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■i

Harvard College
Library

By Exchange

^^^^^^^^H^^^BjfM^^^^^^^^^^^^^^H

THE SOUTH AFRICAN
QUESTION

AN ENGLISH SOUTH AFRICAN
(Olive Schreiner)

AUTHOR OF "the STORY OF AN AFRICAN
FARM," "DREAMS," ETC

CHICAGO

CHARLES H. SERGEL COMPANY

1899

/!-• i;:i2.n-^i

iiARVARD COLLEGE LibRnRr
BY EXCHAN6E

" Then let us pray that come it may.

As come it will for a* that;
That truth and worth, o^er a* the earthy

May bear the gree, and a* that;
For a' that, and a* that;

IV s coming yet, for a' that;
That man to man, the world o'*er.

Shall brothers be for a* thatV

**Put Up thy sword: they that hold the sword
shall perish by the sword ^^"^

THE SOUTH AFRICAN
QUESTION.

Many views have found expression
in the columns of papers during the last
weeks. The working man only a few
weeks or months from England has ex-
pressed his opposition to those strata-
gems with war for their aim which
would leave him without the defence
he has at present from the pressure of
employers. Journalists only a few years,
months, or weeks from Europe, have
written, not perhaps expressing a de-
sire for war, but implying it might be
well if the wave swept across South
Africa, and especially across that por-
tion which is richest in mineral wealth,
and, therefore, more to be desired.

6 I^HB South African QusstibN.

South Africans and men from Europe
alike have written deprecating war, be-
cause of the vast suffering and loss it
would occasion to individuals. Dutch
and English South Africans have writ-
ten (as one in an able and powerful let-
ter dated from Vrededorp, which ap-
peared a few days ago) proving the
injustice that would be inflicted on the
people of Africa, the violation of
treaties and trust. But, amid all this
chorus of opinion there is one voice
which, though heard, has not yet been
heard with that distinctness and fulness
which its authority demands — it is the
voice of the African-born Englishman
who loves England, the man who, bom
in South Africa, and loving it as all
men, who are men, love their birth-
land, is yet an Englishman, bound to
England not only by ties of blood, but

l^HB SoutH African Question. 7

that much more intense passion which
springs from personal contact alone.
Our position is unique, and it would
seem that we are marked out, at the
present juncture of South African af-
fairs, for an especial function, which
imposes on us, at whatever cost to our-
selves, the duty of making our voices
heard and taking our share in the life
of our two nations, at their

MOST CRITICAL JUNCTURE.

For, let us consider what exactly
our position is.

Born in South Africa, our eyes first
opened on these African hills and
plains; around us, of other parentage
but born with us in the land, our birth-
fellows, were men of another white
race ; and we grew up side by side with
them. Is it strange that, like all men

8 The South African Questio!^.

living, who have the hearts of men, we
learnt to love this land in which we
first saw light? In after years, when
we left it, and lived months or years
across the seas, is it strange we carried
it with us in our hearts? When we
stood on the Alps and looked down on
the lakes and forests of Switzerland,
that we have said, "This is fair, but
South Africa to us is fairer?" That
when on the top of Milan Cathedral
and we have looked out across the wide
plains of Lombardy, we have said,
"This is noble; but nobler to us are the
broad plains of Africa, with their
brown kopjes shimmering in the trans-
lucent sunshine ?'* Is it strange that
when, after long years of absence, years
it may be of success and the joy which
springs from human fellowship and
youth, our ship has cast its anchor in

^The South African Question. 9

sight of Table Bay, and the great front
of Table Mountain has reared up be-
fore us, a cry of passionate joy has
welled up within us ; and when we saw
the black men with their shining skins
unloading in the docks, and the rugged
faces of South Africans, browned with
our African sun, we put our foot on
the dear old earth again, and our hearts
have cried : "We are South Africans !
We have come back again to our land
and to our people?'' Is it strange that
when we are in other lands and we fear
that death approaches us, we say:
'*Take me back! We may live away
from her, but when we are dead we
must lie on her breast. Bury us among
the kopjes where' we played when we
were children, and let the iron stones
and red sand cover us?'' Is it strange
that wherever we live we all want to

lO Thb SoutH African Qupsxioij.

go home to die ; and that the time comes
when we know that dearer far to us
than fame or success is one little hand-
ful of our own red South African
earth ? Is it strange that, when the

TIME OF STRESS AND DANGER

comes to our land, we realize what, per-
haps, we were but dimly conscious of
before, that we are Africans, that for
this land and people we could live — ^if
need be, we could die ?

Is it strange we should feel this?^
The Scotchman feels it for his heathery
hills, the Swiss for his valleys. All
men who are men feel it for the land
of their birth !

What is strange is not that we have
this feeling, but that, side by side with
it, we have another. We love Africa,
but we love England also. It is not

The South African Question. 11

merely that when for the first time we
visit the old nesting place of our peo-
ple it is rich for us with associations,
that we tread it for the first time with
something of the awe and reverence
with which men tread an old cathe-
dral, rich with remains of the great
dead and past; it is not merely that
the associations of language and liter-
ature bind us to it, nor that in some
city or country churchyard we stand
beside the graves of our forefathers,
and trace on mould-eaten stones the
names we have been familiar with in
Africa, and bear as our own ; nor is it
that we can linger yet on the steps of
the church where our parents were
united before they moved to the far
South, and made of us South Afri-
cans. Beyond all these impersonal,
and more or less intellectual ties, we

12 The South African Question.

form a personal one with England.
Whether we have gone home as stu-
dents to college or university, or for
purposes of art, literature, or profes-
sional labor, as time passes there
springs up around us

A NETWORK OF TENDER BONDS ;

there are formed the closest friendships
our hearts will ever know, such as are
formed only in the spring time of life;
there is gained our first deep knowledge
of life, and there grow up within us
passions and modes of thought we will
carry with us to our graves. After
years, it may be after many years, when
we return, on the walls of our study in
South Africa we still keep fastened in
memory of the past the old oar with
which we won our first boating victory
on Cam or Thames; and the faces of

The South African Question. 13

the men who shared our victory with
us still look down at us from our walls.
Not dearer to any Englishman is the
memory of his Alma Mater than to him
who sits thousands of miles off in the*
South, and who, as he smokes his last
pipe of African Boer or Transvaal to-
bacco, is visited often by memories of
days that will never fade, evenings on
the river with bright faces and soft
voices, long midnight conclaves over
glimmering fires, when, with voices and
hearts as young and glowing as our
own, we discussed all problems of the
universe and longed to go out into life
that we might settle them — they come
back to us with all the glitter and light
which hangs only about the remem-
brances of youth : and for many of us
the memory of fog-smitten London is
inextricably blended with the all pro-

14 Tbb Soutb African Qubstioii.

foundest emotions, the most passionate

endeavors, noblest relations our hearts

will ever know. The steamers that

come weekly to South Africa are not

for us merely vessels bringing news

from foreign lands ; nor do they merely

bring for us the intellectual pabulum

which feeds our mental life ; they bring

""news from home/'

In London houses, in country cottages,
in English manufacturing towns, are
men and women whose life and labor,
whose joy and sorrows our hearts will
follow to the end, as theirs will follow
ours to the end, and across the seas our
hands will always be interknit with
theirs. Our labor, our homes, our ma-
terial interests, may all be in South
Africa, but a bond of love so strong
that six thousand miles of sea can only

Thb South African Question. 15

Stretch it, but never sever it, binds us
to the land and the friends we loved in
our youth. We are South Africans,
but intellectual sympathies, habits, per-
sonal emotions, have made us strike
deep roots across the sea; and when
the thought flashes on us, we may not
walk the old streets again or press the
old hands, pain rises which those only
know whose hearts are divided between
two lands. We are South Africans,
but we are not South Africans only —
we are Englishmen also :

Dear little Island,
Our heart in the sea!

If to-morrow hostile fleets encompassed
England, and the tread of foreign
troops was on her soil, she would not
need to call to us ; we would stand he-
§id^ her before she had spoken. This h

16 Thb South African Question.

OUR EXACT POSITION.

Side by side with us in South Africa
are other South Africans whose posi-
tion is not and cannot be exactly what
ours is. Shading away from us by im-
perceptible degrees, stand, on one side
of us, those EngHsh South Africans
who, racially English, yet know noth-
ing or little personally of her; the
grandparents, and not the parents of
such men, have left England ; they are
proud of being Englishmen, proud of
England's great record and great
names, as a man is proud of his grand-
mother's family, but they are before all
things essentially South African. They
desire to see England increase and pro-
gress, and to remain in harmony and
union with her while she does not in-
terfere with internal affairs of South
Africa, but they do not and cannot fed

The South African Question. 17

to her as those of us do whose love is
personal and whose intellectual sym-
pathies center largely in England.

Yet further from us on the same side
stand our oldest white fellow South
Africans ; who were, many, not of Eng-
lish blood originally, though among
that body of early white settlers, men
who preceded us in South Africa by
three centuries, were a few with Eng-
lish names, and though by intermar-
riage Dutch and English South Afri-
cans are daily and hourly blending, the
bulk of these folk were Dutchmen from
Holland and Friesland, with a few
Swedes, Germans and Danes, and later
was intermingled with them a strong
strain of Huguenot blood from France.
These men were mainly of that folk
which, in the sixteenth century, held
Philip and the Spanish Empire at bay.

18 Thb South African Question,

and struck the first death-blow into the
heart of that mighty Imperial system
whose death-gasp^ we have witnessed
to-day. A brave, free, fearless folk
with the

BLOOD OF THE OLD SEA KINGS

in their veins; a branch of that old
Teutonic race which came with the
Angles and Saxons into England and
subdued the Britons, and who, in the
persons of the Franks, entered Gaul,
and spread its blood across Europe.
They are a people most nearly akin to
the English of all European folk, in
language, form and feature resembling
them, and in a certain dogged persist-
ence, and an inalienable indestructible
air of personal freedom.

Even under the early Dutch Govern-
ment of the East India Company, they

The South African Question. 19

were not always restful and resented
interference and external control. They
frequently felt themselves * "onder-
gedrukt," and, taking their guns, and
getting together wife and children and
all that they had, and inspanning their
wagons, they t trekked away from the
scant boards of civilization into the
wilderness, to form homes of freedom
for themselves and their descendants.
In 1795 England obtained the Cape
as the result of European complica-
tions, and the South African people,
without request or desire on their part,
were given over to England, England
retired from the Cape in 1803, but, ow-
ing to other changes in Europe, she
took the Cape again in 1806, and has
since then been the

♦Ondergedrukt — oppressed.
tTrekked — moved, traveled.

