But, he asked, what nation engaged in war has at any time, in any country, or under any conditions, endeavoured to feed, clothe, house, nurse, doctor, and educate 150,000 persons, who have been left on their hands by the enemy, whom they had called on--as Lord Roberts did on two occasions--to take over and maintain their own belongings, but who said they would leave them on our hands. And again, he explained that far from any inhumanity being shown the enemy, many of the troubles had been prolonged by excessive leniency to men who, on many occasions, had violated the rules of civilised warfare. For the last year and before it there had been instances of firing on ambulances, professing to surrender and opening fire again, or firing on the wounded, breaches of parole and treachery, which had provoked no retaliation, no deviation from the usages of the civilised warfare on our part. He put forth reasons which accounted for the abnormal death-rate in the concentration camps, showing in the first place that a death-rate in a camp whence all the healthy males have been removed, cannot be looked on as an ordinary death-rate. He said: "If you look only at infants, it has been pointed out that in the thirty-three great towns of the Kingdom the mortality is 248 per 1000. Birkenhead goes up even to 362 per 1000. Therefore, those who compare the death-rate in these camps with the ordinary death-rate of the great towns are, of course, speaking wrongly. I have heard of people who think that measles cannot have much effect on the death-rate. But what of the _gardes mobiles_ of Paris during the siege, whose death-rate was 40 per cent. in measles cases?" The critics who had discussed the camps had not taken the trouble to acquaint themselves with the ordinary statistics of Boer farm life, for, had they done so, they might have taken into consideration the fact that though many Boers had families of twenty children, as a rule, owing to the neglect, ignorance, or apathy of the parents, only two to a family survived. For this reason their population has not been equal to that of other nations in the same conditions. It is only by a study of the habits of life of these people prior to the English rule that it is possible to judge whether they had in the camps the comfort they were accustomed to. Luxury is but comparative, and, as has been shown, the luxury of soap and other sanitary precautions were ignored by the lower classes of Boers from earliest times. In regard to the matter of diet, that these persons received food at all was a marvel, considering that every convoy had to be protected from their marauding relatives by the lives of our own valiant men, men who themselves were not without anxiety as to how their own wives, mothers, and babes were faring at home in their absence, and who themselves, after a long career of hazard and usefulness, might share a less enviable fate.