Very Touching Lament

"You wish to know why our little handful of people are about to die ? You wish to know why the vaunting bearer of the white man's burden is about to transform South Africa ino the white man's grave?

"Did you ever read Evangeline, hat pitiable tale of love, sorrow and death - and the end?"

There were tears in the eyes of he young Boer, and the strong voice trembled with emotion.

Daniel J.Wessels, a first cousin of President Steyn, of the Orange Free State, and who has four brothers, six cousins, three nephews and three uncles in the Boer forces near Ladysmith, could hardly control himself as he sorrowfully expressed the sentiment of his doomed people. Jack, as his friends call him, is a student at Ann Arbor, but may leave the university to die and be buried with his kin among the kopjes and veldts of his faraway home.

"I will tell you why we cannot win - why the Afrikaner nation will perish like a tribe of miserable savages, why we will remain in the ruemory of the world only as the dim legendary story of the Arcadians has remained with you,becoming dimmer and dimmer as the generations pass.

"We are a people who do not love to fight, but we would die rather than lose our honor and our homes. Today there are thousands upon thousands of wives and mothers who are parting with their last children, their husbands. Side by side, the father and the son leave the cottage door. Again and again they turn and wave a parting hand at the lonely, weeping woman, and the little children beside her. She stands and watches them - strains her aching eyes until at last nothing but the rolling veldt, the tall waving grass and the quietly grazing herds relieve the weary vision. Does she realize the significance of that farewell ? Can she know - can she doubt ?"

 Young Wessels turned his heartbroken face to a picture in his hand. ' 'Perhaps you have lost a mother, ' he said, huskily, "but that is not much. Perhaps you have lost a father, but that may be even less. Death may have taken sisters and brothers from you - but listen! Has God so scorned your confidence in him that he has declared you an outcast upon the face of the earth - that he has allowed a usurper, a "bearer of the white man's burden," to rob you of all that which makes life worth the living - a heritage sanctified by the Creator - the right of a name, a heart, and a soul ?

"Don't you see why we cannot win - why we are doomed to the miserable destruction that has fallen upon so many of the smaller nations of the earth? The soldiers of Great Britain come to our country with a picture of glory ever hovering before their eyes. Their homes are safe in a faraway land; their dear ones are as free from starvation and danger as you and I, and their only care, their sole intent, is to work the demolition of those innocent homes wherein dwell a people who have the courage to claim the rights of a nation!

"Why?

"Does not each day bring its bit of evidence which goes to make clear the British policy in South Africa ? It is a mere pretense, a rank hypocrisy, to cloak her real designs, this assumption that her only intention in her differences with our republic is to secure to the outlanders certain rights which were denied them! She had already determined upon war, no matter what concessions were made short of placing the republic under the absolute control of England, and the effort to put the odium of war upon the Transvaal is only a cunning endeavor to deceive the world.

"We Boers had planned for a Dutch confederacy in South Africa, and England was afraid. Since the days of Majuba Hill, and long years before, she has coveted the wonderfully resourceful country of the Afrikander nation, only awaiting a pretext whereby she might pour her troops across the frontier without arousing the antipathy of the world.

"The day is nearly ended. Already we see the sun fast sinking in the west. A few short months of terrible agony, one mighty effort to die like martyrs, and the life of the South African republic will pass away like a breath of sweet air, and he brave 500 of the 'great trek,' the fathers, mothers and sons who conquered the wilderness of darkest Africa, will soon pass from the annals of history. Then once more we will 'trek,' northward,of course, into the wilderness beyond the Zambesi."