In this awful turning point in the history of South Africa, on the eve of the conflict which threatens to exterminate our people, it behoves us to speak the truth in what may be, perchance, our last message to the world.  Even if we are exterminated the truth will triumph through us over our conquerors, and will sterilise and paralyse all their efforts until they too disappear in the night of oblivion.

Up to the present our people have remained silent; we have been spat upon by the enemy, slandered, harried, and treated with every possible mark of disdain and contempt.  But our people, with a dignity which reminds the world of a greater and more painful example of suffering, have borne in silence the taunts and derision of their opponents; indeed, they elected out of a sense of duty to remedy the faults and abuses which had crept into their public administration during moments of relaxed vigilance.  But even this was ascribed to weakness and cowardice.  Latterly our people have been represented by influential statesmen and on hundreds of platforms in England as incompetent, uncivilised, dishonourable, untrustworthy, corrupt, bloodthirsty, treacherous, etc., etc., so that not only the British public, but nearly the whole world, began to believe that we stood on the same level as the wild beasts.  In the face of these taunts and this provocation our people still remained silent.  We were forced to learn from formal blue books issued by Her Majesty’s Government and from dispatches of Her Majesty’s High Commissioner in South Africa that our unscrupulous State Government, and our unjust, unprincipled, and disorderly administration, was a continual festering sore, which, like a pestilential vapour, defiled the moral and political atmosphere of South Africa.  We remained silent.  We were accused in innumerable newspapers of all sorts of misdeeds against civilisation and humanity; crimes were imputed to us, the bare narration of which was sufficient to cause the hair to rise with horror.  If the reading public believe a hundredth part of the enormities which have been laid at the door of our people and Government, they must be irresistibly forced to the conclusion that this Republic is a den of thieves and a sink of iniquity, a people, in fact, the very existence of which is a blot upon humanity, and a nuisance to mankind.  Of the enormous sums which we are alleged to have spent out of the Secret Service Fund in order to purchase the good opinion of the world there has been no practical result or evidence, for the breath of slander went on steadily increasing with the violence of a hurricane.  But our people remained silent, partly out of stupidity, partly out of a feeling of despairing helplessness, and partly because, being a pastoral people, they read no newspapers, and were thus unaware of the way in which the feeling of the whole world was being prejudiced against them by the efforts of malignant hate.