"9. Exorbitant prices were demanded in the shops.
"10. Parents had been separated from their children.
"Within the Report itself, either in footnotes or in the main body of the Report, Miss Hobhouse mentions that active steps had already been taken to remedy these evils. Tanks had been ordered to boil all the water. She left money to buy another, and supplied every family with a pan to hold boiled water. Soap was given out with the rations. 'Moreover, the Dutch are so very full of resources and so clever they can make their own soap with fat and soda.' The milk supply was augmented; during the drought fifty cows only yielded four buckets of milk daily. 'After the rains the milk supply was better.' An additional supply of nurses were on their way. 'The Sister had done splendid work in her domain battling against incessant difficulties … and to crown the work she has had the task of training Boer girls to nurse under her guidance.'
"Ministers of religion are in residence, and schools under Mr. E.B. Sargant, the Educational Commissioner, are open for boys and girls. Children have been reunited to parents, except that some girls, through Miss Hobhouse's kind efforts, have been moved away from the Camps altogether into boarding schools. Even in this Bloemfontein Camp, notwithstanding all that Miss Hobhouse says of the absence of soap and the scarcity of water, she is able to write: 'All the tents I have been in are exquisitely neat and clean, except two, and they are ordinary.' Another important admission about this Camp is to be found in the last sentence of the account of Miss Hobhouse's second visit to Bloemfontein. She describes the iron huts which have been erected there at a cost of £2,500, and says: 'It is so strange to think that every tent contains a family, and every family is in trouble—loss behind, poverty in front, privation and death in the present—but they have agreed to be cheerful and make the best of it all.'
"There can be no doubt that the sweeping together of about 68,000 men, women and children into these Camps must have been attended by great suffering and misery, and if they are courageously borne it is greatly to the credit of the sufferers. The questions the public will ask, and will be justified in asking, are :
"1. Was the creation of these Camps necessary from the military point of view?
"2. Are our officials exerting themselves to make the conditions of the Camps as little oppressive as possible?
"3. Ought the public at home to supplement the efforts of the officials, and supply additional comforts and luxuries?
"The reply to the first question can only be given by the military authorities, and they have answered it in the affirmative. Put briefly, their statement is that the farms on the veldt were being used by small commandoes of the enemy as storehouses for food, arms and ammunition; and, above all, they have been centres for supplying false information to our men about the movements of the enemy, and correct information to the enemy about the movements of the British. No one blames the Boer women on the farms for this; they have taken an active part on behalf of their own people in the war, and they glory in the fact. But no one can take part in war without sharing in its risks, and the formation of the Concentration Camps is part of the fortune of war. In this spirit 'they have agreed,' as Miss Hobhouse says, 'to be cheerful and make the best of it.'
"The second question—'Are our officials exerting themselves to make the Camps as little oppressive as possible?'—can also be answered in the affirmative, judging from the evidence supplied by Miss Hobhouse herself. This does not imply that at the date of Miss Hobhouse's visit, or at any time, there were not matters capable of improvement. But it is confessed even by hostile witnesses that the Government had a very difficult task, and that its officials were applying themselves to grapple with it with energy, kindness and goodwill. Miss Hobhouse complains again and again of the difficulty of procuring soap. May I quote, as throwing light upon the fact that the Boer women were no worse off than the English themselves, that Miss Brooke-Hunt, who was in Pretoria to organise soldiers' institutes a few months earlier than Miss Hobhouse was at Bloemfontein, says in her interesting book, 'A Woman's Memories of the War': 'Captain — presented me with a piece of Sunlight soap, an act of generosity I did not fully appreciate till I found that soap could not be bought for love or money in the town.' A Boer woman of the working-class said to Miss Brooke-Hunt: 'You English are different from what I thought. They told us that if your soldiers got inside Pretoria they would rob us of everything, burn our houses, and treat us cruelly; but they have all been kind and respectable. It seems a pity we did not know this before.' Miss Hobhouse supplies some rather similar testimony. In her Report she says: 'The Mafeking Camp folk were very surprised to hear that English women cared a rap about them or their suffering. It has done them a lot of good to hear that real sympathy is felt for them at home, and I am so glad I fought my way here, if only for that reason.'