A Committee of loyal subjects to Her Majesty the Queen of the Netherlands, feeling deeply and seriously aggrieved by the ever growing rumours of an impending war between the government of your glorious Queen VICTORIA and the Dutch Republic of South-Africa, has ventured upon a strong appeal to your high-minded sense of justice. Do not think we have been impelled to this act of ours by such a thing as race-feeling, by a partial preference for the Boers who speak our tongue and bear Dutch names? Nothing of the kind. Our fellow feeling for our cousins in South-Africa is duly counterbalanced by the high esteem in which we hold our neighbour nation across the sea, the grand people of the British isles, that has set the ever memorable example to all mankind of how a national community may politically come of age without consuming its moral and intellectual forces in fruitless party-strife. Really, if mere national sympathy were our motive, we might well be in doubt, which side to take. That there has been no question of hesitation is explained by this simple fact; we have been prompted by no personal motive;. we have acted upon an ideal one- our deeply inborn sense of right |