20 Thb South African Question.
GUARDIAN OF OUR SEAS,

and the strongest power in our land.
Since that time, for the last ninety
years, Englishmen have slowly been
added to the population, but the men
of Dutch descent still form the major-
ity of white South Africans through-
out the Cape Colony, Free State, and
Transvaal, outnumbering at the pres-
ent day, even with the accession of the
foreigners (Uitlanders mean foreign-
ers in Dutch) to the goldfields of the
Transvaal, those of English descent,
as probably about two to one.

So we of England became step-
mother to this South African people.
We English are a virile race. There is
perhaps no one with a drop of English
blood in his veins who does not feel
pride in that knowledge. We are a
brave and, for ourselves, a freedom-

The South African Question. 21

loving race ; the best of us have nobler
qualities yet — ^we love justice; we ad-
mire courage and the love of freedom
in others as well as ourselves; and we
find it difficult to put our foot on the
weak, it refuses to go down. At times,
whether as individuals or as a nation,
we are capable of the

MOST HEROIC MORAL ACTION.

The heart swells with pride when we
remember what has been done by Eng-
lishmen, at different times and in differ-
ent places, in the cause of freedom and
justice, when they could meet with no
reward and had nothing to gain. Such
an act of justice on the part of the Eng-
lish nation was done in 1881 when
Gladstone gave back to the Transvaal
the independence which had been mis-
takenly taken. I would not say policy

^2 Thb South African Question.

had no part in the action of the wise
old man. No doubt that keen eagle-
eye had fixed itself closely on the truth
which all history teaches that a colony
of Teutonic folk cannot be kept per-
manently in harmony and union with
the Mother Country by any bond but
that of love, mutual sympathy and
honor. The child may be reduced by
force to obedience ; but time passes and
the child becomes a youth; the youth
may be coerced; but the day comes
when the youth becomes a man, and
there can be no coercion then. If the
mother wishes to retain the affection of
the man, she must win it from the
youth. This the wise old man saw ; but
I believe that, over and above the wis-
dom, he saw the right, and the action
was no less heroic because it was wise ;
for other men see truth who have not

Thb South African Question. 23

the courage to follow her, and accept
present loss for a gain which lies
across the centuries.

We English are a fearless folk, and
in the main I think we seek after jus-
tice, but we have our faults. We are
not a sympathetic or a quickly com-
prehending people ; we are slow and we
are proud ; we are shut in by a certain

SHELL OF HARD RESERVE.

There are probably few of us who have
not some consciousness of this defect in
our own persons ; it may be a fault al-/
lied to our highest virtues, but it is a
fault, and a serious one as regards our
relations with peoples who come under
our rule. We may and do generally
sincerely desire justice; we may have
no wish to oppress, but we do not read-
ily understand wants and conditions

24 Thb South African Qubstion.

distinct from our own. Here and there
great Englishmen have appeared in
South African history as elsewhere
(such as Sir William Porter and Sir
George Grey) who have been able to
throw themselves sympathetically into
the entire life of the people about, to
love them, and so to comprehend their
wants and win their affections. Such
men are the burning and shining lights
of our Imperial and Colonial system,
but they are not common. Undoubted-
ly the officials sent out to rule the Cape
in the old days were generally men who
earnestly desired to do their duty ; but
they did not always understand the folk
they had to rule. They were generally
simple soldiers, brave, fearless and hon-
orable as the English soldier is apt to
be, but with hard military conceptions
of government and discipline. Our

The South African Question. 25

Dutch fellow South Africans are a
strange folk. Virile, resolute, pas-
sionate with a passion hid far below the
surface, they are at once the gentlest
and the most determined of peoples.
When you try to coerce them they are
hard as steel encased in iron, but with a
large and generous response to affec-
tion and sympathy which perhaps no
other European folk gives. They may
easily be deceived once ; but never twice.
Under the roughest exterior of the up-
country Boer lies a nature strangely
sensitive and conscious of personal
dignity; a people who never forgets a
kindness and does

NOT EASILY FORGET A WRONG.

Our officials did not always under-
stand them; they made no allowances
for a race of brave, free men inhabiting

86 The South African Question.

a country which by the might of their
own right hand they had won from sav-
ages and wild beasts, and who were
given over into the hands of a strange
government without their consent or
desire ; and the peculiarities which arose
from their wild free life were not al-
ways S)rmpathetically understood ; even
their little language, the South African
"Taal," a South African growth so
dear to their hearts, and to all those of
us who love indigenous and South
African growths, was not sympathet-
ically and gently dealt with. The
men, well meaning, but military, tried
with this fierce, gentle, sensitive, free
folk force, where they should have ex-
ercised a broad and comprehensive
humanity; and when they did right (as
when the slaves were freed), they did
it often in such manner, that it became

The South African Question. 27

practically wrong. A little of that tact
of the higher and larger kind, which
springs from a human comprehension
of another's difficulties and needs,
might, exercised in the old days, have
saved South Africa from all white-
race problems; it was not, perhaps un-
der the conditions, could not, be exer-
cised. The people's hearts ached under
the uncompromising iron rule. In 1815
there was a rising, and it was put down.
As the traveler passes by train along
the railway from Port Elizabeth to
Kimberley, he will come, a few miles
beyond Cookhouse, to a gap between
two hills; to his right flows the Fish
River ; to his left, binding the two hills,
is a ridge of land called in South Africa
a "nek." It is a spot the thoughtful
Englishman passes with deep pain. In
the year 181 5 here were handed five

28 The South African Question.

South Africans who had taken part in
the rising, and the women who had
fought beside them (for the South
African woman has ever stood beside
the man in all his labors and struggles)
were compelled to stand by and look on.
The crowd of fellow South Africans
who stood by them believed,

HOPED AGAINST HOPE,

to the last moment, that a reprieve
would come. Lord Charles Somerset
sent none, and the tragedy was com-
pleted. The place is called to-day
"Schlachter's Nek," or "Butcher's
Ridge." Every South African child
knows the story. Technically, any gov-
ernment has the right to hang those
who rise against its rule. Superficially
it is a short way of ending a difficulty
for all governments. Historically it

The South African Question. 29

has often been found to be the method
for perpetrating them. We may sub-
merge for a moment that which rises
again more formidably for its blood
bath. The mistake made by Lord
Charles Somerset in 1815 was as the
mistake would have been by President
Kruger if, in 1896, instead of exercis-
ing the large prerogative of mercy and
magnanimity, he had destroyed the
handful of conspirators who attempted
to destroy the State. Both would have
been within their legal right, but the
Transvaal would have failed to find
that path which runs higher than the
path of mere law and leads towards
light. Fortunately for South Africa
our little Republic found it.

The reign of stern military rule at
the Cape had this effect, that men and
women, with a sore in their proud

30 The South African Question.

hearts, continued to move away from
a controlling power that did not under-
stand them. Some moved across the
Orange River and joined the old
"Voortrekkers" that had already gone
into that country which is now the Free
State. England kept a certain virtual
sovereignty over that territory, till, in
1854, she grew weary of the expense
it cost her, and withdrew from it in
spite of the representations of certain
of its inhabitants who sent a deputation
to England to request her to retain it.
Thereupon the folk organized an inde-
pendent State and Government ; and the
little land, peopled mainly by men of
Dutch descent, but largely intermingled
with English who lived with them on
terms of the greatest affection and
unity, has become one of the most

Thb South African Question. 31

PROSPEROUS,

WELL-GOVERNED
PEACEFUL

AND

communities on earth. Others, much
the larger part of the people, moved
further; they crossed the Vaal River,
and in that wild northern land, where
no Englishman's foot had passed, they
founded after some years the gallant
little Republic we all know to-day as
the Transvaal. How that Republic
was founded is a story we all know.
Alone, unbacked by any great Im-
perial or national power, with their old
flint-lock guns in their hands as theirj
only weapons, with wife and children,
they passed into that yet untrodden!,
land. The terrible story of their strug- \
gles, the death of Piet Retief and his \
brave followers, killed by treachery by
the Zulu Chief, Dingaan, the victory of
the survivors over him, which is still

32 The South African Question.

commemorated by their children as
Dingaan's Day, the whole, perhaps, the
most thrilling record of the struggle
and suffering of a people in founding
their State that the world can any-
where produce. Paul Kruger can still
remember how, after that terrible fight,
women and children left alone in the
fortified laager, he himself being but a
child, they carried on bushes to fortify
the laager, women with children in
their arms, or pregnant, laboring with
strength of men to entrench themselves
. against evil worse than death. Here in
I the wilderness they planted their homes,
' and founded their little State. Men
and women are still living who can re-
member how, sixty years ago, the spot
where the great mining camp of Jo-
hannesburg now stands was a great

The South African Question. 33

silence where they drew up their wagon
and planted their little home, and

FOUGHT INCH BY INCH

with wild beasts to reclaim the desert.
In this great northern land, which no
white man had entered or desired, they /
planted their people, and loving it as|
men only can love the land they havej
suffered and bled for, the gallant little j
Republic they raised they love to-day as-
the Swiss loves his mountain home and ;
the Hollander his dykes. It is theirs,
the best land on earth to them.

They had fought not for money but
for homes for their wives and children ;
when they battled, the wives reloaded
the old flint-lock guns and handed them
down from the front chest of their
wagon for the men who stood around
defending them. It was a wild free

34 The South African Question.

fight, on even terms; there were no

■Maxim guns to mow down ebony fig-

lures by the hundred at the turn of a

I handle ; a free even stand up fight ; and

j there were times when it almost seemed

j the assagai would overcome the old

flint-lock, and the voortrekkers would

be swept away. The panther and the

jaguar rolled together on the ground,

and, if one conquered instead of the

other, it was yet a fair fight, and South

Africa has no reason to be ashamed of

the way either her black men or her

white men fought it.

If it be asked, has the Dutch South
African always dealt gently and gen-
erously with the native folks with
whom he came into contact, we answer,
"No, he has not" — neither has any
other white race of whom we have
record in history. He kept slaves in

The South African Question. 86

the early days ! Yes, and a century ago
England wished to make war on her
American subjects in Virginia for re-
fusing to take the slaves she sent.
There was a time when we might have
vaunted some superiority in the Eng-
lish-African method of dealing with the
native.

THAT DAY IS PAST.

The terrible events of the last five years
in South Africa have left us silent.
There is undoubtedly a score laid
against us on this matter, Dutch and
English South Africans alike; for the
moment it is in abeyance; in fifty or a
hundred years it will probably be pre-
sented for payment as other bills are,
and the white man of Africa will have
to settle it. It has been run up as heav-
ily north of the Limpopo as south ; and
when our sons stand up to settle it, it

36 The South African Question,

will be Dutchmen and Englishmen to-
gether who have to pay for the sins of
their fathers.

