AFRICAN OPINION ON THE WAR.

Press, Volume LVII, Issue 10589, 24 February 1900, Page 5

AFRICAN OPINION ON THE WAR.

TO THE EDITOR Of THE TRESS. Sir,—The following are extracts from two letters written from South Africa j they may be of interest to your readers,' as showing what men who have lived there over fifty years think of the war.-'-Yours, etc., J. HOLLAND. [Extracts.] . The Sussex "Daily News" prints extracts from a letter written*at Pietermaritzburg by the Dean, who _as been in South Africa since 1849:—"Up to this time God's chastening hand has been heavy on the English in South Africa, in the sufferings which so many -hundreds of our women have had to endure, and are still enduring, and nothing but poverty fronts, we may say, thousands. But I look forward to the English supremacy being re-established in the end. . . I do so because the Transvaal Government, is a military oligarchy, corrupt, oppressive, and blindly ambitious, always aims at being just and generous. So, while the Transvaal would scornfully tread us under foot, we are ready to give the Dutch everywhere equal rights with ourselves. ~ .

Therefore it is that I trust to see the Queen's sovereignty upheld, but how soon God only knows. The war is -civil war, reaching from Capetown to Delagoa Bay, and the Dutch have been diligently preparing for it for twenty years; but I 'hope the energy with which they have commenced the war will hasten the end. 4 They have apparently brought their whole force into the field, having $e_iselves no reserves to fall back upon. Their efforts must, consequently expend themselves in a> short time, and then let us pray that peace may be restored." The Rev. J. S. Moffat, son of the celebrated. Dr. Moffat, writes from to the "Mission. World" in a letter dated November 4th:—"Yet the war now going, on between white men is being watched by the natives with intense concern. As, one of them put it to mc the other day, "If the English.win, then we black men can breathe and live; if the Boers win, then we may as well die, for we shall be no more looked upon as men but as cattle; so we will gohomeand pray to God to make the arms of the English strong." And' this is really the question of the day in South Africa: axe we to 'have all men—British, Boer, and aboriginal—dwelling together with equal rights as men under the British flag, or, are we to have the domination of a Boer oliga,rcfhy; over British and blacks alike? In the Transvaal a black man is not a human being."