Added to this is the political corruption arising, in the Transvaal, out of conditions in which poor and ignorant farmers have obtained and held, through designing adventurers from Holland, the entire government and control of a State in which gold is being produced in immense quantities, and lavished, as opportunity offers, for the purchase of privileges or powers not obtainable through the usual channels of popular government. [Sidenote: Love of Liberty] What of the Boer love of freedom? There is no more admirable quality in the world than love of liberty; no greater inspiration to gallant deeds, to high ideals, to noble practices. But there are different kinds of liberty. The Iroquois of North American history stalked through his noble forests in all the pride of physical power and the freedom to torture and slaughter his red enemy or white foe whenever and wherever he could. He loved liberty in the sense of doing what he liked. The Dublin assassins of Lord Frederick Cavendish, the Chicago bomb-throwers, the lovers of lynch-law in Southern States, the anarchists of Paris or St. Petersburg, all have feelings of the fiercest nature in favor of freedom. License, however, is not true liberty, nor is the love of independence amongst the Boers a regard for freedom in the ordinary sense of that much-abused word. Of course, there is much that is admirable in the feeling, as there is in any sentiment or aspiration for which men will fight and die--as there was in the freebooting instincts of the old-time Scottish clans; as there was in the loyal passion of the Scottish Highlanders for "Bonnie Prince Charlie;" as there was in the prolonged and desperate struggle of the Southern States for a dying cause; as there is even in the Filipino desire for a sort of wild freedom. In the case of the Boer, however, it is simply an instinctive desire for solitude and for the free practice of certain inbred tendencies, such as hunting, slave-holding and ranching. It can hardly be said to be connected with questions of government or constitution. No Government at all would suit the Boer if it were practicable, and his record shows that an oligarchy is no less agreeable to him than was the one-time division of 15,000 settlers into four republics. He knows little of the struggles of his reputed ancestors in Holland for freedom of the higher kind, and for that equality of religious and racial rights which he is now the first to spurn, and to even fight in order to prevent others from obtaining in parts of South Africa. [Sidenote: Change of Policy]