Such is the history of our fellow
South Africans of Dutch extraction,
who to-day cover South Africa from
Capetown to the Limpopo. In the Cape
Colony, and increasingly in the two Re-
publics, are found enormous numbers
of cultured and polished Dutch-
descended South Africans, using Eng-
lish as their daily form of speech, and
in no way distinguishable from the rest
of the nineteenth century Europeans.
Our most noted judges, our most elo-
quent lawyers, our most skillful physi-
cians, are frequently men of this blood ;
the lists of the yearly examinations of
our Cape University are largely filled
with Dutch names, and women, as well
as men, rank high in the order of merit.

The South African Question. 87

It would sometimes almost seem as if
the long repose the people has had from
the heated life of cities, with the large
tax upon the nervous system, had sent
them back to the world of intellectual
occupations with more than the ordi-
nary grasp of power. In many cases
they go home to Europe to study, and
doubtless their college life and English
friendships bind Britain close to their
hearts as to ours who are English-born.
The present State Attorney of the
Transvaal is a man who has taken
some of the highest honors Cambridge
can bestow. Besides, there exist still
our old simple farmers or Boers, found
in the greatest perfection in the mid-
land districts of the Colony, in the
Transvaal and Free State, who consti-
tute a large part of the virile backbone
of South Africa. Clinging to their old

38 The South African Question.

seventeenth century faiths and man-
ners, and speaking their African taal,
they are yet tending to pass rapidly
away, displaced by their own cultured
modern children; but they still form a
large and powerful body. Year by
year the lines dividing the South Afri-
cans from their more lately arrived
English-descent brothers are

PASSING AWAY.

Love, not figuratively but literally, is
obliterating the line of distinction;
month by month, week by week, one
might say hour by hour, men and wom-
en of the two races are meeting. In the
Colony there are few families which
have not their Dutch or English con-
nections by marriage; in another gen-
eration the fusion will be complete.
There will be no Dutchmen then and

'tuE South African Question. 39

no Englishmen in South Africa, but
only the great blended South African
people of the future, speaking the Eng-
lish tongue, and holding in reverend
memory its founders of the past,
whether Dutch or English. Already,
but for the sorrowful mistakes of the
last years, the line of demarcation
would have faded out of sight ; external
impediments may tend to delay it, but
they can never prevent this fusion ; we
are one people. In thirty years' time,
the daughter of the man who landed
yesterday in South Africa will carry
at her heart the child of a de Villiers,
and the son of the Cornish miner who
lands this week will have given the
name of her English grandmother to
his daughter, whose mother was a le
Roux. There will be nothing in forty

40 Thb South African Qxjestioi*.

years but the great blended race of
Africans.

^^ ^t ^0 ^^ ^^f ^^f ^K

^^* ^^* ^^^ ^^^ ^^1 ^^1 ^^1

These South Africans, together with
those of English descent, but who have
been more than two generations in the
country and have had no — or very little
— ^personal and intimate knowledge and
intercourse with England, may be
taken as standing on one side of us.
They are before all things South Afri-
cans. They have — ^both Dutch and
English — in many cases a deep and sin-
cere affection for the English language,
English institutions, and a sincere af-
fection for England herself. They are
grateful to her for her watch over their
seas; and were a Russian fleet to ap-
pear in Table Bay to-morrow and at-
tempt to land troops, it would fly as
quickly from Dutch as English bullets.

I'he South African Question. 41

Neither Dutch nor EngUsh South Afri-
cans desire to see any other power in-
stalled in the place of England. Cul-
tured Dutch and English Africans alike
are fed on English literature, and Eng-
land is their intellectual home. Even
with our simplest Dutch-descent Afri-
cans the memories of

THE OLD BITTER DAYS

had almost faded, when the ghastly
events, which are too well known to
need referring to, awoke the old ache
at the heart a few years ago. But even
they would see quietly no other power
standing in the place of England. *lt
is a strange thing," said a well-known
Dutch South African to us twenty-one
years ago, "that when I went to Eu-
rope to study I went to Holland, and
loved the land and the people, but I felt

42 Thb South African Question.

a stranger; it was the same in Ger-
many, the same in France. But when
I landed in England I said, *I am at
home !' '* That man was once a pas-
sionate lover of England, but he is now
a heart-sore man. There have been
representatives of England in South
Africa who have been loved as dearly
by the Dutch as by the English. When
a few years ago there was a talk of Sir
George Grey visiting South Africa on
his way home from New Zealand to
England, old grey-headed Dutchmen
in the Free State expressed their re-
solve to take one more long train jour-
ney and go down to Capetown only
once more to shake the hand of the old
man who more than forty years before
had been Governor of the Cape Colony.
So deeply had a great Englishman, up-
holding the loftiest traditions of Eng-

Thb South African Qubs'non. 43

lish justice and humanity, endeared
himself to the hearts of South Africans.
"God's EngHshman" — not of the Stock
Exchange and the Catling gun, but of
the great heart.

But great as is the bond between
South Africans, whether Dutch or
English, and England, caused by lan-
guage, sentiments, interest and the
noble record left by those large Eng-
lishmen who have labored among us,
the South African pure and simple,
whether English or Dutch, cannot feel
to England just as we do. Their ma-
terial interest may bind them to Eng-
land as much as it binds us, but that
deep passion for her honor, the con-
sciousness that she represents a large
spiritual factor in our lives, which, once
gone, nothing replaces for us ; that her
right-doing is ours, and her wrong-

44 The South African Question,

doing is also ours ; that in a manner her
flag does not represent anything we
have an interest in, or even that we
love, but that in a curious way it is
ourselves — this they cannot know.
Therefore, while on our side we are
connected with them by our affection
for South Africa and our resolute de-
sire for its good, our position remains
not exactly as theirs. Our standpoint
is at once broader and more impartial
in dealing with South African ques-
tions, in that we are bound by two-fold
sympathies.

On the other hand of us, who are at
once South Africans and Englishmen,
stand in South Africa another body of
individuals who are not South African,
in any sense or only partially, but to
whom from our peculiar position we
also stand closely bound.

The South African Question. 46

Ever since the time when England
took over the Cape, there has been
slowly entering the country a thin
stream of new settlers, English main-
ly, but largely reinforced by people of
other nationalities. Eighty years ago,
in 1820, a comparatively large body of
Englishmen arrived at once, and are
known as the British Settlers. They
settled at first mainly in Albany, and
certain of their descendants are to-day,
in some senses, almost as truly and
typically South African as the older
Dutch settlers.

THEIR LOVE FOR AFRICA

is intense. Some years later a large
body of Germans were brought to the
Kingwilliams town division of South
Africa. They, too, became farmers,
and their descendants are already true

46 The South African Question.

South Africans. For the rest, for
years men continually dribbled in slow-
ly and singly from other countries.
Whether they came out in search of
health, as clergymen, missionaries, or
doctors, or in search of manual employ-
ment, or as farmers, they almost all be-
came, or tended to become almost im-
mediately. South Africans. They set-
tled in the land permanently among
people who were permanent inhabit-
ants, they often married women born in
South Africa, and their roots soon sank
deeply into it. They brought us no
new problem to South Africa. They
have settled among us, living as we
live, sharing our lives and interests. It
is said that it takes thirty years to make
a South African, and in a manner this
is true. Even now, more especially in
times of stress or danger, it is easy to

Thb South African Question 47

distinguish the African-born man from
the man of whatever race and however
long in the country who has not been
born here. But in the main these new-
comers have become South Africans
with quickness and to an astonishing
degree, and coming in in driblets they
were, so to speak, easily digested by
South Africa.

But during the last few years

A NEW PHENOMENON HAS STARTED

up in South African life. The discov-
erj" of vast stores of mineral wealth in
South Africa, more especially gold, has
attracted suddenly to its shores a large
population which is not and cannot, at
least at once, be South African. This
body is known under the name of the
Uitlanders (literally "Foreigners").
Through a misfortune, and by no

.JT^T^ J^ — ■jitty.JiJ

jr . T^

•/VuxcS-^^i:'u

H^L -'^it^i'

'H:»K •qt-^%_:!W .imtil

--X

.«.*••• •^^"Xi^* *. ^

>•>* tX:

-»^;u'j^. xtCT :?i

-v«Ai

' ^

w.>.

.^»j

►vv.;- .-. v',ii< .: vv .vvkti tv-\» ^'^^ 'arse

The South African Question. 49

walking the streets, one has a strange
sense of having left South Africa, and
being merely in some cosmopolitan cen-
ter, which might be anywhere where all
nations and colors gather round the yel-
low king. Russian Jews and Poles are
here by thousands, seeking in South
Africa the freedom from oppression
that was denied that much- wronged |
race of men in their own birth-land;'
Cornish and Northumberland miners
working men from all parts of the
earth; French, German and Englisl:
tradesmen; while on the Stock Ex-
change men of every European nation-
ality are found, though the Jew pre
dominates. The American stranger
are not large in number, but are repr
sented by perhaps the most cultured an
enlightened class in the camp, the min
ing engineer and large importers o

50 Thb South African Qubstion.

mining machinery being often of that
race ; our lawyers and doctors are of all
nationalities, while in addition to all
foreigners, there is a certain admixture
of English and Dutch South Africans.
In the course of a day one is brought
into contact with men of every species.
Your household servant may be a Kafir,
your washerwoman is a Half-caste,
your butcher is a Hungarian, your bak-
er English, the man who soles your
boots a German, you buy your vegeta-
bles and fruit from an Indian Coolie,
your coals from the Chinaman round
the corner, your grocer is a Russian
Jew, your dearest friend an American.
This is an actual, and not an imaginary,
description. Here are found the most
noted prostitutes of Chicago ; and that
sad sisterhood created by the disloca-
tion of our yet uncoordinated civiliza-

The South African Question. 51

tion, and known in Johannesburg un-
der the name of continental women,
have thronged here in hundreds from
Paris and the rest of Europe. Gamb-
ling, as in all mining camps, is rife;
not merely men but even women put
their money into the totalisator, and

A LOW FEVER OF ANXIETY

for chance wealth feeds on us. Crimes
of violence are not unknown; but, if
one may speak with authority who has
known only one other great mining
center in its early condition, and whose
information on this matter has there-
fore been gathered largely from books,
Johannesburg compares favorably, and
very favorably, with other large min-
ing camps in the same stage of their
existence. The life of culture and im-
personal thought is largely and of

The South African Question.

