To say that the people in the Concentration Camps were happy would be a gross exaggeration, but to say that they were martyrs would convey an equally false idea. When judging of facts one ought always to remember the local conditions under which these facts have developed. A Russian moujik sent to Siberia does not find that his life there is very much different from what it was at home, but a highly civilised, well-educated man, condemned to banishment in those frozen solitudes, suffers acutely, being deprived of all that had made existence sweet and tolerable to him. I feel certain that an Englishman, confined in one of the Concentration Camps of South Africa, would have wished himself dead ten times a day, whilst the wife of a Boer farmer would not have suffered because of missing soap and water and clean towels and nicely served food, though she might have felt the place hot and unpleasant, and might have lamented over the loss of the home in which she had lived for years. The Concentration Camps were a necessity, because without them thousands of people, the whole white population of a country indeed, amounting to something over sixty thousand people, would have died of hunger and cold. The only means of existence the country Boers had was the produce of their farms. This taken away from them, they were left in the presence of starvation, and starvation only. This population, deprived of every means of subsistence, would have invaded Cape Colony, which already was overrun with white refugees from Johannesburg and the Rand, who had proved a prolific source of the greatest annoyance to the British Government. To allow this mass of miserable humanity to wander all over the Colony would have been inhuman, and I would like to know what those who, in England and upon the Continent, were so indignant over the Concentration Camps would have said had it turned out that some sixty thousand human creatures had been allowed to starve. The British Government, owing to the local conditions under which the South African War came to be fought, found itself in a dilemma, out of which the only escape was to try to relieve wholesale misery in the most practical manner possible. There was no time to plan out with deliberation what ought to be done; some means had to be devised to keep a whole population alive whom an administration would have been accused of murdering had there been delay in feeding it. There was also another danger to be faced had the veldt been allowed to become the scene of a long-continued migration of nations--that of allowing the movements of the British troops to become known, thereby lengthening a war of already intolerable length, to say nothing of exposing uselessly the lives of English detachments, which, in this guerrilla kind of warfare, would inevitably have occurred had the Boer leaders remained in constant communication with their wandering compatriots.