Excerpt from A Narrative of the Boer War: Its Causes and Results

The circumstances which impelled the Boers of the Transvaal to fight for independence in the years 1880 and 1881 were many, yet it is not a difficult matter to sum up the causes which urged this handful of uncultured farmers to engage in the desperate task of throwing off the to them hateful British yoke. There can be little doubt that an outbreak of hostilities was precipitated by one flagrant act of injustice on the part of the Government at Pretoria, and that at a time when the suspicion first entered the minds of well-informed and thoughtful men in the country that the Boers meant to carry out their threat to fight for their liberty, failing all attempts by agitation to regain their independence. The flagrant act of injustice I have alluded to, I will detail later on, when giving an account of the 'Bezhuidenot' affair. How these descendants of the Dutch Calvinists and Huguenots of the seventeenth century succeeded in the field, armed only with rifles, against the trained and disciplined troops of England, beyond all expectation, and so gained for themselves and their cause that attention which their voices had never been able to command, will be read in history with wonder.

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