LETTERS TO . THE EDITOR.
THE BOERS AND THE NATIVES.
[To THE EDITOR OP THE "SPECTATOR."] Sin,—It is instructive to note how completely your remarks on this subject in the Spectator for August 24th are in accord with the personal impressions of Dr. Livingstone. Iss his "Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa," Pub' lished in 1857, he writes (p. 31) "It is difficult for a person in a civilised country to conceive that any body of men possessing the common attributes of humanity (and these Boers are by no means destitute of the better feelings of our nature) should with one accord set out, a' ter loading their own wives and children with caresses, and proceed to shoot_ in cold blood men and women, of a different colour, it is true, but possessed of domestic feelings "ad affections eqUal to their own. It was long- before I coal
give credit to the tales of bloodshed told by native witnesses ; end bad I received no other testimony but theirs. I should probably have continued sceptical to this day as to the truth of the accounts; but when I found the Boers themselves, some bawailing and denouncing, others glorying in the bloody scenes in which they had been themselves the actors, I was compelled to admit the validity of the testimony and try to account for the cruel anomaly." And again (p. 33) "I can never cease to be most unfeignedly thankful that I was not born in a land of slaves. No one can understand the effect of the unutterable meanness of the slave-system on the minds of those who, but for the strange obliquity which prevents them from feeling the degradation of not being gentlemen enough to pay for services rendered, would be equal in virtue to ourselves Fraud becomes as natural to them as paying one's way' is to the rest c•f mankind."
Thus the testimony of the great African explorer and philan- thropist, more than forty years ago, supports your judgment as to the moral injury which inevitably results to a white race from cruel treatment of a black one.—I am, Sir, dx., 116 Westbourne Terrace, W. P. V. SMITH.
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