The Rev. John Moffat, son of the famous Dr. Moffat, and himself for a long time resident in South Africa, has sent to a friend in London a letter regarding the relations of the British and Dutch races previous to the war.  Mr. Moffat, throughout his varied experiences, has been a special friend to the natives.  One of his younger sons, Howard, is with a force of natives 60 miles south west of Khama’s town (at the time of writing, December 20th), and Dr. Alford Moffat, another son, was medical officer to 300 Volunteers occupying the Mangwe Pass, to prevent a Boer raid into Rhodesia at that point.

He writes:—­

“1. Had Steyn sat still and minded his own business no one would have meddled with him.  Had Kruger confined himself strictly to self-defence, and we had invaded him, we might have had to blame ourselves.

“2.  To have placed an adequate defensive force on our borders before we were sure that there was going to be war would have been accepted (perhaps justly) by the Boers as a menace.  We did not do it, out of respect for their susceptibilities.

“3.  To most people in South Africa who knew the Boers it was quite plain that Kruger was all along playing what is colloquially known as the game of ‘spoof.’  He never intended to make the slightest concession.

“4.  Take them as a whole, the Boers are not pleasant people to live with, especially to those who are within their power, as the natives have found out sufficiently, and as the British have found out ever since Majuba, and the retrocession of the Transvaal.  The wrongs of the Uitlanders were only one symptom of a disease which originated at Pretoria in 1881, and was steadily spreading itself all over South Africa.

“5.  With regard to the equal rights question, it is quite true that all is not as it ought to be in the Cape Colony.  But the condition of the native in the Transvaal is 100 years behind that of our natives in the Cape Colony, and you may take it as a broad fact that in proportion as Boer domination prevails the gravitation of the native towards slavery will be accelerated.”

In conclusion, Mr. Moffat has this to say of the “Boer dream of Afrikander predominance”:  “We, who have been living out here, have been hearing about this thing for years, but we have tried not to believe it.  We felt, many of us, that the struggle had to come, but we held our peace because we did not want to be charged with fomenting race hatred.”  He refers to Ben Viljoen’s manifesto of September 29th, and to President Steyn’s manifesto, and State Secretary Reitz’s proclamation of October 11th, and says, “When I read these in conjunction with the history of South Africa for the last 18 years, I see that the cause of peace was hopeless in such hands.”

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Almost contemporaneously with the expression of opinion of Dr. Moffat (in 1877), the following report was written by M. Dieterlen, to the Committee of the Missions Evangeliques de Paris:—­