In this spirit 'they have agreed,' as Miss Hobhouse says, 'to be cheerful and make the best of it.' "The second question--'Are our officials exerting themselves to make the Camps as little oppressive as possible ?'--can also be answered in the affirmative, judging from the evidence supplied by Miss Hobhouse herself.
This does not imply that at the date of Miss Hobhouse's visit, or at any time, there were not matters capable of improvement.

But it is confessed even by hostile witnesses that the Government had a very difficult task, and that its officials were applying themselves to grapple with it with energy, kindness and goodwill.

Miss Hobhouse complains again and again of the difficulty of procuring soap.

May I quote, as throwing light upon the fact that the Boer women were no worse off than the English themselves, that Miss Brooke-Hunt, who was in Pretoria to organise soldiers' institutes a few months earlier than Miss Hobhouse was at Bloemfontein, says in her interesting book, 'A Woman's Memories of the War': 'Captain -- -- presented me with a piece of Sunlight soap, an act of generosity I did not fully appreciate till I found that soap could not be bought for love or money in the town.' A Boer woman of the working-class said to Miss Brooke-Hunt: 'You English are different from what I thought.

They told us that if your soldiers got inside Pretoria they would rob us of everything, burn our houses, and treat us cruelly; but they have all been kind and respectable.