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ignorance or malice has invented to stimulate antagonism. The mind of both races has been little else than a vast maw of credulity, incapable of testing statements or of weighing evidence.

Most of the South Africans whose statements have been accepted here as independent first-hand evidence have had a very narrow, purely local, experience in some towns of the Colony or the Republics; very few have mixed with the Boers, still fewer can speak the Taal. The outlander of Johannesberg, in particular, whose voice. was heard with so much respect as proceeding from the spot, had virtually no knowledge of the Boer burgher population; and even the grievances of which he prated so freely, he had learned from his newspapers and his League. The slightest investigation of the innumerable statements from South Africa discloses the fact that nine-tenths of this evidence is the mere reproduction of the paragraphs of those very newspapers which I have named. The saloon, the club, the train, and other common avenues of conversation helped in the work of propaganda; and politics, propagated by short stories and bar tittle-tattle, contained perhaps one part of truth to ten of loose embroidery.