A Century of Wrong | Page 8

the way for posterity to reach that goal for
which our sorely tried people have made such great sacrifices, and for
which they have undergone so many vicissitudes.
The historical survey will, moreover, aid in bringing into stronger relief
those naked truths to which the tribunal of impartial history will
assuredly testify hereafter, in adjudging the case between ourselves and
our enemy. And the questions which present themselves for solution in
the approaching conflict have their origin deep in the history of the past;
it is only by the light of that history that it becomes possible to discern
and appreciate the drifting straws which float on the currents of to-day.
By its light we are more clearly enabled to comprehend the truth, to
which our people appeal as a final justification for embarking upon the
war now so close at hand.
History will show convincingly that the pleas of humanity, civilisation,
and equal rights, upon which the British Government bases its actions,
are nothing else but the recrudescence of that spirit of annexation and
plunder which has at all times characterised its dealings with our
people.

THE CAPE OF GOOD HOPE.
The cause for which we are about to take up arms is the same, though
in somewhat different form, as that for which so many of our
forefathers underwent the most painful experiences centuries ago, when
they abandoned house and fatherland to settle at the Cape of Good
Hope, to enjoy there that freedom of conscience which was denied
them in the land of their birth. In the beautiful valleys lying between
the blue mountains of the Cape of Good Hope they planted the
seed-germ of liberty, which sprang up and has since developed with
such startling rapidity into the giant tree of to-day--a tree which not
only covers a considerable area in this part of the world, but will yet, in
God's good time, we feel convinced, stretch out its leafy branches over
the whole of South Africa. In spite of the oppressive bonds of the East
India Company, the young settlement, containing the noblest blood of
old Europe as well as its most exalted aspirations, grew so powerfully
that in 1806, when the Colony passed into the hands of England, a
strong national sentiment and a spirit of liberty had already been
developed.
[Sidenote: The Africander spirit of liberty]
As is forcibly expressed in an old document dating from the most
renowned period of our history, there grew out of the two stocks of
Hollanders and French Huguenots "a united people, one in religion,
united in peaceful reverence for the law, but with a feeling of liberty
and independence equal to the wide expanse of territory which they had
rescued as a labour of love from the wilderness of nature, or from its
still wilder aboriginal inhabitants." When the Dutch Government made
way for that of Great Britain in 1806, and, still more, when that change
was sealed in 1814 by a transaction in which the Prince of Orange sold
the Cape to Great Britain for £6,000,000 against the wish and will of
the inhabitants, the little settlement entered upon a new phase of its
history, a phase, indeed, in which its people were destined by their
heroic struggle for justice, to enlist a world-wide sympathy on their
behalf.

[Sidenote: England's native policy.]
Notwithstanding the wild surroundings and the innumerable savage
tribes in the background, the young Africander nation had been welded
into a white aristocracy, proudly conscious of having maintained its
superiority notwithstanding its arduous struggles. It was this sentiment
of just pride which the British Government well understood how to
wound in its most sensitive part by favouring the natives as against the
Africanders. So, for example, the Africander Boers were forced to look
with pained eyes on the scenes of their farms and property devastated
by the natives without being in a position to defend themselves,
because the British Government had even deprived them of their
ammunition. In the same way the liberty-loving Africander burgher
was coerced by a police composed of Hottentots, the lowest and most
despicable class of the aborigines, whom the Africanders justly placed
on a far lower social level than that of their own Malay slaves.
[Sidenote: Slachter's Nek.]
No wonder that in 1815 a number of the Boers were driven into
rebellion, a rebellion which found an awful ending in the horrible
occurrence of the 9th of March, 1816, when six of the Boers were half
hung up in the most inhuman way in the compulsory presence of their
wives and children. Their death was truly horrible, for the gallows
broke down before the end came; but they were again hoisted up in the
agony of dying, and strangled to death in the murderous tragedy of
Slachter's Nek. Whatever opinions