Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/270

 They were reproduced by W. T. Stead in London and elsewhere in England, in Australia, and were translated into German, Dutch and the other European languages. They are too long for insertion here, but the following which I published at the time is in the same spirit:

It is all very simple. The tale needs but few words for the telling. The British made up their minds to steal the Transvaal, with its wealth of gold guarded only by herdsmen. The event shows that they were strong enough to steal the Transvaal, and they have stolen the Transvaal. Joan of Arc was burned in the market place of Rouen and she is dead. There are some lessons to be learned from the struggle. That for the British is that, when they go marauding after a puny prey they should grasp it, not with hundreds under a Jamieson, but with hundreds of thousands under a Roberts. The lesson for ourselves is one of ineffable meanness. Never before, since July 4, 1776, did this nation sit by with arms folded and mouth closed and see a great empire strangle a little republic, encouraging on the sly the empire—the same empire which took advantage of our stress and made money by sailing under false colors to drive our commerce off the seas. The glory of the war is all with the Boers, who have lost everything but saved their manhood. The lesson for the world is one of hope. There is still a people in it with pluck enough to resist sordid wrong, regardless of consequence. It is well to know that the highest examples of patriotism in the past are equaled in the present and may appear again in the future. The boy who killed Ross, after the burning of the Capitol at Washington, set a note for mankind, though he lost his life, and organized greed may hereafter hesitate when it reflects that the road to Pretoria was sprinkled with the blood of forty thousand Englishmen, and that the profits of the coveted Rand for a quarter of a century and until Cecil Rhodes shall be dead, have been dissipated. Oom Paul takes his place, not in a niche in the Transvaal, but alongside of Leonidas and Winkelried, of Wallace and William of Orange, among the heroes of all time and the whole world, to incite the brave to effort for the ages yet to come. When the English nation, old and toothless, like the giant in the Pilgrim's Progress, sits by the wayside snarling over the memories of its victories won from the weak in Ireland and India, at Wyoming and St. Helena, with every traveler ready to knock it on the head for its past 256