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  THE SOUTH AFRICAN
  QUESTION

  BY

  AN ENGLISH SOUTH AFRICAN

  (_Olive Schreiner_)

  AUTHOR OF “THE STORY OF AN AFRICAN
  FARM,” “DREAMS,” ETC.

  CHICAGO
  CHARLES H. SERGEL COMPANY
  1899




Copyright, 1899, by Olive Schreiner.




  “_Then let us pray that come it may,
    As come it will for a’ that;
  That truth and worth, o’er a’ the earth,
    May bear the gree, and a’ that;
  For a’ that, and a’ that;
    It’s coming yet, for a’ that;
  That man to man, the world o’er,
    Shall brothers be for a’ that._”

       *       *       *       *       *

“_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
expressed his opposition to those stratagems 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 desire for war,
but implying it might be well if the wave swept across South Africa,
and especially across that portion which is richest in mineral wealth,
and, therefore, more to be desired. South Africans and men from Europe
alike have written deprecating war, because of the vast suffering
and loss it would occasion to individuals. Dutch and English South
Africans have written (as one in an able and powerful letter dated from
Vrededorp, which appeared 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, born 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
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 affairs, for an especial
function, which imposes on us, at whatever cost to ourselves, 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 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 translucent 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 sight of Table Bay, and the great front of Table Mountain has
reared up before 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 go home to die; and that the time comes when we know that
dearer far to us than fame or success is one little handful 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, perhaps, 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 merely that when for the first time we visit the old
nesting place of our people 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 cathedral, rich with remains of the great
dead and past; it is not merely that the associations of language and
literature 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 Africans. Beyond all these impersonal, and more or less
intellectual ties, we form a personal one with England. Whether we
have gone home as students to college or university, or for purposes of
art, literature, or professional 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 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
tobacco, 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
remembrances of youth: and for many of us the memory of fog-smitten
London is inextricably blended with the all profoundest 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 us

  “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 material interests, may all be in South Africa,
but a bond of love so strong that six thousand miles of sea can only
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, personal 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 beside her before she had spoken. This is

  OUR EXACT POSITION.

Side by side with us in South Africa are other South Africans whose
position is not and cannot be exactly what ours is. Shading away from
us by imperceptible degrees, stand, on one side of us, those English
South Africans who, racially English, yet know nothing 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
grandmother’s family, but they are before all things essentially South
African. They desire to see England increase and progress, and to
remain in harmony and union with her while she does not interfere with
internal affairs of South Africa, but they do not and cannot feel to
her as those of us do whose love is personal and whose intellectual
sympathies center largely in England.

Yet further from us on the same side stand our oldest white fellow
South Africans; who were, many, not of English blood originally,
though among that body of early white settlers, men who preceded us
in South Africa by three centuries, were a few with English names,
and though by intermarriage Dutch and English South Africans 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, 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 persistence, and an inalienable indestructible air of
personal freedom.

Even under the early Dutch Government of the East India Company, they
were not always restful and resented interference and external control.
They frequently felt themselves “ondergedrukt,”[A] and, taking their
guns, and getting together wife and children and all that they had, and
inspanning their wagons, they trekked[B] 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
complications, 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, owing to other changes in Europe, she took the Cape
again in 1806, and has since then been the

  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 majority of white South
Africans throughout the Cape Colony, Free State, and Transvaal,
outnumbering at the present day, even with the accession of the
foreigners (Uitlanders mean foreigners 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-loving race; the best
of us have nobler qualities yet--we love justice; we admire 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
Englishmen, at different times and in different 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 English
nation was done in 1881 when Gladstone gave back to the Transvaal the
independence which had been mistakenly taken. I would not say policy
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 permanently 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 wisdom, he saw the right, and
the action was no less heroic because it was wise; for other men see
truth who have not 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
justice, but we have our faults. We are not a sympathetic or a quickly
comprehending 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 allied 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 readily
understand wants and conditions 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. Undoubtedly 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 honorable as the English soldier is apt to be, but with
hard military conceptions of government and discipline. Our Dutch
fellow South Africans are a strange folk. Virile, resolute, passionate
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 affection 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 understand them; they made no allowances
for a race of brave, free men inhabiting a country which by the might
of their own right hand they had won from savages 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 always sympathetically 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 sympathetically and gently dealt with.
The men, well meaning, but military, tried with this fierce, gentle,
sensitive, free folk force, where they should have exercised 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
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 under the
conditions, could not, be exercised. 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 1815 here were hanged five 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 completed. The place is called to-day
“Schlachter’s Nek,” or “Butcher’s Ridge.” Every South African child
knows the story. Technically, any government 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 has often
been found to be the method for perpetrating them. We may submerge 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 exercising
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 hearts, continued to move
away from a controlling power that did not understand 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 independent 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

