Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/283

 *terbury and Mr. Davis, while Adelaide rode in front with the driver. Mr. Atterbury frequently tapped Bristow on the back with his cane, and said: "Too fast!" and Bristow slowed up for a time, but in a few minutes would be running faster than ever. The South-African roads are naturally good, as they are in western Kansas. Our road lay along the railway, and every mile or two there was a stone block-house, erected by the English during the Boer war, for the protection of the railroad. This line of block-houses extends from Capetown to a point four hundred miles beyond Johannesburg, a distance of something like fourteen hundred miles. The Boer war almost ruined South Africa, and resulted in the death of 25,000 English soldiers, and probably 4,000 Boer soldiers. In the concentration camps of the English, it is said 22,000 Boer women and children died, because of conditions which resembled the conditions under Weyler in Cuba. England spent millions and almost billions in the war; yet it was brought on by a handful of alien Jews. War is the most wicked, senseless thing men engage in No one disputes that the Boers were terrible fighters. Mr. Davis recalled a limerick composed by an English soldier during the war. It ran in this way: "There was an old Boer who hid in a trench with a bullet-proof lid. And when the English came nigh, he said with a sigh, 'I can bag the whole lot'—and he did." South Africa does not encourage immigration. The Boers are in control, and they do not want new-comers, since they know that the immigrants must come mainly from England, and that every immigrant means another vote against them Mr.