At the very beginning of that contest our forces were of an irregular and guerilla character. The farmers, who attacked the British regulars at Lexington and followed them back to Boston picking them off from behind stone fences and trees, were the most irregular fighters it is possible to imagine. They were not acting under the authority of any legitimate or even a _de facto_ government. They were not even officered, directed or authorized by the rebel Continental Congress, which had met the year before in Philadelphia. They were acting in a purely voluntary manner in obedience to a mere sentiment of that faction of the colonists who resented an invasion from Great Britain and wanted this country for their own. They were acting in the same manner and on the same sentiment by which the Boers now act and which you say is a crime. It is very important to remember that the moral position of the Boers is vastly stronger than was ours. Before the present Boer war began the Boers were two independent nations whose independence had been acknowledged by England on two or three different occasions and in two or three different documents. We were not independent and never had been. We were colonies and some of our communities were not even charter colonies; they were crown colonies; and one of the charter colonies, Pennsylvania, had a clause in its charter acknowledging the right of parliament to tax as it pleased. Our revolution was an out and out rebellion against legitimate control because we wanted to govern ourselves; because we did not want to be governed by people who lived three thousand miles away in another and far separated country; because we did not want to be taxed by the outsider; because we did not want him to maintain an army amongst us to keep us in order, because we did not want him to regulate our commerce or our manufacturing industries; because in short, we wanted to keep house for ourselves and believed that the colonial position was at its best essentially a degradation to manhood or as we called it at that time "political slavery." If the Boers are wrong in defending against England by guerilla methods an independence long since acknowledged, then we were ten thousand times wrong in supporting by the same methods a rebellion for independence against that same country which it is said can rule any people better than those people can rule themselves.