A Century of Wrong (1900)

Publisher's illustrated cloth hardcover.

xxiii + 152pp.

Binding solid with clean text. A rectangular piece of the top end of the front end-paper has been removed. A very good copy otherwise. Small newspaper cut-out relating to the contents of the book loosely inserted.

First English edition of "Een Eeuw van Onrecht".

'The case for the Boers could hardly have been placed in more zealous hands than those of the past President of the Orange Free State and Mr. W. T. Stead. The latter avers that for nearly a quarter of a century he had been on the other side, and would "in the last resort" have supported "legitimate insurrection" to bring about "a progressive Liberal administration in Pretoria." His conversion appears to have been caused by the conviction that a plot had been made to add the territory of the Transvaal to the Empire. Nevertheless, Mr. Stead is careful to disavow any responsibility for all or any of the statements in "A Century of Wrong," but he maintains that the volume is an authentic exposition "of what . . . the Boers think of the way we have dealt with them for the last hundred years.'' Mr. Reitz reviews the "oppression and persecution endured by the Boers for the past century, and by the collection of everything detrimental to the character of the British policy in South Africa, and the careful elimination of anything that could be advanced in its favour he makes out a case which would strongly appeal to the uninitiated. It was evidently with little fear of the ultimate result of the struggle, to the consummation of which he had so greatly contributed, that he prophesied that eventually "from the Zambesi to Simon's Bay it will be "Africa for the Afrikander." ' - Mendelssohn Vol.II, page 208

Government historian Gustav S. Preller relates in his memoir of the Boer War "Ons Parool" that when the British forces occupied Pretoria, they immediately made their way to the treasury in the heart of the Capital, and that what they found there when they finally succeeded in opening the vault by force, was not Transvaal Gold, but 500 copies of "A Century of Wrong".