  PROSPEROUS, WELL-GOVERNED AND PEACEFUL

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 Imperial or national power, with their old flint-lock guns in
their hands as their only weapons, with wife and children, they passed
into that yet untrodden land. The terrible story of their struggles,
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 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 anywhere
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 the
wilderness they planted their homes, and founded their little State.
Men and women are still living who can remember how, sixty years ago,
the spot where the great mining camp of Johannesburg now stands was a
great 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 have suffered and
bled for, the gallant little 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 fight, on
even terms; there were no Maxim guns to mow down ebony figures by the
hundred at the turn of a handle; a free even stand up fight; and there
were times when it almost seemed 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
generously 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 early days! Yes, and
a century ago England wished to make war on her American subjects in
Virginia for refusing to take the slaves she sent. There was a time
when we might have vaunted some superiority in the English-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 presented
for payment as other bills are, and the white man of Africa will have
to settle it. It has been run up as heavily north of the Limpopo as
south; and when our sons stand up to settle it, it will be Dutchmen
and Englishmen together 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 Republics, are found enormous
numbers of cultured and polished Dutch-descended South Africans, using
English 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 eloquent lawyers, our most skillful physicians, 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. 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 ordinary 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 midland districts of the Colony, in the Transvaal and Free State,
who constitute a large part of the virile backbone of South Africa.
Clinging to their old seventeenth century faiths and manners, 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
Africans 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 women of the two races are meeting. In the Colony there are
few families which have not their Dutch or English connections by
marriage; in another generation the fusion will be complete. There will
be no Dutchmen then and no Englishmen in South Africa, but only the
great blended South African people of the future, speaking the English
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
years but the great blended race of Africans.

       *       *       *       *       *

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 Africans. They have--both Dutch and English--in many
cases a deep and sincere affection for the English language, English
institutions, and a sincere affection for England herself. They are
grateful to her for her watch over their seas; and were a Russian
fleet to appear in Table Bay to-morrow and attempt to land troops, it
would fly as quickly from Dutch as English bullets. Neither Dutch nor
English South Africans desire to see any other power installed in the
place of England. Cultured Dutch and English Africans alike are fed on
English literature, and England is their intellectual home. Even with
our simplest Dutch-descent Africans 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. “It is a strange thing,” said a well-known Dutch South
African to us twenty-one years ago, “that when I went to Europe to
study I went to Holland, and loved the land and the people, but I
felt a stranger; it was the same in Germany, the same in France. But
when I landed in England I said, ‘I am at home!’” That man was once a
passionate 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 resolve to take one more long train journey 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, upholding the loftiest traditions of English
justice and humanity, endeared himself to the hearts of South Africans.
“God’s Englishman”--not of the Stock Exchange and the Gatling gun, but
of the great heart.

But great as is the bond between South Africans, whether Dutch or
English, and England, caused by language, sentiments, interest and the
noble record left by those large Englishmen who have labored among us,
the South African pure and simple, whether English or Dutch, cannot
feel to England just as we do. Their material interest may bind them to
England as much as it binds us, but that deep passion for her honor,
the consciousness 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-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 desire for its good, our
position remains not exactly as theirs. Our standpoint is at once
broader and more impartial in dealing with South African questions, 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.

