In connection with the publication, by the Rev. J. D. Kestell and Mr. D. E. van Velden, of the official minutes of the Peace Negotiations (together with the official correspondence relating thereto) between the British Government and the Governments of the Orange Free State and the South African Republic, which terminated in the Peace concluded at Vereeniging on May 31, 1902, I do not wish in this introduction to enter into details, but merely to confine my remarks to the great responsibility which rested upon us and to the question, "Was it necessary to conclude Peace?" If it was a task of supreme importance to decide to enter upon the struggle which had been waged, if it was an arduous and difficult duty to carry on the struggle, it was much harder and more difficult to foresee what the result of that struggle would be, and still harder and more difficult to decide to give it up. With how much hope, fear, and anxiety was not the end looked forward to! And when the end came, what did it not cost us to persuade the head to do what the heart refused to perform? What was realised of that hope for which there had been such a struggle, for which so much had been suffered, so much endured, so much sacrificed--the Reader will find in this book. He will also find in it the correspondence which led up to, and was carried on during, the Peace Negotiations; the proceedings at our meetings at Klerksdorp, Pretoria, and Vereeniging; the opinions, views, and grounds upon which the leaders of the people acted, in so far as those were expressed. You will not, however, find here the struggle that took place at Vereeniging within every Delegate between the heart and the head; the intense effort which it cost us to bring ourselves to acknowledge to our powerful enemy that we had been overpowered, exhausted, and were unable to continue the struggle any longer; to acknowledge to ourselves and posterity that our sacrifices, the blood and tears that had been shed, the indescribable anxiety for wife and children, the suffering and death of the thousands of innocent women and children, the awful evils which had fallen to the lot of the rebels, had been all in vain; that we were about to lose all for which we had suffered and sacrificed. All this, I say, you do not find recorded here, but you may read it in the grey hairs of the Delegates to Vereeniging and of our people, in the deep wrinkles on their faces, and in the expression on the countenance of every Boer--that expression which cannot conceal what the soul had to endure. We had already sacrificed much, yet, in spite of all, the hope had inseparably clung to us that no sacrifice, no privation, no loss would be in vain. There at Vereeniging, however, we had to surrender what was dearest to us, we had to stand at the open grave of the two Republics, and we had to say with bowed heads: "We had not hoped, expected, willed for this, but--Thy will be done!"