Now these picturesque and comfortable residences of such varying
architecture, whose furniture I could just see through open windows and
doors, and bespoke great wealth and taste, you must bear in mind would
adorn Birmingham or Manchester. Imagine miles of such houses crowded
with fair occupants and troops of daintily-clad children, their long
hair floating in the wind as they sported in snowy garments on the lawns
and amid the flowers, and then my surprise and something more as I
suddenly came in view of a fort, which the rude Boers have built to
terrorise this community. The superb ridge, which seemed to me with its
beautiful houses and gardens a veritable Paradise after four thousand
miles of travel over treeless plains, and which would certainly be an
ornament to any city on the globe, had in its centre a large and ugly
earthwork, behind which were monstrous Krupp guns to lay waste this
Eden, should the humanity of Johannesburg ever be driven by despair to
strive physically for the rights of freemen. The mere suggestion of it
is brutish, and a Government which can coolly contemplate such a
possibility and frighten timid women and young children with such horrid
prospects, are only fit to be classed with the Herods of the Dark Ages.