Ever since the time when England took over the Cape, there has been
slowly entering the country a thin stream of new settlers, English
mainly, 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 South Africans. For
the rest, for years men continually dribbled in slowly and singly
from other countries. Whether they came out in search of health, as
clergymen, missionaries, or doctors, or in search of manual employment,
or as farmers, they almost all became, or tended to become almost
immediately, South Africans. They settled in the land permanently among
people who were permanent inhabitants, 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
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 newcomers 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 discovery 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 fault of its own, the mass of this
gold has been discovered mainly along the Witwatersrand, within the
territory of the Transvaal Republic, and more especially at the spot
where the great mining camp of Johannesburg now stands, thus throwing
upon the little Republic the main pressure of the new arrivals.

To those who know the great mining camps of Klondike and Western
America, it is perhaps not necessary to describe Johannesburg. Here are
found that diverse and many-shaded body of humans, who appear wherever
in the world gold is discovered. The Chinaman with his pigtail, the
Indian Coolie, the manly Kafir, and the Half-caste; all forms of dark
and colored folk are here, and outnumber considerably the white. Nor is
the white population less multifarious and complex. On first walking
the streets, one has a strange sense of having left South Africa, and
being merely in some cosmopolitan center, which might be anywhere where
all nations and colors gather round the yellow 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 English tradesmen; while on the
Stock Exchange men of every European nationality are found, though
the Jew predominates. The American strangers are not large in number,
but are represented by perhaps the most cultured and enlightened
class in the camp, the mining engineer and large importers of 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 baker English, the man who soles your boots a
German, you buy your vegetables 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 dislocation of our yet
uncoordinated civilization, and known in Johannesburg under the name
of continental women, have thronged here in hundreds from Paris and the
rest of Europe. Gambling, 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 therefore been gathered largely from books, Johannesburg
compares favorably, and _very_ favorably, with other large mining
camps in the same stage of their existence. The life of culture and
impersonal thought is largely and of necessity among a new and nomadic
population absent; art and science are of necessity unrepresented;
but a general alertness and keenness characterizes 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, intelligent, 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 mining 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 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 livelihood, and for nothing more. Even our miners and
working men in Johannesburg, the most stable and possibly permanent
element in our population, have, in many instances, their wives and
families in Cornwall or elsewhere; and when they have them here they
still think of the return home for good in after years; while with
the wealthier classes this is practically universal. Not only have our
leading mining engineers and the great speculators not the slightest
intention of staying in Johannesburg permanently; most have their wives
and families in England, America, or on the Continent, and project
as soon as possible a retirement from business, and return to the
fashionable circles 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 probably form any integral part of the South African
nation of the future and become subject to the Transvaal Republic is
the poorer, which, from the larger advantages for labor here, will be
unable to return to its natural home.

The nomadic population of Johannesburg 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 citizen 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 Fatherland; every Englishman, every Frenchman, would, as all
brave men in the world’s history have done, when the cry arises, “The
birth-land in danger!” The few Spaniards here trooped back to Spain as
soon as the news of war arrived.

One of the most brilliant and able of English journalists (a man
whose opinion 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 devotion) that man,
three and a half years ago, when brave little Jameson--brave, however
mistaken--was sent in to capture the mines of Johannesburg for his
master, and when the great mixed population of Johannesburg, Germans
and French, English and Jews, Arabs and Chinamen, refused to arise and
go to aid him, and when hundreds of Englishmen, Cornishmen and others
fled from Johannesburg, fearing that Jameson might arrive and cause a
disturbance--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-morrow 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 difficulty
win in their own land; they were friendly treated by South Africa and
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 unavoidable conviction that by no other means can we
preserve our own life and freedom 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 willing, 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 Johannesburg and foreigners of all nations
could not possibly feel. They were not more 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 defending 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
process of abstract thought we have arrived at a strong conviction of a
right or human justice to be maintained by a cause with which we have
no practical 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 Englishmen and others who refused 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 enter upon a deadly raid for a man whom personally the workers of
Johannesburg 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 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 imagine not merely that,
within the space of ten or twelve years, forty millions of Russians,
Frenchmen and Germans 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 instantaneously
and at once; not merely, that the large bulk of them did not intend to
remain in England, and were there merely to extract wealth; not merely,
that the bulk of this wealth was exported at once to other countries
enriching Russia, France and Germany out of the products of English
soil; that would be 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 continued 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 obtain 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

