The emotion of loyalty at first manifested by the Boers
is said to be exhausting itself, many of them exhibiting a decidedly sullen temper. They are angry at the cession of certain dis- tricts of the Transvaal to Natal, and at the slowness with which the work of repatriation is accomplished. Symptoms of a desire to boycott the Scouts, or Boers who joined the English, are also manifested, and altogether the feeling in Pretoria is reported as much less hopeful. It is unnecessary to attach much importance to these symptoms, which are perfectly natural and excusable in a conquered country, and have not entirely disappeared even yet in Alsace-Lorraine. The foible of young communities is hurry. There will, of course, be order from the beginning, amid which the English settlements will grow numerous and large, and the Boers themselves will become prosperous, but it will be a generation before a kind of sullenness dies out. Jacobitism lasted sixty years, but during that time it only once became a political danger, and it never was a social one. The squires scowled at each other, but they intermarried, and traded together, and readily accepted commissions and con- tracts—especially contracts—from the Crown. Meanwhile, we must be as lenient and just as possible, only taking care that the loyalists, especially the Scouts, do not suffer for their loyalty. Their prototypes in America were disgracefully abandoned ; but then we had no power within the United States.
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