are ever hostile to us, and are determined to have this country English, and under the thumb of the British Government. We refuse to have the British Government vex us now as it has done in the past. They drove the Transvaal Dutch from the Cape Colony; and they may drive us away if we are not united in opposing this constant British hostility or meddlesomeness with our peculiar habits, principles, and ideas.'" "It is perhaps more correct to say that the Dutch retired before the advance of the English rather than that the English drove them away by persecution." A HINT TO DOWNING STREET. "An over-sensitive English sentiment is at the root of many of the past disturbances. When I was going to South Africa on the _Norman_ the great question of the hour was the indenturing of the Bechuanaland rebels. I talked a good deal with Colonial people on board, and they were not disposed to be reticent about their feelings. They frankly said the British people were just beginning the same old game of meddlesomeness. `Here,' they said, `are rebels whom we have caught in the act of fighting against us, raiding and murdering our fellow-colonists. We pay for the forces to suppress that rebellion; we have taken hold of the prisoners who have surrendered. We do not know what to do with them better than to distribute them, with their own consent, among the farmers for a term of five years, instead of imprisoning them, and thereby making them non-productive and a burden to the State. If we had sent them back to their own country, they would simply have died, or made it very dangerous for anyone with property to go near their country, and we should have had to begin again. You English say it is a form of slavery. We deny it. It is no more than Sir Charles Warren did in 1878. What the British Government did in 1878 we are doing now. Don't you suppose that, having given us an almost independent Government, we have got plenty of pious, well-educated, intelligent men as capable of looking after our morals as the civilised people of England? Why do you all the time place English sentiment in opposition to us, with a view of tyrannising over us? We make our laws, and can correct them if they are wrong. We do not want you to interfere all the time. Our lives and our property, the welfare of our wives and children, depend upon good government. But immediately we do anything you raise the cry that we are barbarous and wicked, and are reducing rebels to the state of slaves, and thus you excite and disturb the people.' `Supposing,' said one of the speakers, `that the majority of the British nation were inclined to that opinion, and believed that we were so wickedly disposed as to subject our coloured people to a condition of slavery, Parliament would raise the question, and very possibly, if the sentiment has taken deep hold of your people, would pass a law to prevent it. Then a collision of interests would take place--Boers against English.