Lord Milner's Work in South Africa Part 36

"The protracted struggle which has for so long caused suffering to South Africa has at length terminated, and I should fail to do justice to my own feelings if at this moment I neglected to bear testimony to the patience, tenacity, and heroism which has been displayed by all ranks of His Majesty's forces, Imperial and Colonial, during the whole course of the war. Nothing but the qualities of bravery and endurance in our troops could have overcome the difficulties of this campaign, or have finally enabled the empire to reap the fruits of all its sacrifices."]

[Sidenote: Admissions of the Boer leaders.]

The words used by the Boer leaders in the course of the debates at Vereeniging afford culminating and conclusive evidence of the hollowness of the two allegations upon which both the Boer sympathisers in England and the hostile critics of the British people abroad, based their denunciations of the policy and conduct of the war in South Africa. The war was unnecessary; it was a war of aggression forced upon the Boers by the British Government, said the enemies of England, and those Englishmen who, like Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, wrote and spoke as though they belonged to the enemy. Very different is the account of the origin of the war, which Acting President Schalk-Burger gave to the remnant of his fellow countrymen in this day of truth-telling.

"Undoubtedly we began this war strong in the faith of G.o.d," he said; "but there were also one or two other things to rely upon.

We had considerable confidence in our own weapons; we under-estimated the enemy; the fighting spirit had seized upon our people; and the thought of victory had banished that of the possibility of defeat."

And Mr. J. L. Meyer, a member of the Government of the Republic, and one of the few progressive Boers whose judgment had not been clouded by the fever of war pa.s.sion, said: "In the past I was against the war; I wished that the five years' franchise should be granted;" and this "although the people had opposed" the measure. And Mr. Advocate s.m.u.ts, State-Attorney to the late South African Republic, and then a general of the Boer forces in the field, said: "I am one of those who, as members of the Government of the South African Republic, provoked the war with England." This is evidence which we may believe, since in the circ.u.mstances in which these men met the Father of Lies himself would have found no occasion for departing from the truth.

[Sidenote: The Burgher camps.]

No less conclusive is the admission, made with perfect frankness now that s.h.i.+fts and deceits and calumnies were no longer of any use, that the Boers, whatever they said, had proved by their acts that they regarded the burgher camps as havens of refuge, not "methods of barbarism"; and that it was Lord Kitchener's refusal to admit any more Boer non-combatants to the shelter of the British lines that brought the guerilla leaders to Pretoria to sue for peace. On May 29th General de Wet, in a last effort to induce the burghers to prolong the war, said:

"I am asked what I mean to do with the women and children. That is a very difficult question to answer. We must have faith. I think also we might meet the emergency in this way--a part of the men should be told off to lay down their arms for the sake of the women, and then they could take the women with them to the English in the towns."

But Commandant-General Louis Botha doubted the possibility of any longer carrying this plan into effect.

"When the war began," he said, on May 30th, "we had plenty of provisions, and a commando could remain for weeks in one spot without the local food running out. Our families, too, were then well provided for. But all this is now changed. One is only too thankful nowadays to know that our wives are under English protection. This question of our woman-folk is one of our greatest difficulties. What are we to do with them? One man answers that some of the burghers should surrender themselves to the English, and take the women with them. But most of the women now amongst us are the wives of men already prisoners. And how can we expect those not their own kith and kin to be willing to give up liberty for their sakes?"

And at the earlier meeting (May 16th) he said:

"If this meeting decides upon war, it will have to make provision for our wives and children, who will then be exposed to every kind of danger. Throughout this war the presence of the women has caused me anxiety and much distress. At first I managed to get them into the towns.h.i.+ps, but later on this became impossible, because the English refused to receive them. I then conceived the idea of getting a few of our burghers to surrender, and sending the women in with them. But this plan was not practicable, because most of the families were those of prisoners of war, and the men still on commando were not so closely related to these families as to be willing to sacrifice their freedom for them."

Equally illuminating is the testimony which General Botha bore to the efficiency of Lord Kitchener's system of blockhouses and protected areas.

[Sidenote: The blockhouse system.]

"A year ago," he said on May 16th, "there were no blockhouses. We could cross and recross the country as we wished, and hara.s.s the enemy at every turn. But now things wear a very different aspect. We can pa.s.s the blockhouses by night indeed, but never by day. They are likely to prove the ruin of our commandos."

