The Great Boer War | Page 4

realise the point at issue if he could
conceive that after the founding of the United States the Dutch
inhabitants of the State of New York had trekked to the westward and
established fresh communities under a new flag. Then, when the
American population overtook these western States, they would be face
to face with the problem which this country has had to solve. If they
found these new States fiercely anti-American and extremely
unprogressive, they would experience that aggravation of their
difficulties with which our statesmen have had to deal.
At the time of their transference to the British flag the colonists--Dutch,
French, and German--numbered some thirty thousand. They were
slaveholders, and the slaves were about as numerous as themselves.
The prospect of complete amalgamation between the British and the
original settlers would have seemed to be a good one, since they were
of much the same stock, and their creeds could only be distinguished
by their varying degrees of bigotry and intolerance. Five thousand

British emigrants were landed in 1820, settling on the Eastern borders
of the colony, and from that time onwards there was a slow but steady
influx of English speaking colonists. The Government had the
historical faults and the historical virtues of British rule. It was mild,
clean, honest, tactless, and inconsistent. On the whole, it might have
done very well had it been content to leave things as it found them. But
to change the habits of the most conservative of Teutonic races was a
dangerous venture, and one which has led to a long series of
complications, making up the troubled history of South Africa. The
Imperial Government has always taken an honourable and
philanthropic view of the rights of the native and the claim which he
has to the protection of the law. We hold and rightly, that British justice,
if not blind, should at least be colour-blind. The view is irreproachable
in theory and incontestable in argument, but it is apt to be irritating
when urged by a Boston moralist or a London philanthropist upon men
whose whole society has been built upon the assumption that the black
is the inferior race. Such a people like to find the higher morality for
themselves, not to have it imposed upon them by those who live under
entirely different conditions. They feel--and with some reason--that it is
a cheap form of virtue which, from the serenity of a well-ordered
household in Beacon Street or Belgrave Square, prescribes what the
relation shall be between a white employer and his half-savage,
half-childish retainers. Both branches of the Anglo-Celtic race have
grappled with the question, and in each it has led to trouble.
The British Government in South Africa has always played the
unpopular part of the friend and protector of the native servants. It was
upon this very point that the first friction appeared between the old
settlers and the new administration. A rising with bloodshed followed
the arrest of a Dutch farmer who had maltreated his slave. It was
suppressed, and five of the participants were hanged. This punishment
was unduly severe and exceedingly injudicious. A brave race can forget
the victims of the field of battle, but never those of the scaffold. The
making of political martyrs is the last insanity of statesmanship. It is
true that both the man who arrested and the judge who condemned the
prisoners were Dutch, and that the British Governor interfered on the
side of mercy; but all this was forgotten afterwards in the desire to

make racial capital out of the incident. It is typical of the enduring
resentment which was left behind that when, after the Jameson raid, it
seemed that the leaders of that ill-fated venture might be hanged, the
beam was actually brought from a farmhouse at Cookhouse Drift to
Pretoria, that the Englishmen might die as the Dutchmen had died in
1816. Slagter's Nek marked the dividing of the ways between the
British Government and the Afrikaners.
And the separation soon became more marked. There were injudicious
tamperings with the local government and the local ways, with a
substitution of English for Dutch in the law courts. With vicarious
generosity, the English Government gave very lenient terms to the
Kaffir tribes who in 1834 had raided the border farmers. And then,
finally, in this same year there came the emancipation of the slaves
throughout the British Empire, which fanned all smouldering
discontents into an active flame.
It must be confessed that on this occasion the British philanthropist was
willing to pay for what he thought was right. It was a noble national
action, and one the morality of which was in advance of its time, that
the British Parliament should vote the enormous sum of twenty million
pounds to pay compensation to the slaveholders,