The Gisborne Times PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. GISBORNE, SEPTEMBER 10, 1901. COLD-BLOODED MURDERS.

Gisborne Times, Volume VI, Issue 209, 10 September 1901, Page 2

The Gisborne Times PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. GISBORNE, SEPTEMBER 10, 1901. COLD-BLOODED MURDERS.

Ook cablegrams this morning show that the Boers are carrying out their threats to murder natives employed as scouts. By mail we are in receipt of tho following comments bearing on the subject : Kruitzinger has not only resolved to shoot all natives in British employ whom he can catch, armed or unarmed, but has carefully written to inform General French of his intention to commit these infamous murders. There are some who will not believe the word of a British war correspondent, or even of British officers and privates, against a Boer. But when a Boer coolly proclaims himself a murderer the evidence is strong enough for the most wilfully sceptical, This is no mere bluff of Ivruitzinger's. The cowardly cruelty which he announces has already begun to be put into effect. 1 xircro T”” 5 t k° v^6 doing to death of the loyal black, Esau, some ‘ lL?o,an d rc |

Kitchener now reveals to us that this kina of cold-blooded crime has become frequent in Cape Colony of late. Even more striking is the official anouneement of what happened when twenty Yeomen and some native scouts were compelled to surrender in the Orange Colony, One wounded Y’eoman was shot by his captors, but they explained that they mistook him for a “ Cape Boy.” If he had been a black man, that is, they would have killed him in cold blood without apologising. Indeed, they had already done as much. They forced the surrendered native scouts to hold up their hands, and then shot them dead. This is the return for forbearance in

restraining the natives throughout South Africa from taking part in the war as combatants, frantically eager though thousands of Basutos and the rest were to wipe off old scores against their hated tyrants. We even refused to , employ Indian cavalry and Gurkhas in this war. valuable though they would have been, so determined were we not to be false to tho white man's duty to his color in Africa. It was sound policy, 1 but we doubt if any other nation, passing through such a stress, would have shown such self-restraint. We have used natives

only as non-combatant auxiliaries, in transport and scouting work ; whereas | armed Kaffirs have Been found before now in captured Boer trenches. Murder is murder, whether the victim’s skin be white or black. The Boer too often regards the black man as a mere chattel, without rights or even a soul, who may be beaten, robbed or slaugatered with less infamy attaching to the man j who does the deed than in a genuinely civilised community is attached to a brute who maltreats a dog or horse. But the Boer who holds these principles and acts upon them is himself a savage, out of the pale !of consideration as a civilised being. The I situation created by this villainous and systematic campaign of crime is very serious. This policy of cowardly butchery must silence the pretence that we are fighting a chivalrous enemy, nr an enemy to whom it is possible to extend any abnormal consideration.