Your Excellency will thus see that it was not we who drew the sword, but that we only put it away from our throats.
We have only acted in self-defence--one of the holiest rights of man--in order to assert our right to exist.

And therefore I think, with all respect, that we have a right to trust in a just God.
I again observe that your Excellency reverts to the impossibility of intervention by any foreign power, and that your Excellency interprets our resistance as only based on the hope of such intervention.
With your Excellency's permission, I should like to clear up our position with regard to intervention.

It is this: We hope, and still are hoping, that the moral feeling of the civilized world would protest against the crime which England is now permitting in South Africa, namely, that of endeavouring to exterminate a young nation, but we were still firmly determined that, should our hopes not be realized, we would exert our utmost strength to defend ourselves, and this decision, based on a firm trust in a merciful God, is still unshaken in us.
I further notice that your Excellency thinks that our fight is hopeless.

I do not know on what grounds this assumption is based.
Let us for a moment compare our mutual situations of to-day with those of a year ago, after the surrender of General Prinsloo.

Then, the Cape Colony was altogether quiet, and free from our commandos.
The Orange Free State was almost entirely in your hands, not only as regards the principal townships, railway lines and villages, but also the whole country, except where Commandant Hasebroek was, with his commando.