necessity among a new and nomadic
population absent ; art and science are
of necessity unrepresented; but a gen-
eral alertness and keenness character-
izes our population. In the bulk of our
miners and working men, of our young
men in banks and houses of business,
we have a large mass of solid, intel-
ligent, and invaluable social material
which counter-balances that large mass
of human flotsam and jetsam found in
this, as in all other mining camps ; while
among our professional men and min-
ing officials is found a large amount of
the highest professional knowledge and
efficiency. Happy would it be for the
gallant little Transvaal Republic, and
well for South Africa as a whole, if
the bulk of this little human nature
could become ours forever, if they were
here to stay with us, drink out of our

Thb South African Question.

cup and sup out of our platter. But in
most cases this is not so. The bulk of
the population, and especially its most
valuable and cultured elements, are
here temporarily ; as persons who go to
Italy or the south of France for health
or sunshine, who, even when they go
year after year, or buy villas and settle
there for a time, yet go to seek merely
health and sunshine, not strike root
there; and as men go to Italy for
health and sunshine, the bulk of us here
come to seek gold or a temporary liveli-
hood, and for nothing more. Even our
miners and working men in Johannes-
burg, the most stable and possibly per-
manent element in our population, have,
in many instances, their wives and fam-
ilies in Cornwall or elsewhere; and
when they have them here they still
think of the return home for good in

^W m ■■» ^»m

64 Thb South African Question.

after years; while with the wealthier
classes this is practically universal. Not
only have our leading mining engineers
and the great speculators not the slight-
est intention of staying in Johannes-
burg permanently; most have their
wives and families in England, Amer-
ica, or on the Continent, and project as
I soon as possible a retirement from busi-
ness, and return to the fashionable cir-
cles of Europe or America. Even
among South African-born men the
large majority of us intend returning
to our own more lovely birthplaces and
homes in the Colony sooner or later;
and the only element which will prob-
ably form any integral part of the
South African nation of the future and
become subject to the Transvaal Re-
public is the poorer, which, from the
larger advantages for labor here, will

l^B South African O^bstion. 65

be unable to return to its natural home.
The nomadic population of Johannes-
burg undoubtedly consists of men who
are brave and loyal citizens in their
own States and nations. To-morrow,

IF AMERICA WERE IN DANGER,

probably almost every American citi-
zen would troop back to her bosom, and
spend not only life, but the wealth he
had gained in South Africa from South
African soil, in defending her. Every
German would go home to the Father-
land ; every Englishman, every French-
man, would, as all brave men in the
world's history have done, when the cry
arises, "The birthland in danger !" The
few Spaniards here trooped back to
Spain as soon as the news of war ar-
rived.

One of the most brilliant and able of

56 The South African Question.

English journalists (a man whose opin-
ion on any subject touching his own
land we would receive almost with the
reverence accruing to the man who
speaks of a subject he knows well and
has studied with superior abilities ; but
who had been only a few months in our
land, and, therefore, had not full grasp
of either our people or our problems,
which from their complexity and many-
sidedness are subjects for a life's devo-
tion) that man, three and a half years
ago, when brave little Jameson — ^brave,
however mistaken — was sent in to cap-
ture the mines of Johannesburg for his
master, and when the great mixed pop-
ulation of Johannesburg, Germans and
French, English and Jews, Arabs and
Chinamen, refused to arise and go to
aid him, and when hundreds of Eng-
lishmen, Corniahmen and others fled

The South African Question. 57

from Johannesburg, fearing that Jame-
son might arrive and cause a dis-
turbance — said that Johannesburg
would be known forever in history by
the name of Judasburg! and that the
Cornish and other Englishmen who fled
from the place were poltroons and
cowards. But he was mistaken.

JOHANNESBURG IS NOT JUDASBURG,

and the Englishmen who fled were not
poltroons. There ran in them blood as
brave as any in England, and if to-mor-
row a hostile force attacked their birth-
land, those very Cornish miners and
English working men would die in the
last ditch defending their land. Those
men were strangers here ; they came to
earn the bread they could with diffi-
culty win in their own land ; they were
friendly treated by South Africa and

6d Tbb South African O^ssTibM.

made money here ; but were they bound
to die in a foreign land for causes which
they neither knew nor cared for ?

One thing only can possibly justify
war and the destruction of our fellows
to the enlightened and humane denizen
of the nineteenth century ; the unavoid-
able conviction that by no other means
can we preserve our own life and free-
dom from a stronger power, or defend
a weaker state or individual from a
stronger. Nothing can even palliate it
but so intense a conviction of a right so
great to be maintained that we are will-
ing, not merely to hire other men to
fight and die for us, but to risk our own
lives,

A LIFE FOR A LIFE.

This the Englishmen in Johannes-
burg and foreigners of all nations could
not possibly feel. They were not more

Thb South African Question. 59

bound to die to obtain control of the
gold mines of Johannesburg for a man
already wealthy or his confederates,
than to assist South Africans in defend-
ing them; or than we who visit the
south of France or Italy for health
should feel ourselves bound to remain
and die if war breaks out between the
Bonapartists and the Republicans, or
the Pope and the King. If by a pro-
cess of abstract thought we have ar-
rived at a strong conviction of a right
' or human justice to be maintained by
a cause with which we have no prac-
tical concern, we may feel morally
compelled to take a part in it; but no
man can throw it in our teeth if we
refuse to die in a strange land for

A CAUSE THAT IS NOT OURS.

The Eng^lishmen and others who re-

50 Tbb South African Question.

mining machinery being often of that
race ; our lawyers and doctors are of all
nationalities, while in addition to all
foreigners, there is a certain admixture
of English and Dutch South Africans.
In the course of a day one is brought
into contact with men of every species.
Your household servant may be a Kafir,
your washerwoman is a Half-caste,
your butcher is a Hungarian, your bak-
er English, the man who soles your
I boots a German, you buy your vegeta-
1 bles and fruit from an Indian Coolie,
your coals from the Chinaman round
the comer, your grocer is a Russian
Jew, your dearest friend an American.
This is an actual, and not an imaginary,
description. Here are found the most
noted prostitutes of Chicago ; and that
sad sisterhood created by the disloca-
tion of our yet uncoordinated civiliza-

I'hb South African Question. 51

A LOW FEVER OF ANXIETY

62 The South African Question.

The South African Question.

54 Thb South African QuBsnOM.

after years; while with the wealthier
classes this is practically universal. Not
only have our leading mining engineers
and the great speculators not the slight-
est intention of staying in Johannes-
burg permanently; most have their
wives and families in England, Amer-
ica, or on the Continent, and project as
soon as possible a retirement from busi-
ness, and return to the fashionable cir-
cles of Europe or America. Even
among South African-bom men the
large majority of us intend returning
to our own more lovely birthplaces and
homes in the Colony sooner or later;
and the only element which will prob-
ably form any integral part of the
South African nation of the future and
become subject to the Transvaal Re-
public is the poorer, which, from the
larger advantages for labor here, will

I'bb South African O^bstion. 65

be unable to return to its natural home.
The nomadic population of Johannes-
burg undoubtedly consists of men who
are brave and loyal citizens in their
own States and nations. To-morrow,

IF AMERICA WERE IN DANGER,

One of the most brilliant and able of

56 The South African Question.

English journalists (a man whose opin-
ion on any subject touching his own
land we would receive almost with the
reverence accruing to the man who
speaks of a subject he knows well and
has studied with superior abilities ; but
who had been only a few months in our
land, and, therefore, had not full grasp
of either our people or our problems,
which from their complexity and many-
sidedness are subjects for a life's devo-
tion) that man, three and a half years
ago, when brave little Jameson — ^brave,
however mistaken — was sent in to cap-
ture the mines of Johannesburg for his
master, and. when the great mixed pop-
ulation of Johannesburg, Germans and
French, English and Jews, Arabs and
Chinamen, refused to arise and go to
aid him, and when hundreds of Eng-
lishmen, Corniahmen and others fled

The South African Question. 57

JOHANNESBURG IS NOT JUDASBURG,

6d Tbb South African OuBsribM.

made money here ; but were they bound
to die in a foreign land for causes which
they neither knew nor cared for ?

A LIFE FOR A LIFE.

This the Englishmen in Johannes-
burg and foreigners of all nations could
not possibly feel. They were not more

Thb South African Question. 59

bound to die to obtain control of the
gold mines of Johannesburg for a man
already wealthy or his confederates,
than to assist South Africans in defend-
ing them; or than we who visit the
south of France or Italy for health
should feel ourselves bound to remain
and die if war breaks out between the
Bonapartists and the Republicans, or
the Pope and the King. If by a pro-
cess of abstract thought we have ar-
rived at a strong conviction of a right
or human justice to be maintained by
a cause with which we have no prac-
tical concern, we may feel morally
compelled to take a part in it; but no
man can throw it in our teeth if we
refuse to die in a strange land for

A CAUSE THAT IS NOT OURS.

The Eng^lishmen and others who re-

50 The South African Question.

mining machinery being often of that
race ; our lawyers and doctors are of all
nationalities, while in addition to all
foreigners, there is a certain admixture
of English and Dutch South Africans.
In the course of a day one is brought
into contact with men of every species.
Your household servant may be a Kafir,
your washerwoman is a Half-caste,
your butcher is a Hungarian, your bak-
er English, the man who soles your
boots a German, you buy your vegeta-
bles and fruit from an Indian Coolie,
your coals from the Chinaman round
the corner, your grocer is a Russian
Jew, your dearest friend an American.
This is an actual, and not an imaginary,
description. Here are found the most
noted prostitutes of Chicago; and that
sad sisterhood created by the disloca-
tion of our yet uncoordinated civiliza-

tun South African Question. 61

tion, and known in Johannesburg un-
der the name of continental women,
have thronged here in hundreds from
Paris and the rest of Europe. Gamb-
Hng, as in all mining camps, is rife;
not merely men but even women put
their money into the totalisator, and

A LOW FEVER OF ANXIETY

The South African Question.

necessity among a new and nomadic
population absent; art and science are
of necessity unrepresented; but a gen-
eral alertness and keenness character-
izes our population. In the bulk of our
miners and working men, of our young
men in banks and houses of business,
we have a large mass of solid, intel-
ligent, and invaluable social material
which counter-balances that large mass
of human flotsam and jetsam found in
this, as in all other mining camps ; while
among our professional men and min-
ing officials is found a large amount of
the highest professional knowledge and
efficiency. Happy would it be for the
gallant little Transvaal Republic, and
well for South Africa as a whole, if
the bulk of this little human nature
could become ours forever, if they were
here to stay with us, drink out of our

Thb South African Question.