  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 matters. Without the appending of explanation, they convey a
false impression. These terms, so familiar to the students of social
phenomena in Europe and America, are generally used in connection
with a larger, but a quite distinct body of problems. The terms
“capitalism,” “monopolist,” and “millionaire” are now generally
associated with the question of the forming of “trusts,” “corners,”
etc., and the question whether it is desirable that society should so
organize itself that one man may easily obtain possession of twenty
millions, while the bulk of equally intelligent and equally laborious
men obtain little or nothing from the labor of humanity. This question
is a world-wide question; it is not one in any sense peculiarly South
African; it is a world-wide problem, which, as the result of much
thought, careful consideration and many experiments, the nations of the
civilized world will be called to adjudicate upon during the twentieth
century; but it is not the question with which South Africa stands face
to face at this moment. The question before us is not: Shall one South
African possess twenty millions, live in his palace, live on champagne,
have his yacht in Table Bay, and deck women with a hundred thousand
pounds’ worth of jewels, while the South African next door has nothing?
This is not our question. Our problem is not the problem of America.
In America there are many individuals possessing wealth amounting to
many millions, but when the United States in their entirety is taken
the £40,000,000 of the richest individual sink to nothing; and, were it
the desire of the richest millionaire in the States

  TO CORRUPT AND PURCHASE

the whole population for political purposes, he could not pay so much
as £1 a head to the 80,000,000 inhabitants of the country. Further, the
bulk of American millionaires are American! They differ in no respect,
except in their possession of large wealth, in interest or affections,
from the shoemaker in the alley or the farmer at his plough. They are
American citizens; their fate is bound up with that of the land they
live in; their ambitions are American. If a great misfortune should
overtake America to-morrow there is no reason to suppose that the heart
of a Rockefeller or a Vanderbilt would not ache as that of the simplest
cowboy in the States. When they die, it is to American institutions
that they leave their munificent donations, and the colleges and public
institutions of America are endowed by them. The mass even of that
wealth they expend on themselves is expended in America, and, whether
they will or no, returns to the people of the country in many forms.
The millionaires of America are and remain Americans; and the J. Gould
who should expend his millions in stirring up war between the North and
South, or in urging England to attack and slay American citizens, would
be dealt with by his fellow-subjects, whether millionaires or paupers,
with expedition. The question whether the conditions which lead to such
vast accretions of fortune in the hands of private individuals is a
desirable one and of social benefit is an open one, and a fair field
for impartial discussion; but, whatever decision is arrived at with
regard to millionaires and private monopoly as they exist in Europe or
the United States, it has little or no bearing on the problem of South
Africa, which is totally distinct.

South Africa is a young country, and taken as a whole it is an arid,
barren country agriculturally. Our unrivalled climate, our sublime and
rugged natural scenery,

