he has to have summer and winter veldt 
so as to avoid sickness. 
I saw no wood anywhere except the telegraph posts, and I am not sure 
that they were not iron. 
As to the Boer I should say, after having met a good many, that he is 
a religious agriculturalist, often nomadic. He wants mostly to be let 
alone ; he is very simple, very ungainly, very unkempt and very 
badly clothed. He smokes greatly, and likes to live as “far from the 
madding crowd ” as possible. He consequently sees nothing, hears 
nothing, and knows nothing, and apparently washes nothing. He has 
one failing, or quality, common to Europeans (that satire on govern¬ 
ment), a strong dislike for taxes, as instanced by the fact that before 
the Boer War the Transvaal was in a state of bankruptcy, due to the 
want of payment of taxes. 
As for the religious fervour of the Boers—for instance as shewn in 
President Kruger’s speeches—I believe a great deal in that religious 
fervour. While in Johannesburg their great festival came off, which is 
called Dingaan’s Day. That is celebrated by the Boers because it is the 
anniversary of the day when in ’38 the Zulus were defeated by their 
forefathers. The Boers before the fight vowed that if they defeated the 
12,000 Zulus with their small force of 500, they would keep that as a 
holy day and celebrate it for ever after ; accordingly on Dingaan’s day 
the whole of the Boers in the neighbourhood of Johannesburg and from 
many other parts collected together. 
Let me here point out that the Jameson expedition selected this 
time and Christmas time, when the Boers could so easily mobilize, for 
their demonstration ; the one time in the year when the Boers can 
easily be commandeered. 
But to return to my story. For a few days before Dingaan’s Day 
Johannesburg was simply a hot-bed of rumours ; I never was in such a 
place for rumours. We were told that we were all to be shot down, 
and that armed Boers were riding about ; we heard that Rhodes was 
coming in with 5,000 men, and that the Boers on the Natal frontier 
were shooting down the men in the colony. Every sort of rumour was 
not only being talked about but was appearing in the newspapers. 
Another rumour was to the effect that the Young Boer party was going 
to declare that it would have done with the London Convention on 
Dingaan’s Day. 
After all these rumours I thought it very striking that at Dingaan’s 
Day, when the Boers were assembled, the celebration consisted first of 
a few prayers, and then President Kruger made an address to them. 
But the whole address contained nothing about politics, nothing about 
the questions which were agitating everybody there, but simply was a 
warning against internal dissensions and a prayer for divine help to 
prevent discord. It was in fact a repetition of AEsop’s old fable of the 
bundle of sticks. Now I thought that to be very striking. (Applause.) 
The Boer manages to give the impression of a most contemptuous 
dislike for the Englishman. The ‘ verdompt Englander,’ he terms him, 
who, as someone said, if not fighting him is on his track trying to make 
