I have made these lengthy statements and quotations for the sake of reminding you that the man who was responsible for your existence and also very largely for the existence of the revolution, faced with his eyes open the very state of affairs which you say should in conscience and good morals compel a man to surrender and give up. He faced a far worse state of affairs than the Boers face, and he had less excuse for his conduct.
He, however, did not follow your advice; and one reason may have been that his wife, whose blood is also in your veins, would have despised him if he had. I need not quote those beautiful letters of hers which are in print, in which she declares not only her own unalterable affection, but her willingness, to go down with him to disaster and poverty and labor with her hands. Among all the men of that time I do not know of one who was more uncompromising, more obstinate, more determined as President Kruger put it, to make Great Britain "pay a price that would stagger humanity," or according to your own theory, more immoral, than your own great grandfather and his wife.
During the seven years fighting of the revolution Great Britain sent out peace commissioners and kept offering terms which steadily increased in liberality, entire freedom from taxation, in fact almost everything the rebel colonists had demanded, up even to a sort of semi-independence. Your great grandfather voted down everyone of them. He attended with Franklin the famous peace meeting with Lord Howe on Staten Island and rejected Lord Howe's terms. And why? Because none of them contained the one essential condition, absolute independence. Your great grandfather was a Kruger.
But let us pass from him. Let us see what others thought and what was the general situation during the revolution.
At the very beginning of that contest our forces were of an irregular and guerilla character. The farmers, who attacked the British regulars at Lexington and followed them back to Boston picking them off from behind stone fences and trees, were the most irregular fighters it is possible to imagine. They were not acting under the authority of any legitimate or even a _de facto_ government. They were not even officered, directed or authorized by the rebel Continental Congress, which had met the year before in Philadelphia. They were acting in a purely voluntary manner in obedience to a mere sentiment of that faction of the colonists who resented an invasion from Great Britain and wanted this country for their own. They were acting in the same manner and on the same sentiment by which the Boers now act and which you say is a crime.