  THE JOY AND PRIDE

of the South African heart, is largely the result of this very aridity
and rockiness. Parts are fruitful, but we have no vast corn-producing
plains, which for generations may be cultivated almost without
replenishing, as in Russia and America; we have few facilities for
producing those vast supplies of flesh which are poured forth from
Australia 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 country, 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 nation. Nor have we any great inland
lakes, seas, and rivers, or arms of the sea, to enable us to become
a great 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 running 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 galleries 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 somewhat suddenly upon us. We
were not prepared for its appearance by wise legislative enactments,
as in New Zealand 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 English alike, are a curious folk, strong,
brave, with a terrible intensity and perseverance, 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, from
the lovely Hex River Valley to Magaliesberg, had largely passed into
the hands of a very small knot of speculators. 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 sympathies, hopes, and fears they were one with us. They are
not. It is not merely 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 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 inspiration, for whose good
in a far distant 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 African 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 exceedingly 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 enslave us; they
strike at our hearts with a sword gilded with South African gold! While
the gold and stones remained 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 from us never 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 produces them, and must
pay the same price. The man at the helm who goes to sleep cannot 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 towards 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 remain 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
competition. It was we who did not defend ourselves, and must take
the consequences. 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 Mashonaland were wiser than we; they
ordained that 50 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
individual or a nation. In that harsh school the noblest lessons and
the sturdiest virtues are learnt. The greatest nations, like the
greatest individuals, have often been the poorest; and with wealth
comes often what is more terrible 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 prevent 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 received them with
the blood of its citizens--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 nationalities leaped aboard at
once; and gallantly the taut little craft, if for a moment she shivered
from stem to stern, 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 whatever nationality, who have gone deeply into the
problems of social structure and the practical science of government,
and to all thinkers who have devoted time and study to the elucidation
of social problems and the structure of societies and nations, whether
the problem placed suddenly for solution before this little State does
not exceed in complexity and difficulty that which it has almost ever
been a necessity that the people of any country in the past or present
should deal with? When we remember 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 absorbed in less than two generations forming
good and leal English subjects, has been solemnly adverted upon as

  A GREAT NATIONAL CALAMITY,

and measures have been weightily discussed for forcibly excluding them,
it will assuredly be clear, to all impartial and truth loving minds,
that the problem 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 spirits, whether of statesmen or thinkers, whether
the little Republic does not deserve 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
whether, 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 approach 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 Republic in dealing with its
great problems, whether, when all the many sides and complex conditions
are considered, it has not manfully and wonderfully endeavored 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 thousand men and women, white or colored, of all
nationalities gathered here in the space of a few years, on the spot
where 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 looking upon one of the most wonderful spectacles
on earth. And it is wonderful; 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 simple 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 traditionary 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. Nothing but that

  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 Republic 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.

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 position, 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 large 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 integral parts. But the ground is
cut from under our feet when a large mass of persons concerned are
_not_ integral portions of the State, but merely temporarily connected
with it, have no interest 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
legislature; but the

  PRACTICAL AND OBVIOUS DIFFICULTY

at once arises of determining who, in an uncertain stream of strangers
who 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 illustration); there may be no external evidence 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 solicitude over its future. The first man who
accompanies me may feel perfectly indifferent 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 desire to see it
downtrodden by Austria, and its inhabitants destroyed. By enfranchising
me the moment I arrived, the Italian nation would gain a faithful and
devoted citizen, who would sacrifice all for her in time of danger,
and devote thought in times of peace; in enfranchising immediately the
second man, they would perform an act entirely 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 difficulties by instituting a
probationary residence of two years, after which by taking a solemn
oath renouncing all allegiance to any foreign sovereign or land,
more especially to the ruler of England and the English nation, and
declaring their wish to live and die citizens 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 practical 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
enfranchisement, in a small state like the Transvaal each new burgher
receives 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 Republic situated as the
Transvaal is, a longer residence and the votes of a certain proportion
of the already enfranchised citizens are necessary before the vast
rights conferred by citizenship in a small purely democratic State are
granted. The terms for the enfranchisement for foreigners in England
yield us no instructive analogy; for, in a country with an hereditary
sovereign and an hereditary Upper House the enfranchised 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 supreme 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 becomes all
important. The greater the stability and immobility at one end of a
State, the greater the mobility and instability which may be allowed
at the other end, without endangering the stability of the State as
a whole, or the healthy performance of its functions. Even on this
comparatively small question 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 enlightened judgment may
sincerely differ.

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 citizens 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 African
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 and William
Porters. The rough Cornish miner, who is looking out with surprised
eyes at our new South African world to-day, may yet give to us our
greatest statesmen and noblest leader. 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 intentionally 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
entertained angels unawares.”

