THE SILENCE OF THE PROBOERS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 11987, 9 June 1902, Page 4

THE SILENCE OF THE PROBOERS.

The Pro-Boer element in the United Kingdom is for the moment reduced to silence by the failure of its agitation to prevent the triumph of the Chamberlain policy. On the Continent, the kindred element is dumbfounded at the mutual friendliness exhibited by the lately fighting Boer and British. But it is not to be expected that this will continue. The embittered hatred of their own nationality displayed by the Camp-bell-Bannerman faction and of all things British by the sympathetic Pro-Boers of the Continent was too deep to be suddenly eliminated. We shall hear it again, in some other guise, but still unmistakably. Our safeguard will be that those who have libelled and slandered our troops and have encouraged the enemy can never again win public trust and confidence, will always be branded as traitors or counted as antagonistic and alien. And we may hope that the bitter experience of the Boer people will cause them to be equally distrustful of the Athenian verbosity of their pretended sympathisers. .If not disturbed by these false friends, the wounds of the past war promise to close with unexampled rapidity and to leave South Africa among the most loyal of our British dominions. But in South Africa, as in London and Berlin, those who fought us with their tongues are much more bitter than those who fought us with the rifle, and from these former any trouble that may arise is sure to start. In the ' day of peace, as in the day of war, we may well ask whether our Imperial toleration of treason—so long as it is confined to words not an injustice to those who are incited by coward-counsellors to hatred, rebellion and ruin. £