On one point, however, we undoubtedly had a right to interfere, as the stronger, the juster, and more merciful nation—namely, the attitude of the Transvaal Boers towards, and their treatment of, the native tribes who were their neighbours, or who came under their control. On behalf of the latter unfortunates (Transvaal subjects), we did not even profess to interfere; but one of the chief causes alleged by us for our taking possession of the country was a long and desultory war which was taking place between the Boers and Sikukuni, the chief of the Bapedi tribe living upon their northern borders, and in the course of which the Boers were behaving towards the unhappy natives with a treachery, and, when they fell into their power, with a brutality unsurpassed by any historical records. The sickening accounts of cruelties inflicted upon helpless men, women, and children by the Boers, which are to be found on official record in the pages of the Blue-book (C. 1776), should be ample justification in the eyes of a civilised world for English interference, and forcible protection of the sufferers; and it is rather with the manner in which the annexation was carried out, and the policy which followed it, than with the intervention of English power in itself, that an objection can be raised. The war between the Boers and the Bapedi arose out of similar encroachments on the part of the former, which led, as we shall presently show, to their border disputes with the Zulus. Boer farmers had gradually deprived of their land the native possessors of the soil by a simple process peculiarly their own. They first rented land from the chiefs for grazing purposes, then built upon it, still paying a tax or tribute to the chief; finally, having well established themselves, they professed to have purchased the land for the sum already paid as rent, announced themselves the owners of it, and were shortly themselves levying taxes on the very men whom they had dispossessed. In this manner Sikukuni was declared by the Boers to have ceded to them the whole of his territory—that is to say, hundreds of square miles, for the paltry price of a hundred head of cattle.