AN APPEAL ON BEHALF OF THE BOERS.

Globe, Volume XXIII, Issue 2178, 17 February 1881, Page 3

AN APPEAL ON BEHALF OF THE BOERS.

The Dutch Press is naturally devoting muoh attention to the course of events at the Cape, and the latest papers to hand from Holland print the following text of an " appeal which, signed by hundreds of reputable men throughout the Netherlands, aims at exciting a sentimental pity and compassion in the breasts of Englishmen for the rebellious Boers of the Transvaal" : " We, the undersigned, as Dutch oitizens, have followed with deep interest the late events affecting the people of the Transvaal, our own flesh and blood by derivation ; and we can no longer repress the feeling of wonder and regret experienced by us when the late Government of England resolved to deprive the Transvaal people of their national independence and subject their small territory to the administration of the English Crown. It would be useless to detail the reasons of our wonder and regret. Many of us at the time, and especially our Prime Minister, entered an energetio protest against the annexation of the Transvaal as an equally impolitic and unjust aot. The people of the Transvaal continued to cherish the hope, and not without reason, that the wrong done them would again be made good. Still, as all these expectations have been disappointed, their patienoe has been exhausted, and in despair they have rushed to arms. We may lament this aot of theirs, but we find it intelligible. For are their forefathers not ours also—the men who, for eighty long and grievous years, struggled for the preservation of their national independence ? And shall the spirit of their ancestors be quenched among them ! No, Britons, you yourselves are a free people, you cannot do otherwise than sympathise with another, if comparatively unimportant race, which your powerful Government, it is true, can exterminate and soatter, but which will never allow itself to be subjugated. And it is this feeling whioh encourages us to direot this appeal to the sense of justice of the British nation. The people of England cannot brook the dishonor whioh must inevitably result from a struggle that is as unequal as it is unjust, from a struggle with a powerless race, with a people who wish for nothing further than to live in peaoe and quiet under their own laws, cultivating the ground that has become their own through stress and peril. And we cherish the hope that this appeal of ours will not remain wholly unattended to. We are still inclined to believe that the voice of public opinion will give a powerful support to the present Government of England in order to enable her Majesty's Ministers to undo an aot of injustice, which, to judge from the liberal professions of the Cabinet, and from its own particular views, should never have been planned and carried out."