And again--

"There is a natural reason, a military reason, why [we have managed to hold out so long]. The fact that our commandos have been spread over so large a tract of country has compelled the British, up to the present time, to divide their forces. But things have changed now; we have had to abandon district after district, and must now operate on a far more limited territory.

In other words, the British Army can at last concentrate its forces upon us."

To this may be added his admission (May 30th) of the impossibility of again attempting to raise a revolt in the Cape Colony.

"Commander-in-Chief de Wet ... had a large force, and the season of the year was auspicious for his attempt, and yet he failed.

How then shall we succeed in winter, and with horses so weak that they can only go _op-een-stap_?"[344]

[Footnote 344: An onomatopoeic expression for the step of a tired horse.]

Elsewhere the minutes of the burgher meetings afford even more direct evidence of the fact that it was the desperate condition of the Boers, and not any desire to make friends with a generous opponent, that led them to surrender. "To continue the war," says General Botha on May 30th, "must result, in the end, in our extermination."... The terms of the English Government "may not be very advantageous to us, but nevertheless they rescue us from an almost impossible position." And Acting-President Schalk-Burger: "I have no great opinion of the doc.u.ment which lies before us: to me it holds out no inducement to stop the war. If I feel compelled to treat for peace" ... it is because "by holding out I should dig the nation's grave.... Fell a tree, and it will sprout again; uproot it and there is an end of it.

What has the nation done to deserve extinction?" De Wet himself and the majority of the Free State representatives advocated the continuation of the war at the Vereeniging meetings. But in the brief description of the final meeting which he gives in his book,[345] he writes:

[Footnote 345: _The Three Years' War._]

"There were sixty of us there, and each in turn must answer Yes or No. It was an ultimatum--this proposal of England. What were we to do? To continue the struggle meant extermination."

[Sidenote: Boer claim to independence.]

Even more significant than these admissions is the spirit in which the question of submission is discussed. There is no recognition of the moral obliquity of the Boer oligarchy, or of the generosity of the British terms. Physical compulsion is the sole argument to which their minds are open. At the very moment when the sixty representatives agreed to accept the British terms, and thereby to acknowledge the sovereignty of the British Crown, they pa.s.sed a resolution affirming their "well-founded" claim to "independence." History may well ask, On what was this claim based? Judged by the ethical standard,[346] the Boers had shown themselves utterly unworthy of the administrative autonomy conferred upon them by Great Britain. Judged by the laws of war,[347] they had been saved from the alternatives of physical annihilation or abject submission by the almost quixotic generosity of the enemy who fed and housed their non-combatant population. From a const.i.tutional point of view, the presence of Article IV.[348] in the London Convention was in itself sufficient to refute the claim of the republic to be a "sovereign international state."

[Footnote 346: [The Transvaal Government]--"or rather the President and his advisers--committed the fatal mistake of trying to maintain a government which was at the same time undemocratic and incompetent.... An exclusive government may be pardoned if it is efficient; an inefficient government, if it rests upon the people. But a government which is both inefficient and exclusive incurs a weight of odium under which it must ultimately sink; and this was the kind of government which the Transvaal attempted to maintain. They ought, therefore, to have either extended their franchise or reformed their administration" (Bryce, _Impressions of South Africa_, 2nd Ed., 1900). Mr. Bryce is not likely to have been unduly severe. "The political sin of the Transvaal against the Uitlander, therefore, was no mere matter of detail--of less or more--but was fundamental in its denial of elementary political right." And again: In the Transvaal "an armed minority holds the power, compels the majority to pay the taxes, denies it representation, and misgoverns it with the money extorted" (Captain Mahan, _The Merits of the Transvaal Dispute_, 1900 [included in _The Problem of Asia_]). To these, perhaps, I may be permitted to add the following words spoken by myself in 1894--more than a year before the Raid--and published in 1895 (_South Africa: a Study, etc._):--"The Boer has still to justify his possession of these ample pastures, these rich and fertile valleys, and these stores of gold and of coal. If he can enlarge his mind, if he can reform existing abuses, if he can expand an archaic system of government and render it sufficiently elastic to meet the requirements of an enlarged population and important and increasing industries--well and good. If not, let the Boer beware; for he will place himself in conflict with the intelligence and the progress of South Africa. _Then_ the Boer system will be condemned by a higher authority than the Colonial Office or the opinion of England; and from the high court of Nature--a court from which no appeal lies--the inexorable decree will go forth: 'Cut it down; why c.u.mbereth it the ground?'"]

