2110-1-9-4

HIGH COMMISSIONER'S OFFICE,

JOHANNESBURG,

Jan: 16:: 1902

My dear Lady Mary [Murray]

I have long had it in my mind to write to you, but I have been so harried lately that I have had little time for private correspondence. I hear that we are soon to have the pleasure of seeing your father here, and that Morpeth is coming out; also I see that your brother has gone to be one of Chamberlain's secretaries: so you see that whether you will or not you must have some sort of interest in this S. African business. I cant but feel very pessimistic about

the country and quite unconvinced about our methods. I spent some time when I arrived going thoroughly into the history of the war; and my conclusion was that we were just in the right. It seemed to me a case of competing equities, and ours was rather the better. But now I am rather an optimist, and I am convinced that we are overwhelmingly in the right in our reconstruction. There are of course many dangers. At home you are apt to think the Boer the only factor in the problem: out here in the midst of assertive colonials one is apt to regard the Uitlander as the most important factor - very wrongly, I think. There is a great deal of

silly talk of the 'Carthago est delenda' kind. We have to amalgamate, not to destroy: and it is a childish solution of a problem which consists in removing the chief factor.

I am rather grossly overworked, for in addition to my secretarial duties, Lord M. has turned over to me two Govt. departments - Land Settlement and the Boer Refugee Camps. The first is a fascinating and most hopeful work: my views on it you may read in an article which will probably appear in the April 'Edinburgh Review'. The Refugee Camps have made my hair grey. When we took them over they were terrible - partly owing to the preoccupation of the Military with other things, partly to causes inherent in any concentration of people accustomed to live in the sparsely peopled veldt. I shall never forget going thropugh the hospitals 9

months ago, when the children were dying like flies. We have now revolutionised the whole system, and the death rate is down to something nearly normal now. I have visited most camps, and have had to decide in emergencies all kinds of complicated questions of rations, water supply, sanitation and hospital management. I was very much struck by the heroism of some of the nurses, I got Lord M. to write his name in their albums, which pleased them. It has been a hideous grind for everybody, but I think we are all better for having gone through it. I say nothing about the original policy of forming camps: It was certainly not wise: but any one who knows the country admits that it was humane. I am afraid there is one thing I shall never be able to forgive your party for. Radical newspapers are not allowed here, but some

come privately, and when I read the mass of misrepresentations and lies which they have heaped on the Camps, I find it difficult to realise the point of view. If I had little information and no local knowledge, I should try to criticise with a little more modesty and good-breeding.

I have kept very well, though I had two rather nasty turns of dysentery and fever from sleeping