64 Thb South African O^bstioK.

after years; while with the wealthier
classes this is practically universal. Not
only have our leading mining engineers
and the great speculators not the slight-
est intention of staying in Johannes-
burg permanently; most have their
wives and families in England, Amer-
ica, or on the Continent, and project as
soon as possible a retirement from busi-
ness, and return to the fashionable cir-
cles of Europe or America. Even
among South African-born men the
large majority of us intend returning
to our own more lovely birthplaces and
homes in the Colony sooner or later;
and the only element which will prob-
ably form any integral part of the
South African nation of the future and
become subject to the Transvaal Re-
public is the poorer, which, from the
larger advantages for labor here, will

Th8 South African Question. 65

be unable to return to its natural home.
The nomadic population of Johannes-
burg undoubtedly consists of men who
are brave and loyal citizens in their
own States and nations. To-morrow,

IF AMERICA WERE IN DANGER,

One of the most brilliant and able of

56 The South African Question.

English journalists (a man whose opin-
ion on any subject touching his own
land we would receive almost with the
reverence accruing to the man who
speaks of a subject he knows well and
has studied with superior abilities ; but
who had been only a few months in our
land, and, therefore, had not full grasp
of either our people or our problems,
which from their complexity and many-
sidedness are subjects for a life's devo-
tion) that man, three and a half years
ago, when brave little Jameson — ^brave,
however mistaken — was sent in to cap-
ture the mines of Johannesburg for his
master, and. when the great mixed pop-
ulation of Johannesburg, Germans and
French, English and Jews, Arabs and
Chinamen, refused to arise and go to
aid him, and when hundreds of Eng-
lishmen, Corniahmen and others fled

The South African Question. 57

JOHANNESBURG IS NOT JUDASBURG,

6d The South African Oussridi^.

made money here ; but were they bound
to die in a foreign land for causes which
they neither knew nor cared for ?

A LIFE FOR A LIFE.

This the Englishmen in Johannes-
burg and foreigners of all nations could
not possibly feel. They were not more

Thb South African Question. 59

A CAUSE THAT IS NOT OURS.

The Eng^lishmen and others who re-

60 The South African Question.

fused to fight in Johannesburg, or fled
rather than run the risk of remaining,
pursued the only course open to wise
and honorable men. Had they resolved
to remain permanently in South Africa,
and to become citizens of the Transvaal
Republic, the case might have been
otherwise. As it was, they could not
run a knife into the heart of a people
which had hospitably received them,
and attempt to destroy a land in which
they had found nothing but greater
wealth and material comfort than in
their own ; and they could also not en-
ter upon a deadly raid for a man whom
personally the workers of Johannes-
burg cared nothing for, and with whom
they had not a sympathy or interest in
common. In leaving Johannesburg and
refusing to fight, they pursued the only

The South African Question. 61

course left open to them by justice and
honor.

Rightly to understand the problem :
before the little Transvaal Republic to- ''■
day, it is necessary for Englishmen to j
imagine not merely that, within the
space of ten or twelve years, forty mill-
ions of Russians, Frenchmen and Ger-
mans should enter England, not in
driblets and in time extending over half
a century, so that they might, in a
measure, be absorbed and digested into
the original population, but instantan-
eously and at once ; not merely, that the
large bulk of them did not intend to re-
main in England, and were there mere-
ly to extract wealth; not merely, that
the bulk of this wealth was exported at
once to other countries enriching Rus-
sia, France and Germany out of the
products of English soil ; that would be

62 The South African Question.

comparatively a small matter — ^but, that
the bulk of the wealth extracted was in
the hands of a few persons, and that
these persons were opposed to the con-
tinued freedom and independence of
England, and were attempting by the
use of the wealth they extracted from
England to stir up Russia and France
against her, that through the loss of
her freedom they might the better ob-
tain the command of her wealth and
lands. When the Englishman has
vividly drawn this future for himself,
he will hold, as nearly as is possible, in
a nutshell an image of the problem
which the people and government of
the Transvaal Republic are called on
to face to-day ; and we put it straightly
to him whether this problem is not
one of

Thb South African Question. 63

INFINITE COMPLEXITY AND
DIFFICULTY ?

Much unfortunate misunderstanding
has arisen from the simple use of the
terms "capitalist" and "monopolist" in
the discussion of South African mat-
ters. Without the appending of ex-
planation, they convey a false impres-
sion. These terms, so familiar to the
students of social phenomena in Eu-
rope and America, are generally used
in connection with a larger, but a quite
distinct body of problems. The terms
"capitalism," "monopolist," and "mil-
lionaire" are now generally associated
with the question of the forming of
"trusts," "corners," etc., and the
question whether it is desirable that so-
ciety should so organize itself that one
man may easily obtain possession of
twenty millions, while the bulk of

66 The South African Question,

English journalists (a man whose opin-
ion on any subject touching his own
land we would receive almost with the
reverence accruing to the man who
speaks of a subject he knows well and
has studied with superior abilities ; but
who had been only a few months in our
land, and, therefore, had not full grasp
of either our people or our problems,
which from their complexity and many-
sidedness are subjects for a life's devo-
tion) that man, three and a half years
ago, when brave little Jameson — ^brave,
however mistaken — was sent in to cap-
ture the mines of Johannesburg for his
master, and. when the great mixed pop-
ulation of Johannesburg, Germans and
French, English and Jews, Arabs and
Chinamen, refused to arise and go to
aid him, and when hundreds of Eng-
lishmen, Corniahmen and others fled

The South African Question. 57

JOHANNESBURG IS NOT JUDASBURG,

68 Thb South African 0uBSTi6il.

made money here ; but were they bound
to die in a foreign land for causes which
they neither knew nor cared for ?

A LIFE FOR A LIFE.

This the Englishmen in Johannes-
burg and foreigners of all nations could
not possibly feel. They were not more

Thb South African Question. 59

A CAUSE THAT IS NOT OURS.

The Eng^lishmen and others who re-

68 The South African Question.
THE JOY AND PRIDE

of the South African heart, is largely
the result of this very aridity and rocki-
ness. Parts are fruitful, but we have
no vast corn-producing plains, which
for generations may be cultivated al-
most without replenishing, as in Rus-
sia and America ; we have few facilities
for producing those vast supplies of
flesh which are poured forth from Ausr
tralia and New Zealand; already we
import a large portion of the grain and
flesh we consume. We may, with care,
become a great fruit-producing coun-
try, and create some rich and heavy
wines, but, on the whole, agriculturally,
we are, and must remain, as compared
with most other countries, a poor na-
tion. Nor have we any great inland
lakes, seas, and rivers, or arms of the
sea, to enable us to become a great

'Thb South African Question. 69

maritime or carrying people. One
thing only we have which saves us from
being the poorest country on the earth,
and should make us one of the richest.
We have our vast stores of mineral
wealth, of gold and diamonds, and
probably of other wealth yet unfound.
This is all we have. Nature has given
us nothing else; we are a poor people
but for these. Out of the veins run-
ning through rocks and hills, and the
mud-beds, heavy with jewels, that lie
in our arid plains, must be reared and
created our great national institutions,
our colleges and museums, our art gal-
leries and universities; by means of
these our system of education must be
extended ; and on the material side, out
of these must the great future of South
Africa be built up — or not at all. The
discovery of our mineral wealth came

^0 The South African Question.

somewhat suddenly upon us. We were
not prepared for its appearance by wise
legislative enactments, as in New Zea-
land or some other countries. Before
the people of South Africa as a whole
had had time to wake up to the truth
and to learn the first

GREAT AND TERRIBLE LESSON,

our diamonds should have taught us
the gold mines of the Transvaal were
discovered.

We South Africans, Dutch and Eng-
lish alike, are a curious folk, strong,
brave, with a terrible intensity and per-
severance, but we are not a sharp people
well versed in the movements of the
speculative world. In a few years the
entire wealth of South Africa, its mines
of gold and diamonds, its coal fields,
and even its most intractable lands.

Thb South African Question. 71

from the lovely Hex River Valley to f
Magaliesberg, had largely passed into
the hands of a very small knot of spec-
ulators. In hardly any instances are
they South Africans. That they were
not South African-born would in itself
matter less than nothing, had they
thrown in their lot with us, if in sym-
pathies, hopes, andjears they were one
with us. They are not. It is not mere-
ly that the wealth which should have
made us one of the richest peoples in the
world has left us one of the poorest,
and is exported to other countries, that
it builds palaces in Park Lane, buys
yachts in the Mediterranean, fills the
bags of the croupiers at Monte Carlo,
decks foreign women with jewels, while
our citizens toil in poverty; this is a
small matter. But those men are not
of us! That South Africa we love

< 2 The South African Question.

whose great future is dearer to us than
our own interests, in the thought of
whose great and noble destiny lies the
source of our patriotism and highest in-
spiration, for whose good in a far dis-
tant future we, Dutch and English
alike, would sacrifice all in the present
— this future is no more to them than
the future of the Galapagos Islands.
We are a hunting ground to them, a
field for extracting wealth, for

\ BUILDING UP FAME AND FORTUNE ;

nothing more. This matter does not
touch the Transvaal alone; from the
lovely Hex River Valley, east, west,
north, and south, our lands are being
taken from us, and passing into the
hands of men who not only care nothing
for South Africa, but apply the vast
wealth they have drawn from South Af-

I'hb South African Question. ?3

rican soil in an attempt to corrupt our
public life and put their own nominees
into our parliaments, to grasp the reins
of power, that their wealth may yet
more increase. Is it strange that from
the hearts of South Africans, English
and Dutch alike, there is arising an ex-
ceedingly great and bitter cry: "We
have sold our birthright for a mess of
pottage ! The lands, the mineral wealth
which should have been ours to build
up the great Africa of the future has
gone into strange hands! And they
use the gold they gain out of us to en-
slave us ; they strike at our hearts with
a sword gilded with South African
gold! While the gold and stones re-
mained undiscovered in the bosom of
our earth, it was saved up for us and
for our grandchildren to build up the
great future; it is going froia us never

74 Thk South African Question.

to return; and when they have rifled
our earth and picked the African bones
bare as the vultures clear the carcass
of their prey, they will leave us with the
broken skeleton!"

I think there is no broad-minded and
sympathetic man who can hear this cry
without sympathy. The South African
question is far other than the question :
Shall one man possess twenty millions
while his brother possesses none ? It is
one far deeper.