[Footnote 347: See admissions of the Boer Generals quoted _supra_.]

[Footnote 348: "The South African Republic will conclude no treaty or engagement with any state or nation other than the Orange Free State, nor with any native tribe to the eastward or westward of the Republic, until the same has been approved by Her Majesty the Queen." Captain Mahan writes: "In refusing the Transvaal that independence in foreign relations which would enable other states to hold it directly accountable, Great Britain retained, in so far, responsibility that foreigners should be so treated as to give no just cause for reclamations.... Great Britain, by retaining the ultimate control of foreign relations, and by her well-defined purpose not to permit interference in the Transvaal by a foreign Power, was responsible for conditions of wrong to foreign citizens within its borders. She had surrendered the right to interfere, as suzerain, with internal affairs; but she had not relieved herself, as by a grant of full independence and sovereignty she might have done, from responsibility for injury due to internal maladministration, any more than the United States was relieved of the responsibility to Italy [in the case of the Italian citizens lynched at New Orleans] by the state sovereignty of Louisiana" (_Ibid._). And, says the same writer, _a fortiori_ was Great Britain justified in interfering on behalf of her own subjects.]

[Sidenote: Effect of surrender terms.]

Obviously the quality of mercy was strained to the point of danger by the grant of terms to such a people. It will always remain a question whether it would not have been better policy, instead of negotiating at all, to wait for that unconditional surrender of the Boers which, as the discussion at Vereeniging clearly shows, could only have been deferred for a very few months. But, granting that the course actually pursued was the right one, little fault can be found with the terms actually agreed to. No doubt they were generous, but they gave the British Government practically a free hand to shape the settlement of the country, and left it to them to decide at what time, and by what stages, to establish self-government in the new colonies. The two respects in which the Vereeniging terms seemed at first sight dangerously lenient were the undertaking to allow the Boers to possess rifles for their protection and the recognition of the Dutch language in the law courts and public schools. Yet both of these concessions are justified by considerations of practical convenience and sound policy. In respect of the first it must be remembered that in certain districts of the Transvaal the population is composed of a very small number of Europeans, almost exclusively Boers, living in isolated homesteads, together with a native population many times as numerous and still under the immediate authority of its tribal chiefs. The refusal to allow the Boers thus circ.u.mstanced to provide themselves with the only weapons sufficient to protect them against occasional Kafir outrages and depredations would have thrown a heavy responsibility upon the new administration, or involved it in an altogether disproportionate expenditure on European and native police.

At the same time, in view of the smallness of the Boer population in such districts, the necessity for obtaining a licence (required under the clause in question) provided the Government with an efficient remedy against incipient disaffection. For under the licence system--a system generally adopted as a check upon the acquisition of arms by the natives in South Africa--the number of rifles possessed by the Boers in any particular district would be known to the Government; while, at the same time, the power to refuse or withdraw the privilege of possessing a rifle from any person believed to be disaffected to British rule would form an additional safeguard.

In respect of the second concession, there could be no question, of course, as to the desirability of hastening the general adoption of English as the common language of the Europeans of both races in South Africa. But any attempt to proscribe the Dutch language would have resulted in creating an obstinate desire to preserve it on the part of the Boers, coupled with a sense of injury; and would, therefore, have r.e.t.a.r.ded rather than advanced the object in view. In these circ.u.mstances the decision to rely mainly upon the natural inclination of the more enlightened Boers to secure for their children the material advantages which a knowledge of English would bring them, was the right one. And the policy which this clause allowed the new administration to pursue may be described as that of a modified "free trade in language"--that is to say, free trade up to, but not beyond, the point at which the toleration of Dutch would not impede the convenient and efficient discharge of the ordinary business of administration. It is doubtful, however, whether either of these concessions were justifiable except on the a.s.sumption that full self-government would not be granted to either of the new colonies until a British or loyalist majority was a.s.sured.

[Sidenote: Free initiative secured.]

But, whatever the ultimate result of the Terms of Vereeniging, their immediate effect was to leave the High Commissioner with complete freedom of initiative, but with a no less complete responsibility for the complex and difficult task of economic and administrative reconstruction which now awaited him. How this task--at once more congenial and more especially his own--was discharged is a matter that must be left for a second volume. In the meantime the conclusion of the Surrender Agreement is no unfitting stage at which to bring the review of the first period of Lord Milner's administration to a close.