Steve had watched with pain how the Republics were robbed of all just claims for northern extension, through delusive promises of eastern extension towards the sea-coast. He had seen the formation of the British South African Chartered Company; only another name, he said, for an anti-Boer company.
He had seen how this company had dispossessed Afrikander holders of concessions in Mashonaland. How this company had robbed and deprived poor Lobengula of country and life on the shallow pretence of Matabele aggression in Mashonaland. Ah, if a _Boer_ republic had done what the Chartered Company did in Matabeleland, how they would have been reviled, how they would have been abused. New names would have been invented to call the Boers by, as the English language had already been exhausted on them when they defended their own country. How the Boers were called murderers, slaveholders, and God knows what more, when they subdued two rebellious chiefs in Zoutpansberg in the interest of law and order. After having treated those two chiefs with the greatest consideration and kindness, both before and after their subjection, the Boer haters invented lies and deeds of cruelty never perpetrated in order to blacken the name of Boer before the world. But Rhodes and his followers were called ‘Napoleons,’ ‘heroes,’ and all sorts of high-sounding names, for doing what no Christian man in the world ought to have countenanced--shooting down naked human beings, armed partly with comparatively harmless assegais, or in their hands harmless rifles, in hundreds and thousands, with Satanic inventions of machine guns. Ah, God! how long wilt thou permit the strong to murder the weak? All those hundreds and thousands of poor innocent human beings were murdered or driven starving from their homes, for the sole reason to make a dividendless company pay dividends--Civilisation? The sooner such civilisation is swept from off the earth the better it would be for humanity in general. It must be remembered that these Matabeles were not rebels, but were fighting in defence of their own country, which up to then had been free and independent.
Steve saw how the Chartered Company was not yet satisfied. They must have Khama’s land too. Poor Khama went to England to ask the Great White Queen for protection, for he had had a terrible object lesson in Lobengula, and knew what his fate would be. Khama had a partial success. He was at least safeguarded against total extinction by the Chartered Company.