The Boer President refused to think of this, on the precise and often expressed ground that the Uitlanders were a large majority of the people, and there could be no safeguards for the Boer Government if these outsiders and strangers were permitted to have any political rights whatever. The President held indomitably that the "newcomers" and "strangers" should not occupy and possess the country to any degree by force of numbers or merit of industry and property. They were in the "blood-bought land"--that is truthfully applied, especially the native blood, and British blood had been shed copiously, and the land was bloody enough in that sense; but the condition of English-speaking people and all white immigrants in the gold fields, the richest in the world, and the diamond fields, also the richest ever known--the whole output amounting to more than one hundred millions of dollars a year--should be abject submission to an extortionate, tyrannous and brutal caste that respected no human rights and revelled in selfishness, sordidness and personal and racial insolence. [Sidenote: Mr. Kruger's Views on the Question] The initial point at which President Kruger stood through these negotiations, in which he had ample and honorable opportunities to make peace, was that the great communities of English-speaking people were composed of strangers and aliens who must be inferiors. This amounted to a presumption, officially and peremptorily and continuously asserted, that the Boers must, though a minority, and _because they were a minority_, be consecrated by "blood" a ruling caste, a caste whose authority it was impious to dispute, and that they must have confided to them exclusively and forever commanding powers held sacred over the natives they had enslaved; and the English-speaking people they taxed, assessed and restricted, insulted and humiliated with ostentation at their sovereign, savage pleasure. It is a mild and gentle form of expression to say that the behavior of the Boers has been that of a barbarous tribe, and that their conduct has had a nearer correspondence with Zulu savagery than with Christian civilization, and totally lacks the kindliness of the Hottentot. The Boers forced the war with England in the spirit of haughty, tribal, class, racial, contemptuous hostility, and would have it so throughout the Conferences. [Sidenote: The English Language not Permitted]