It will be curious to see what sums are received.
If the sympathy expressed by the Continent was real and not factitious, the fund should quickly reach two or three millions sterling. France should at least be good for £500,000, Germany and Austria together should be able to provide £750,000, Russia ought not to give less than France, and as her people are generous should perhaps give more, while another £500,000 should come from the rest of the Continent if their generosity is anything like equal to their strength of language. If this is accomplished. and the Boers find that their Continental friends are Mends in need and friends indeed, they will have justified their action, at any rate from their own point of view. If, however, the funds raised by them abroad are disappointing in amount, they will find they have committed a grave error. They cannot then fall bank on the generosity of the British public. An appeal first to the Anglophobia of the Continent and to the persons who declared that our offieers and soldiers outraged women and starved children to death with hellish satisfaction, and then to the fathers and sons, wives, mothers, and daughters of those same officers and soldiers, is rather too wide a " straddle," to use a useful Americanism.
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