       *       *       *       *       *

We, English South Africans of to-day, who are truly South African,
loving

  THE LAND OF OUR BIRTH,

and men inhabiting it, yet bound by intense and loving ties, not only
of intellectual affinity but of personal passion, to the home-land
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; between 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 double
affections, we are fitted to fulfil a certain function at the present
day, to stand, as it were, as mediators and interpreters 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 inherent fitness for
the task, we should not shrink nor remain silent and inactive, but
exert by word and action that peculiar function which our position
invests us with.

       *       *       *       *       *

If it be asked, why at this especial 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

  HEAVY WITH RUMORS;

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

There are some things the mind refuses seriously to entertain, as the
man who has long loved and revered his mother would refuse to accept
the assertion 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
unwonted tread of armed and hired soldiers 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-morrow 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 horrible embrace, and rend, if it be
possible, each other’s vitals?... Believing it impossible, we fall to
considering, 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 English 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 offspring; 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 child of either the
Dutch or the English 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 woman 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 political world, and we ask ourselves:
What great and terrible and sudden crime has been committed, what
reckless slaughter and torture of the innocents, 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 intellect cannot solve it by
means of peace, that the highest and noblest diplomacy falls powerless
before it, and the wisdom 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

  WHO GAINS BY WAR?

What is it for? Who is there that desires it? Do men shed streams of
human 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 violate. 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
consciousness 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!

  WHO GAINS BY WAR?

Not the great woman whose eighty years to-night completes,[C] who would
carry with her to her grave the remembrance of the longest reign and
the purest; who would have that when the nations 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 dying 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 hearing it--these men can bind no laurels on 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 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 Africans; 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 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 Thermopylae, 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 external success may be the hour of irrevocable
failure, and that the hour of death, whether to nations or individuals,
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 hurled
backward the greatest Empire of the world to meet its slow imperial
death; it was the hour when that little band stood alone with the
waters over their homes,

  FACING DEATH AND DESPAIR,

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

It may be said, “But what has England to fear in a campaign with a
country 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 numbers.” We answer yes--she might do it. Might generally
conquers; not always. (I have seen a little _muur kat_ attacked by a
mastiff, the first joint of 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 soldiers to South Africa, and they could bombard our
towns and destroy our villages; 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, never to go home. I suppose it would be quite
possible for the soldiers to shoot all male South Africans who appeared
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 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 generations 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
of England’s career was completed. England acknowledges it now. A
hundred 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 Africa would rise up silently, and count her dead, and bury them.
She would know the places where she found them. 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 African-born 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 in these whelps of the South? We
cannot live if we are not free!

The grandchildren and great-grandchildren 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 Independence,”
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-grandfather lay in one of those graves. We shall know no more of
Dutch or English 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 on the honor of Englishmen, and by the faith
of Englishmen--what of _us_?

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
falling of the dew and the dropping of the rain it has extended itself;
its branches have drooped down and rooted themselves 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 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 soldiers 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 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 African 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

  THE FIGURE OF FRANKLIN

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 fighting 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 England, 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 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 Hutchinson, and North, and Grafton are
not forgotten also; it might be well for them if they were!

Do not say to us: “You are Englishmen; 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. In that day where should we be found;
we who have to maintain English honor in the South? Judge for us, and
by your judgment we will abide. Remember, we are Englishmen!

       *       *       *       *       *

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 unknown, which may be of
vast possible good and beauty.

What have we in this man, who represents English honor and English
wisdom in South Africa? To a certain extent we know.

We have a man honorable in the relations of personal life, loyal to
friend, 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
knowledge 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 avail, but where sympathy and comprehension
are the more needed, that woman 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 Africa 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 ground with the old man
of Hawarden; 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,” rises the great English Jekyll, who cries louder yet “Justice
and honor.” We appeal to him; history shall not repeat itself.

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; 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 Africans, 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 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 zal recht kom._” (Wait a little, all will come right.)

On our great African flag let us emblazon 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.




FOOTNOTES:


[A] Ondergedrukt--oppressed.

[B] Trekked--moved, traveled.

[C] Written on 24th May, 1899.




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  CHARLES H. SERGEL COMPANY,
  PUBLISHERS,      CHICAGO.




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.





End of Project Gutenberg's The South African Question, by Olive Schreiner