For five years I lived among them as a teacher on their farms, sometimes among the more cultured, and sometimes among the more primitive but not one whit less lovable and intelligent, class. Sometimes for eighteen months I did not see an English face and was brought into the closest mental contact with them which is possible--the mental contact between teacher and taught. Watching them in all the vicissitudes of life, from birth to marriage and death, I learnt to love the Boer, but more, I learnt to admire him. I learnt that in the African Boer we have one of the most intellectually virile and dominant races the world has seen; a people who beneath a calm and almost stolid surface hide the intensest passions and the most indomitable resolution. Among the peoples of Europe I have been thrown into contact with, the Swiss and the Tyrolese of remote Alpine villages most resemble the African Boer; but there is a certain quiet but high-spirited indomitableness and an unlimited power of self-control which is characteristic of the average Boer man and above all the average Boer woman, which I have not met with in an equal degree in any other races, though individuals in all races may be found possessing it, and certain Boers of course have it not. It has been asked me more than once, on what ground I based the statement made before the present war began, in papers futilely written in the hope of preventing it, that, if England made war on the Republics, she would have to send out at least one hundred and fifty thousand soldiers to attack these small states, and that even then there was a possibility that the red African mier-kat might ultimately creep back into its hole in the red African earth, torn and bleeding, but alive--it has been asked how I came to form this opinion, when military authorities, keen financiers and politicians held that at most twenty thousand soldiers and a few months would see the Republics crushed. To this I have only one answer. I based my statement on my knowledge of the character of the Boer men, but above all of the Boer women. The measure of its women is ultimately the measure of any people's strength and resistile power. With the mother of the Gracchi, the Roman Republic in its might and vitality: with the effete Roman woman of a later period, the decadent Empire. The heart of the Boer woman is the true citadel of her people; and while that remains unbroken, though every city be taken and every village and farm-house burnt, the people is yet to crush. I have been blamed for an excessive love of the race, and an unwillingness to see its faults: but I hardly think this is true.