Nevertheless, there is another side to
the question. Nations, like individuals,
suffer, and must pay the price, yet more
for their ignorance and stupidity than
their wilful crimes. He who sits supine
and intellectually inert, while great evils
are being accomplished, sins wholly as
much as he whose positive action pro-
duces them, and must pay the same

The South African Question. 75

price. The man at the helm who goes
to sleep camiot blame the rock when
the ship is thrown upon it, though it be
torn asunder. He should have known
the rock was there, and steered clear of
it. It is perhaps natural

A GREAT BITTERNESS

should have arisen in our hearts to-
wards the men who have disinherited
us; but is it always just? Personally,
and in private life, they may be far from
being inhuman or unjust; they may be
rich in such qualities ; at most they re-
main men and brothers who differ in no
way from the majority of us. We
made certain laws and regulations;
they took advantage of them for their
own success; they have but pursued
the universal laws of the business
world, and of the struggle of competi-

76 The South African Question.

tion. It was we who did not defend
ourselves, and must take the conse-
quences. As long as any of these men
merely use the wealth they extract
from Africa for their own pleasures and
interest, we have not much to complain
of, and must bear the fruit of our folly.
The speculators who rule in Mashona-
land were wiser than we ; they ordained
that so per cent of all gold mining
profits should go to the government,
and they retained all diamonds found as
a government monopoly. We were not
wise enough to do so, and the nation
must suffer. But poverty is not the
worst thing that can overtake an indi-
vidual or a nation. In that harsh
school the noblest lessons and the
sturdiest virtues are learnt. The great-
est nations, like the greatest individuals,
have often been the poorest ; and with

The South African Question. 77

wealth comes often what is more ter-
rible than poverty — corruption. Not all
the millionaires of Europe can prevent
one man of genius being born in this
land to illuminate it; not all the gold
of Africa can keep us from being the
bravest, freest nation on earth ; no man
living can shut out from our eyes the
glories of our African sky, or kill one
throb of our exultant joy in our great
African plains; nor can all earth pre-
vent us from growing into a great, free,
wise people. The faults of the past we
cannot undo; but

THE FUTURE IS OURS.

But when the men, who came penniless
to our shores and have acquired millions
out of our substance, are not content
with their gains ; when they seek to dye
the South African soil which has re-

?8 Thb South African Question.

fceived them with the blood of its citi-
zens — when they seek her freedom —
the matter is otherwise.

This is the problem, the main weight
of which has fallen on the little South
African Republic. It was that little
ship which received the main blow
when eighty thousand souls of all na-
tionalities leaped aboard at once; and
gallantly the taut little craft, if for a
moment she shivered from stem to
stem, has held on her course to shore,
with all souls on board.

We put it, not to the man in the
street, who, for lack of time or interest,
may have given no thought to such
matters, but to all statesmen, of what-
ever nationality, who have gone deeply
into the problems of social structure
and the practical science of government,
and to all thinkers who have devoted

The South African Question. 79

time and study to the elucidation of so-
cial problems and the structure of so-
cieties and nations, whether the problem
placed suddenly for solution before this
little State does not exceed in complex-
ity and difficulty that which it has al-
most ever been a necessity that the peo-
ple of any country in the past or pres-
ent should deal with ? When we remem-
ber how gravely is discussed the arrival
of a few hundred thousand Chinamen
in America, who are soon lost in the
vast bulk of the population, as a handful
of chaff is lost in a bag of corn ; when
we recall the fact that the appearance
in England of a few thousand labouring
Polish and Russian Jews amidst a vast
population, into which they will be ab-
sorbed in less than two generations
forming good and leal English subjects,
has been solemnly adverted upon as

80 Thb South African Question.
A GREAT NATIONAL CALAMITY,

and measures have been weightily dis-
cussed for forcibly excluding them, it
will assuredly be clear, to all impartial
and truth loving minds, that the prob-
lem which the Transvaal Republic has
suddenly had to deal with is one of
transcendent complexity and difficulty.
We put it to all generous and just spir-
its, whether of statesmen or thinkers,
whether the little Republic does not de-
serve- our sympathy, the sympathy
which wise minds give to all who have
to deal with new and complex problems,
where the past experience of humanity
has not marked out a path — and wheth-
er, if we touch the subject at all, it is
not necessary that it should be in that
large, impartial, truth-seeking spirit, in
which humanity demands we should ap-

The jOuth African Question. 81

prcTach all great social difficulties and
questions ?

We put it further to such intelligent
minds as have impartially watched the
action and endeavors of the little Re-
public in dealing with its great prob-
lems, whether, when all the many sides
and complex conditions are considered,
it has not manfully and wonderfully en-
deavored to solve them ?

It is sometimes said that when one
stands looking down from the edge of
this hill at the great mining camp of
Johannesburg stretching beneath, with
its heaps of white sand and debris
mountains high, its mining chimneys
belching forth smoke, with its seventy
thousand Kafirs, and its eighty thous-
and men and women, white or colored,
of all nationalities gathered here in the
space of a few years, on the spot where

82 The South African Question.

fifteen years ago the Boer's son guided
his sheep to the water and the Boer's
wife sat alone at evening at the house
door to watch the sunset, we are look-
ing upon one of the most wonderful
spectacles on earth. And it is wonder-
ful ; but, as we look at it, the thought
always arises within us of something
more wonderful yet — the marvelous
manner in which a little nation of sim-
ple folk, living in peace in the land they
loved, far from the rush of cities and
the concourse of men, have risen to the
difficulties of their condition ; how they,
without instruction in statecraft, or tra-
ditionary rules of policy, have risen to
face their great difficulties, and have
sincerely endeavored to meet them in a
large spirit, and have largely succeeded.
Nothings but that

Thb South African Question. 83

CURIOUS AND WONDERFUL INSTINCT

for Statecraft and the organization and
arrangement of new social conditions
which seem inherent as a gift of the
blood to all those peoples who took their
rise in the little deltas on the northeast
of the continent of Europe, where the
English and Dutch peoples alike took
their rise, could have made it possible.
We do not say that the Transvaal Re-
public has among its guides and rulers
a Solon or a Lycurgus; but it has to-
day, among the men guiding its destiny,
men of brave and earnest spirit, who
are seeking manfully and profoundly to
deal with the great problems before
them in a wide spirit of humanity and
justice. And, we do again repeat, that
the strong sympathy of all earnest and
thoughtful minds, not only in Africa,
but in England, should be with them.

84 Ths South African Qubsti(»i.

Let US take as an example one of the
simplest elements of the question, the
enfranchisement of the new arrivals.
Even those of us, who with the present
writer are sometimes denominated "the
fanatics of the franchise/' who hold that
that state is healthiest and strongest,
in the majority of cases, in which every
adult citizen, irrespective of sex or posi-
tion, possesses a vote, base our assertion
on the fact that each individual forming
an integral part of the community has
their all at stake in that community;
that the woman's stake is likely to be as
iarge as the man's, and the poor man's
as the rich; for each has only his all,
his life; and that their devotion to its
future good, and their concern in its
health is likely to be equal; that the
state gains by giving voice to all its in-
tegral parts. But the ground is cut

Thb South African Question. 85

from under our feet when a large mass
of persons concerned are not integral
portions of the State, but merely tem-
porarily connected with it, have no in-
terest in its remote future, and only a
commercial interest in its present. We
may hold (and we personally very
strongly hold) that the moment a
stranger lands in a country, however
ignorant he may be of its laws, usages,
and interests, if he intends to remain
permanently in it, and incorporates all
his life and interest with it, he becomes
an integral part of the State, and should
as soon as possible be given the power
of expressing his will through its legis-
lature ; but the

PRACTICAL AND OBVIOUS DIFFICULTY

at once arises of determining who, in
an uncertain stream of strangers who

86 Thb South African (^ubstiOi4

suddenly flow into a land, is so situated !
I may go to Italy, accompanied by two
friends; we may hire the same house
between us (to use a homely illustra-
tion) ; there may be no external evi-
dence of difference in our attitude;
yet I may have determined to live
and die in Italy; I may feel a most
intense affection for its people and
its institutions, and a great solici-
tude over its future. The first man who
accompanies me may feel perfectly in-
different to land and people, and be
there merely for health, leaving again
as soon as it is restored. The second
may be animated by an intense hatred
of Italy and Italians ; he not only may
not wish well to the nation, but may de-
sire to see it downtrodden by Austria,
and its inhabitants destroyed. By en-
franchising me the moment I arrived,

The South African Question. 87

the Italian nation would gain a faith-
ful and devoted citizen, who would sac-
rifice all for her in time of danger, and
devote thought in times of peace ; in en-
franchising immediately the second
man, they would perform an act entire-
ly negative and indifferent without loss
or gain either way; in enfranchising
the third man, they would perform an
act of minor social suicide. Yet it
would be impossible at once, and from
any superficial study to discover our
differences !

THE GREAT SISTER REPUBLIC

across the water has met these difficul-
ties by instituting a probationary resi-
dence of two years, after which by tak-
ing a solemn oath renouncing all al-
legiance to any foreign sovereign or
land, more especially to the ruler of

88 Thb South African Question.

England and the English nation, and
declaring their wish to live and die cit-
izens of the United States, the new
comers are, after a further residence of
another three years, fully enfranchised,
and become citizens of the American
Republic. In this, as in many other
cases, it would appear that the great
Republic has struck on a wise and prac-
tical solution to a complex problem ; and
in this matter, as in many others, we,
personally, should like to see the action
of the great sister Republic followed.
But thoughtful minds may suggest, on
the other hand, that, while in America,
at least at the present day, the newly
enfranchised burgher receives but one-
sixteen millionth of the State power and
of governmental control on his enfran-
chisement, in a small state like the
Transvaal each new burgher receives

The South African Question. 89

over eight hundred times that power in
the government and control of the
country, and that this makes a serious
difference in the importance of making
sure of the loyalty and sincerity of your
citizen before you enfranchise him. We
see this, and there is something to be
said for it. It has been held by many
sincerely desirous of arriving at a just
and balanced conclusion, that, in a Re-
public situated as the Transvaal is, a
longer residence and the votes of a cer-
tain proportion of the already enfran-
chised citizens are necessary before the
vast rights conferred by citizenship in
a small purely democratic State are
granted. The terms for the enfranchise-
ment for foreigners in England yield us
no instructive analogy ; for, in a country
with an hereditary sovereign and an
hereditary Upper House the enfran-

do The South African Question.

chised foreigner receives only a minute
fraction of the power conferred on the
elector in a pure democracy. The little
Russian Jew who has a vote given him
in London can never become the su-
preme head of the State, can never sit
in or vote for members of the Upper
House, and receives only the minute
fractional power of voting for members
of the Lower. It is

IN A PURE DEMOCRACY

where the people are the sovereign and
represent in themselves the hereditary
ruler, the hereditary Upper House, and
the Lower House combined, that the
personnel of each accredited citizen be-
comes all important. The greater the
stability and immobility at one end of
a State, the greater the mobility and in-
stability which may be allowed at the

Thb South African Question. 91

Other end, without endangering the sta-
bility of the State as a whole, or the
healthy performance of its functions.
Even on this comparatively small ques-
tion of the franchise it is evident that
the problem before the little Transvaal
Republic is one of much complexity,
and on which minds broadly liberal and
sincerely desirous of attaining to the
wisest and most humane and most en-
lightened judgment may sincerely dif-
fer.

