“Oh,” said my companion, “it is only what many people expected. The Boers have never been satisfied about being under England. Plenty of them are sensible enough, and think that the proper thing to do is to attend to their farms and grazing cattle; but there are a set of discontented idiots among them who have stirred them up with a lot of political matter, telling them they are slaves of England’s tyrannical rule, and that it is time to strike for their freedom, till they have believed that they are ill-treated. So now they have risen, and say that they are going to drive all the Rooineks, as they call us English, into the sea, quite forgetting that if we had not helped them the savage tribes around them would have overrun their country and turned them out.”
“Will they drive us into the sea?” I asked.
“What do you think?” said Denham, with a laugh. “Do you think we are the sort of people to let a party of rough farmers turn us out of Natal, just because they have been stirred up to fight by a gang of political adventurers? Is your father going to give up his farm that he has spent years of his life in making out of the wilderness?”
“What?” I cried angrily. “No! I should think not.”
“Well, that’s bringing it home to you, my lad. I said your father’s farm. His is only one instance.”
“It isn’t as if we wanted to turn the Boers out,” I said.
“Of course not. All we want is for them to behave like peaceable neighbours, and obey the laws. They want what they call freedom, which is as good as saying that English laws make people slaves. We don’t feel much like slaves—do we?”
“Is that the reason they are at war with us?”
“Something of that kind,” said the Lieutenant, “as far as I understand it. All politics, and they are the most quarrelsome things in the world. People are always fighting about them somewhere.”
“But—” I began.