breakers, and then cries out that they are barbarous and uncivilized and must be "coerced" and forced into more assassination, rioting and law breaking. I place the blame where it belongs; and I venture to predict that if England continues her inhuman, morally degrading and worse than Irish policy with the Boers she will turn them into a race of assassins or law breakers. They are now the very reverse of that. They have shown a higher regard for the sacredness of human life than we have to-day in America. They have shown more self-restraint, more respect for personal rights, have dealt more fairly with their opponents than we did in our revolution. They are the superiors of both ourselves and the English and they are inferior to us and the English only in numbers.

There is a great deal of talk of England's success in ruling dependencies. She rules no doubt successfully enough over the servile, over toadies, flunkeys and weaklings or those who have no spirit or love of independence. Wherever she has attempted to rule an independence-loving people as in the case of the Irish, ourselves or the Boers, she has made a most shocking failure of it. Few people trouble themselves to read the long history of England's dealings with the South Africans for nearly a hundred years previous to the present war. It is all detailed in Theal's admirable volumes of the history of South Africa. Theal was himself an Englishman, an official in South Africa, and he prints all documents in full. I must confess I was astonished to read this long record of atrocious injustice, inhumanity, stupidity and cruelty which generation after generation has hammered the Boers into a separate people, given them a long list of martyrs and anniversaries of ferocity and built up in them a fell hatred of the English, which now astonishes men like yourself, who suppose this to be a mere sudden outbreak, and who have not the time, or will not take the trouble, to investigate the long chain of causes which led up to it.

With an independence loving people England has only two methods of success, extermination or banishment. She always rules with complete success over the dead. When with Martinis and Lee Metfords she has slaughtered over 27,000 black or brown men, carrying spears or old-fashioned guns, with a loss on her side of only 387, and with a vast crop of medals and Victoria crosses for the supposed heroes of this supposed wonderful victory, she has unquestionably solved a "problem" in her way.

When, after 700 years of conquests, "colonization," reform bills, final settlements, coercion acts, land acts, hangings, confiscations, corruptions, treachery and broken promises, a large part of the native Irish are living in the United States, where by their steadiness, industry, bright minds and success they contradict and disprove every charge and statement made against them by pottering English statesmen, England may undoubtedly be said to have successfully solved the problem of her "white man's burden" so far as concerns these Irish in the United States.

As to those who remain in Ireland we again hear of coercion, are told that there is to be some more legislation for them which is to be a "final settlement." An Englishman has just written a book to prove that all settlements with such people as the Boers and the Irish should be "finalities" and settle the question. This, he says, is very important.

I notice also that some Irish representatives arrived the other day in New York to collect from Irish-Americans subscriptions in money to enable them to discuss this "final settlement," which has been progressing for 700 years without arousing the least sense of humor in any Englishman whom I ever knew or heard of.

I know however of one settlement which is supposed to have been final. It was a document signed in Paris in the year 1783, by an Englishman whose name is of no importance, but the persons who signed on the other side were Franklin, Adams and Jay. I am wrong to call this a final settlement. It gave us only independence on the land. England still ruled us on the ocean where she searched our ships as she pleased and claimed a suzerainty over us as she has claimed a suzerainty over the Boers, and for the same contemptible purpose, to enable her to watch her chance to destroy our independence.

We remained semi-independent until 1812 when we fought what used to be called the Second War for Independence. There were a great many people in your part of the country who thought we ought not to fight that war. They used your argument. They said what is the use? It will waste money and destroy valuable property, both English and American. What is the use of fighting for a mere sentiment? Let us be governed by sense rather than sentiment. Let us be content with the substantial advantage and the liberty we already have rather than risk it all, and our material interests besides. And you carried this argument so far that you threatened to secede from the Union.

England had secret emissaries here at that time to encourage secession and dissolution in the hope that at any rate she could turn New England and possibly the Middle States into dependencies again. A few years afterwards in our Civil War, she again did her utmost to dismember us; and she would to-day seize with eagerness any similar opportunity. She never gives up her purpose to destroy the political manhood of any people.

If she had the courage of her convictions and intentions and was not afraid of the outcry of the civilized world, she would be much shorter and quicker in her work with the Boers. She would surround the concentration camps of Boer women and children with machine guns and pump into the mass of humanity until that heroic race was extinct. But she prefers the safer and more veiled, but equally infamous, method of slow starvation and disease, of banishment and imprisonment in distant countries to extinguish a race which she hates because she knows she has always done them evil and wrong and because they excel her own people in morals, military intelligence and courage.

She hated our love of independence as she hated Ireland's and it was merely an accident that she did not make of us an Ireland. When she deals with an independence-loving people she makes of them either an Ireland or a United States. And that is the question in South Africa. Shall there be an Ireland in South Africa or a United States of South Africa?

It is most dismal to read of Englishmen suggesting for the Boers the same old methods that were used in Ireland, "colonization," stamping out the native language, stamping out the love of independence, banishment, depriving of weapons, the greatest severity, no mercy. The Irish were deprived of their weapons, even of their shot guns. They were forbidden to have carving knives above a certain length or horses above a certain value. They were "colonized" and their lands taken away from them and given to Englishmen over and over again, in exactly the same manner that Cecil Rhoads now recommends for the Boers. Measures to exterminate their language and their Roman Catholic religion were taken over and over again and were of such relentless severity that no reasonable man could doubt that both the language and the religion would disappear within a generation.

Cromwell went among them with scythes, bullets and Bibles and the war cry of his soldiers was "Jesus and no quarter." The town of Drogheda surrendered to him on his promise that their lives should be spared.