Of those other and far more serious
problems which the Republic faces in
common with South Africa, there is no
necessity here to speak further; the
thoughtful mind may follow them out
for itself. Time and experiment must
be allowed for the balance of things to
adjust themselves.

South Africa has need of more cit-

92 The South African Question.

izens leal and true. Whoever enters
South Africa and desires to become one
of us, to drink from our cup and sup
from our platter, to mix his seed with
ours and build up the South Africa of
the future — ^him let us receive with open
arms. From great mixtures of races
spring great peoples. The scorned and
oppressed Russian Jew, landing here to-
day, vivified by our fresh South Af-
rican breezes, may yet be the progenitor
of the Spinoza and Maimonides of the
great future South Africa, who shall
lead the world in philosophy and
thought. The pale German cobbler who
with his wife and children lands to-
day, so he stays with us and becomes
one with us, may yet be the father of
the greater Hans Sachs of Africa ; and
the half-starved Irish peasant become
the forerunner of our future Burkes

The South African Question. 93

and William Porters. The rough Cor-
nish miner, who is looking out with
surprised eyes at our new South Afri-
can world to-day, may yet give to us
our greatest statesmen and noblest lead-
er. The great African nation of the
future will have its foundations laid on
stones from many lands. Even to the
Coolie and the Chinaman, so he comes
among us, we personally should say:
Stretch forth the hand of brotherhood.
We may not desire him, we may not in-
tentionally bring him among us, but,
so he comes to remain with us, let South
Africa be home to him.

"Be not unmindful to entertain
strangers, for some have thereby en-
tertained angels unawares."

♦ * ♦ ♦ ♦

We, English South Africans of to-

94 Thb South African Question.

day, who are truly South African, lov-
ing

THE LAND OF OUR BIRTH^

and men inhabiting it, yet bound by
intense and loving ties, not only of in-
tellectual affinity but of personal pas-
sion, to the homeland from which our
parents came, and where the richest
formative years of our life were passed,
we stand to-day midway between these
two great sections of South African
folk, the old who have been here long
and the new who have only come; be-
tween the home-land of our fathers and
the love-land of our birth ; and it would
seem as though, through no advantage
of wisdom or intellectual knowledge on
our part, but simply as the result of the
accident of our position and of our dou-
ble affections, we are fitted to fulfil a
certain function at the present day, to

Thb South African Question. 95

Stand, as it were, as mediators and in-
terpreters between those our position
compels us to sympathize with and so
understand, as they may not, perhaps,
be able to understand each other.

Especially at the present moment has
arrived a time when it is essential that,
however small we may feel is our in-
herent fitness for the task, we should
not shrink nor remain silent and in-
active, but exert by word and action
that peculiar function which our posi-
tion invests us with.

* * *

If it be asked, why at this especial i
moment we feel it incumbent on us not
to maintain silence, and what that is
which compels our action and speech,
the answer may be given in one word —
WAR!

The air of South Africa is

96 The South African Question.

HEAVY WITH RUMORS;

inconceivable, improbable, we refuse to
believe them ; yet, again and again they
return.

There are some things the mind re-
fuses, seriously to entertain, as the man
who has long loved and revered his
mother would refuse to accept the as-
sertion of the first passer-by that there
was any possibility of her raising up
her hand to strike his wife or destroy
his child. But much repetition may at
last awaken doubt; and the man may
begin to look out anxiously for further

evidence.

* * *

We English South Africans are
stunned ; we are amazed ; we say there
can be no truth in it. Yet we begin to
ask ourselves : "What means this un-
wonted tread of armed and hired sol-

The South African Question. 97

diers on South African soil ? Why are
they here?" And the only answer that
comes back to us, however remote and
seemingly impossible is — WAR !

To-night we laugh at it, and to-mor-
row when we rise up it stands before us
again, the ghastly doubt — ^war! — war,
and in South Africa! War — between
white men and white ! War! — Why ? —
Whence is the cause? — For whom? —
For what ? — And the question gains no
answer.

We fall to considering, who gains by
war?

Has our race in Africa and our race
in England interests so diverse that any
calamity so cataclysmic can fall upon
us, as war? Is any position possible,
that could make necessary that mother
and daughter must rise up in one hor-
rible embrace, and rend, if it be pos-

98 The South African Question.

sible, each other's vitals? . . Be-
Heving it impossible, we fall to consid-
ering, who is it gains by war ?

There is peace to-day in the land ; the
two great white races, day by day, hour
by hour, are blending their blood, and
both are mixing with the stranger. No
day passes but from the veins of some
Dutch South African woman the Eng-
lish South African man's child is being
fed ; not a week passes but the birth cry
of the English South African woman's
child gives voice to the Dutchman's off-
spring ; not an hour passes but on farm,
and in town and village, Dutch hearts
are winding about English

AND ENGLISH ABOUT DUTCH.

If the Angel of Death should spread his
wings across the land and strike dead
in one night every man and woman and

The South African Question. 99

child of either the Dutch or the EngHsh
blood, leaving the other alive, the land
would be a land of mourning. There
would be not one household nor the
heart of an African born man or wo-
man that would not be weary with grief.
We should weep the friends of our
childhood, the companions of our early
life, our grandchildren, our kindred, the
souls who have loved us and whom we
have loved. In destroying the one race
he would have isolated the other. Time,
the great healer of all differences, is
blending us into a great mutual people,
and love is moving faster than time. It
is no growing hatred between Dutch
and English South African born men
and women that calls for war. On the
lips of our babes we salute both races
daily.

Then we look round through the po-

100 The South African Question.

litical world, and we ask ourselves:
What great and terrible and sudden
crime has been committed, what reck-
less slaughter and torture of the inno-
cents, that blood can alone wash out
blood?

And we find none.

And still we look, asking what great
and terrible difference has suddenly
arisen, so mighty that the human intel-
lect cannot solve it by means of peace,
that the highest and noblest diplomacy
falls powerless before it, and the wis-
dom and justice of humanity cannot
reach it, save by the mother's drawing
a sword and planting it in the heart of
the daughter ?

We can find none.

And again, we ask ourselves

The Soul-H African Question. 101
WHO GAINS BY WAR?

What is it for ? Who is there that de-
sires it? Do men shed streams of hu-
man blood as children cut off poppy-
heads to see the white juice flow?

WHO GAINS BY WAR?

Not England ! She has a great young
nation's heart to lose. She has a cable
of fellowship which stretches across the
seas to rupture. She has treaties to vio-
late. She has the great traditions of her
past to part with. Whoever plays to
win, she loses.

WHO GAINS BY WAR?

Not Africa ! The great young nation,
quickening to-day to its first conscious-
ness of life, to be torn and rent, and
bear upon its limb, into its fully ripened
manhood, the marks of the wounds —
wounds from a mother's hands !

102 Thx South African QuBstioii.
WHO GAINS BY WAR?

Not the great woman whose eighty
years to-night completes,* who would
carry with her to her grave the remem-
brance of the longest reign and the pur-
est ; who would have that when the na-
tions gather round her bier, the whisper
should go round, "That was a mother's
hand; it struck no child."

WHO GAINS BY WAR?

Not the brave English soldier ; there
' are no laurels for them here. The dy-
j ing lad with hands fresh from the
plough; the old man tottering to the
grave, who seizes up the gun to die with
it; the simple farmer who as he falls
hears yet his wife's last whisper, "For
freedom and our land !" and dies hear-
ing it — ^these men can bind no laurels on

♦Written on 24th May, 1899.

^HB South African Question. 103

a soldier's brow ! They may be shot, not
conquered — fame rests with them. Go,
gallant soldiers and defend the shores
of that small island that we love ; there
are no laurels for you here !

WHO GAINS BY WAR?

Not we the Africans, whose hearts
are knit to England. We love all. Each
hired soldier's bullet that strikes down
a South African, does more ; it finds a
billet here in our hearts. It takes one
African's life — in another it kills that
which will never live again.

WHO GAINS BY WAR?

There are some who think they gain !
In the background we catch sight of
misty figures ; we know the old tread ;
we hear the rustle of paper, passing
from hand to hand, and we know the

1
i

104 The South African Question.

fall of gold ; it is an old familiar sound
in Africa ; we know it now ! There are
some who think they gain! Will they
gain?

^^^ ^^^ ^^^ ^^^

But it may be said, "What matter
who goads England on, or in whose
cause she undertakes war against Afri-
cans; this at least is certain, she can
win. We have the ships, we have the
men, we have the money."

We answer, "Yes, might generally
conquers — for a time at least." The
greatest empire upon earth, on which
the sun never sets, with its five hundred
million subjects, may rise up in its full
majesty of power and glory, and crush
thirty thousand farmers. It may not
be a victory, but at least it will be
a slaughter. We ought to win. We
have the ships, we have the men, and

The South African Quisstion. 105

we have the money. May there not be (
something else we need? The Swiss
had it when they fought with Austria ;
the three hundred had it at Thermopy-
lae, although not a man was saved ; it |
goes to make a victory. Is it worth
fighting if we have not got it?

I suppose there is no man who to-day
loves his country who has not perceived
that in the life of the nation, as in the
life of the individual, the hour of ex-
ternal success may be the hour of irrev-
ocable failure, and that the hour of
death, whether to nations or individ-
uals, is often the hour of immortality.
When William the Silent, with his little
band of Dutchmen, rose up to face the
whole Empire of Spain, I think there is
no man who does not recognize that the
hour of their greatest victory was not
when they had conquered Spain, and .

106 Thb South African Question.

/ hurled backward the greatest Empire of

/ the world to meet its slow imperial

/ death ; it was the hour when that little

I band stood alone with the waters over

their homes,

FACING DEATH AND DESPAIR^

and stood, facing it. It is that hour
i that has made Holland immortal, and
I her history the property of all human
hearts.

It may be said, "But what has Eng-
land to fear in a campaign with a coun-
try like Africa ? Can she not send out
a hundred thousand or a hundred and
fifty thousand men and walk over the
land ? She can sweep it by mere num-
bers." We answer yes — she might do
it. Might generally conquers; not al-
ways. (I have seen a little muur kat
attacked by a mastiff, the first joint oi

The South African Question. 107

whose leg it did not reach. I have seen
it taken in the dog's mouth, so that
hardly any part of it was visible, and
thought the creature was dead. But it
fastened its tiny teeth inside the dog's
throat, and the mastiff dropped it, and,
mauled and wounded and covered with
gore and saliva, I saw it creep back into
its hole in the red African earth. ) But
might generally conquers, and there is
no doubt that England might send out
sixty or a hundred thousand hired sol-
diers to South Africa, and they could
bombard our towns and destroy our vil-
lages; they could shoot down men in
the prime of life, and old men and boys,
till there was hardly a kopje in the
country without its stain of blood, and
the Karoo bushes grew up greener on
the spot where men from the midlands,
who had come to help their fellows, fell,

108 The South African Question.

never to go home. I suppose it would
be quite possible for the soldiers to
shoot all male South Africans who ap-
peared in arms against them. It might
not be easy, a great many might fall,
but a great Empire could always import
more to take their places ; we could not
import more, because it would be our
husbands and sons and fathers who
were falling, and when they were done
we could not produce more. Then the
war would be over. There would not
be a house in Africa — where African-
born men and women lived — without
its mourners, from Sea Point to the
Limpopo; but South Africa would be
pacified — as Cromwell pacified Ireland
three centuries ago, and she has been
being pacified ever since ! As Virginia
was pacified in 1677 ; its handful of men
and women in defence of their freedom

The South African Question. 109

were soon silenced by hired soldiers. "I
care that for the power of England,
said **a notorious and wicked rebel
called Sarah Drummond, as she took a
small stick and broke it and lay it on
the ground. A few months later her
husband and all the men with him were
made prisoners, and the war was over.
*'I am glad to see you," said Berkely,
the English Governor, "I have long
wished to meet you ; you will be hanged
in half an hour!" and he was hanged
and twenty-one others with him, and
Virginia was pacified. But a few gen-
erations later in that State of Virginia
was born George Washington, and on
the 19th of April, 1775, was fought the
battle of Lexington — "Where once
the embattled farmers stood, and fired
a shot, heard round the world," — ^and
the greatest crime and the greatest folly

110 Thb South African Question.

of England's career was completed.
England acknowledges it now. A hun-
dred or a hundred and fifty thousand
imported soldiers might walk over
South Africa ; it would not be an easy
walk ; but it could be done. Then from
east and west and north and south
would come men of pure English blood
to stand beside the boys they had played
with at school and the friends they had
loved ; and a great despairing cry would
rise from the heart of Africa. But we
are still few. When the war was over
the imported soldiers might leave the
land — ^not all ; some must be left to keep
the remaining people down. There
would be quiet in the land. South Af-
rica would rise up silently, and count
her dead, and bury them. She would
know the places where she found them.

Thb South African Question. Ill

South Africa would be peaceful. There
would be silence, the silence of a long
exhaustion — ^but not peace! Have the
dead no voices? In a thousand farm
houses black robed women would hold
memory of the count, and outside under
African stones would lie the African
men to whom South African women
gave birth under our blue sky. There
would be silence, but no peace.

You say that all the fighting men in
arms might have been shot. Yes, but
what of the women ? If there were left
but five thousand pregnant South Afri-
can-bom women, and all the rest of
their people destroyed, those women
would breed up again a race like to the
first.

OH, LION-HEART OF THE NORTH,

do you not recognize your own lineage

112 Thb South African Qubstion.

in these whelps of the South ? We can-
not live if we are not free !

The grandchildren and great-grand-
children of the men who lay under the
stones (who will not be English then
nor Dutch, but only Africans), will say,
as they pass those heaps: "There lie
our fathers, or great-grandfathers who
died in the first great War of Indepen-
dence," and the descendants of the men
who lay there will be the aristocracy of
Africa. Men will count back to them
and say : My father or my great-grand-
father lay in one of those graves. We
shall know no more of Dutch or Eng-
lish then, we shall know only one great
African people. And we? We, the
South Africans of to-day, who are still
English, who have been proud to do the
smallest good so it might bring honor
to England, who have vowed our vows

The South African Question. 113

on the honor of Englishmen, and by the
faith of EngHshmen — ^what of usf

What of us ? We, too, have had our
vision of Empire. We have seen as
in a dream the Empire of England as a
great banyan tree ; silently with the fall-
ing of the dew and the dropping of the
rain it has extended itself ; its branches
have drooped down and rooted them-
selves in the earth ; in it all the fowl of
Heaven have taken refuge, and under
its shade all the beasts of the field have
lain down to rest. Can we change it for
an upas tree, whose leaves distill poison
and which spells death to those who
have lain down in peace under its
shadow ?

You have no right to take our dream
from us ; you have no right to kill our
faith ! Of all the sins England will sin

114 The South African Qubstion.

if she makes war on South Africa, the
greatest will be towards us.

Of what importance is the honor and
faith we have given her ? You say, we
are but few ! Yes, we are few ; but all
the gold of Witwatersrand would not
buy one throb of that love and devotion
we have given her.

Do not think that when imported sol-
diers walk across South African plains
to take the lives of South African men
and women, that it is only African sand
and African bushes that are cracking
beneath their tread : at each step they
are breaking the fibres, invisible as air,
but strong as steel, which bind the
hearts of South Africans to England.
Once broken they can never be made
whole again; they are living things;
broken, they will be dead. Each bullet
which a soldier sends to the heart of a

The South African Question. 115

South African to take his life, wakes up
another who did not know he was an
African. You will not kill us with your
Lee-Metfords : you will make us. There
are men who do not know they love a
Dutchman ; but the first three hundred
that fall, they will know it.

Do not say, "But you are English,
you have nothing to fear : we have no
war with you !"

There are hundreds of us, men and
women, who have loved England; we
would have given our lives for her ; but,
rather than strike down one South Af-
rican man fighting for freedom, we
would take this right hand and hold it
in the fire, till nothing was left of it but
a charred and blackened bone.

I know of no more graphic image in
the history of the world than

116 Thb South African Qusstion.
THE FIGURE OF FRANKUN

when he stood before the Lords of
Council in England, giving evidence,
striving, fighting, to save America for
England. Browbeaten, flouted, jeered
at by the courtiers, his words hurled
back at him as lies, he stood there fight-
ing for England. England recognizes
now that it was he who tried to save an
Empire for her ; and that the men who
flouted and browbeat him, lost it. There
is nothing more pathetic than the way
in which Americans who loved Eng-
land, Washington and Franklin, strove
to keep the maiden vessel moored close
to the mother's side, bound by the bonds
of love and sympathy, that alone could
bind them. Their hands were beaten
down, bruised and bleeding, wounded
by the very men they came to save, till
they let go the mother ship and drifted

The South African Question. 11 7

away on their own great imperial course
across the seas of time.

England knows now what those men
strove to do for her, and the names of
Washington and Franklin will ever
stand high in honor where the English
tongue is spoken. The names of Hutch-
inson, and North, and Grafton are not
forgotten also; it might be well for
them if they were!

Do not say to us : "You are English-
men; when the war is over, you can
wrap the mantle of our imperial glory
round you and walk about boasting that
the victory is yours."

We could never wrap that mantle
round us again. We have worn it with
pride. We could never wear it then.
There would be blood upon it, and the
blood would be our brothers'.

We put it to the men of England.

Il8 Thb South African Questiok.

In that day where should we be found ;
we who have to maintain English hon-
or in the South ? Judge for us, and by
your judgment we will abide. Remem-
ber, we are Englishmen !

^r ^ ^h ^F ^F

Looking around to-day along the
somewhat over-clouded horizon of
South African life, one figure strikes the
eye, new to the circle of our existence
here ; and we eye it with something of
that hope and sympathy with which a
man is bound to view the new and un-
known, which may be of vast possible
good and beauty.

What have we in this man, who rep-
resents English honor and English wis-
dom in South Africa ? To a certain ex-
tent we know.

We have a man honorable in the re-
lations of personal life, loyal to friend,

The South African O^kstion. 119

and above all charm of gold ; wise with
the knowledge of books and men; a
man who could not violate a promise
or strike in the dark. This we know we
have, and it is much to know this ; but
what have we more?

The man of whom South Africa has
need to-day to sustain England's honor
and her Empire of the future, is a man
who must possess more than the knowl-
edge and wisdom of the intellect.

When a woman rules a household
with none but the children of her own
body in it, her task is easy ; let her obey
nature and she will not fail. But the
woman who finds herself in a large
strange household, where children and
step-children are blended, and where
all have passed the stage of childhood
and have entered on that stage of
adolescence where coercion can no more

120 Thb South African Question.

avail, but where sympathy and compre-
hension are the more needed, that wo-
man has need of large and rare qualities
springing more from the heart than
from the head. She who can win the
love of her strange household in its
adolescence will keep its loyalty and
sympathy when adult years are reached
and will be rich indeed.

There have been Englishmen in Af-
rica who had those qualities. Will

THIS NEW ENGLISHMAN OF OURS

evince them and save an Empire for
England and heal South Africa's
wounds? Are we asking too much
when we turn our eyes with hope to
him?

Further off also, across the sea we
look with hope. The last of the race of
great statesmen was not put into the

The South African Question » 121

ground with the old man of Hawar-
den ; the great breed of Chatham and
Burke is not extinct; the hour must
surely bring forth the man.

We look further yet with confidence,
from the individual to the great heart
of England, the people. The great
fierce freedom-loving heart of England
is not dead yet. Under a thin veneer
of gold we still hear it beat. Behind the
shrivelled and puny English Hyde who
cries only "gold," risds the great Eng-
lish Jekyll, who cries louder yet "Jus-
tice and honor." We appeal to him; .
history shall not repeat itself. j

Nearer home, we turn to one whom
all South Africans are proud of, and
we would say to Paul Kruger, "Great
old man, first but not last of South
Africa's great line of rulers, you have
shown us you could fight for freedom ;

1^2 Thb South African Question.

show US you can win peace. On the
foot of that great statue which in the
future the men and women of South
Africa will raise to you let this stand
written: This man loved freedom,
and fought for it; but his heart was
large; he could forget injuries and deal
generously.' "

And to our fellow Dutch South Afri-
cans, whom we have learnt to love so
much during the time of stress and
danger, we would say : "Brothers, you
have shown the world that you know
how to fight ; show it you know how to
govern; forget the past; in that Great
Book which you have taken for your
guide in life, turn to Leviticus, and
read there in the 19th chapter, 34th
verse : *But the stranger that dwelleth
with you shall be unto you as one born
among you, and thou shalt love him as

Thb South African Question. 123

thyself; for ye were strangers in the
land of Egypt. I am the Lord your
God.'"

Be strong, be fearless, be patient.

We would say to you in the words
of the wise dead President of the Free
State which have become the symbol
of South Africa, 'Wacht een beetje>
alles sal recht kom/^ (Wait a little,
all will come right. )

On our great African flag let us em-
blazon these words, never to take them
down, "FREEDOM, JUSTICE,
LOVE"; great are the two first, but
without the last they are not complete.

Olive Schreiner,

2 Primrose Terrace,
Berea Estate,
Johannesburg,
June, 1899. South African Republic.

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