The conquest of South Africa is one of the most curious
episodes in English history. Begun through purely mercenary motives, it yet
acquired a character of grandeur which, as time went on, divested it of all
sordid and unworthy suspicions. South Africa has certainly been the land of
adventurers, and many of them found there either fame or disgrace,
unheard-of riches or the most abject poverty, power or humiliation. At the
same time the Colony has had amongst its rulers statesmen of unblemished
reputation and high honour, administrators of rare integrity, and men who
saw beyond the fleeting interests of the hour into the far more important
vista of the future.
When President Kruger was at its head the Transvaal
Republic would have crumbled under the intrigues of some of its own
citizens. The lust for riches which followed upon the discovery of the
goldfields had, too, a drastic effect. The Transvaal was bound to fall into
the hands of someone, and to be that Someone fell to the lot of England.
This was a kindly throw of Fate, because England alone could administer all
the wealth of the region without its becoming a danger, not only to the
community at large, but also to the Transvaalers.
That this is so can be proved by the eloquence of facts
rather than by words. It is sufficient to look upon what South Africa was
twenty-five years ago, and upon what it has become since under the
protection of British rule, to be convinced of the truth of my assertion.
From a land of perennial unrest and perpetual strife it has been transformed
into a prosperous and quiet colony, absorbed only in the thought of its
economic and commercial progress. Its population, which twenty years ago was
wasting its time and energy in useless wrangles, stands to-day united to the
Mother Country and absorbed by the sole thought of how best to prove its
devotion.
The Boer War has still some curious issues of which no
notice has been taken by the public at large. One of the principal, perhaps
indeed the most important of these, is that, though brought about by
material ambitions of certain people, it ended by being fought against these
very same people, and that its conclusion eliminated them from public life
instead of adding to their influence and their power. The result is
certainly a strange and an interesting one, but it is easily explained if
one takes into account the fact that once England as a nation—and not as the
nation to which belonged the handful of adventurers through whose intrigues
the war was brought about—entered into the possession of the Transvaal and
organised the long-talked-of Union of South Africa, the country started a
normal existence free from the unhealthy symptoms which had hindered its
progress. It became a useful member of the vast British Empire, as well as a
prosperous country enjoying a good government, and launched itself upon a
career it could never have entered upon but for the war. Destructive as it
was, the Boer campaign was not a war of annihilation. On the contrary,
without it it would have been impossible for the vast South African
territories to become federated into a Union of its own and at the same time
to take her place as a member of another Empire from which it derived its
prosperity and its welfare. The grandeur of England and the soundness of its
leaders has never come out in a more striking manner than in this conquest
of South Africa—a blood-stained conquest which has become a love match.
During the concluding years of last century the
possibility of union was seldom taken into consideration; few, indeed, were
clever enough and wise enough to find out that it was bound to take place as
a natural consequence of the South African War. The war cleared the air all
over South Africa. It crushed and destroyed all the suspicious, unhealthy
elements that had gathered around the gold mines of the Transvaal and the
diamond fields of Cape Colony. It dispersed the coterie of adventurers who
had hastened there with the intention of becoming rapidly rich at the
expense of the inhabitants of the country. A few men had succeeded in
building for themselves fortunes beyond the dreams of avarice, whilst the
majority contrived to live more or less well at the expense of those naïve
enough to trust to them in financial matters until the day when the war
arrived to put an end to their plunderings.
The struggle into which President Kruger was compelled
to rush was expected by some of the powerful intriguers in South Africa to
result in increasing the influence of certain of the millionaires, who up to
the time when the war broke out had ruled the Transvaal and indirectly the
Cape Colony by the strength and importance of their riches. Instead, it
weakened and then destroyed their power. Without the war South Africa would
have grown more wicked, and matters there were bound soon to come to a
crisis of some sort. The crux of the situation was whether this crisis was
going to be brought about by a few unscrupulous people for their own
benefit, or was to arise in consequence of the clever and far-seeing policy
of wise politicians.
Happily for England, and I shall even say happily for
the world at large, such a politician was found in the person of the then
Sir Alfred Milner, who worked unselfishly toward the grand aim his
far-sighted Imperialism saw in the distance.
History will give Viscount Milner—as he is to-day—the
place which is due to him. His is indeed a great figure; he was courageous
enough, sincere enough, and brave enough to give an account of the
difficulties of the task he had accepted. His experience of Colonial politics was principally founded on what he had seen and studied when in
Egypt and in India, which was a questionable equipment in the entirely new
areas he was called upon to administer when he landed in Table Bay. Used to
Eastern shrewdness and Eastern duplicity, he had not had opportunity to
fight against the unscrupulousness of men who were neither born nor brought
up in the country, but who had grown to consider it as their own, and
exploited its resources not only to the utmost, but also to the detriment of
the principles of common honesty.
The reader must not take my words as signifying a
sweeping condemnation of the European population of South Africa. On the
contrary, there existed in that distant part of the world many men of great
integrity, high principles and unsullied honour who would never, under any
condition whatsoever, have lent themselves to mean or dishonest action; men
who held up high their national flag, and who gave the natives a splendid
example of all that an Englishman could do or perform when called upon to
maintain the reputation of his Mother Country abroad.
Some of the early English settlers have left great
remembrance of their useful activity in the matter of the colonisation of
the new continent to which they had emigrated, and their descendants, of
whom I am happy to say there are a great number, have not shown themselves
in any way unworthy of their forbears. South Africa has its statesmen and
politicians who, having been born there, understand perfectly well its
necessities and its wants. Unfortunately, for a time their voices were
crushed by the new-comers who had invaded the country, and who considered
themselves better able than anyone else to administer its affairs. They
brought along with them fresh, strange ambitions, unscrupulousness,
determination to obtain power for the furtherance of their personal aims,
and a greed which the circumstances in which they found themselves placed
was bound to develop into something even worse than a vice, because it made
light of human life as well as of human property.
In any judgment on South Africa one must never forget
that, after all, before the war did the work of a scavenger it was nothing
else but a vast mining camp, with all its terrifying moods, its abject
defects, and its indifference with regard to morals and to means. The first
men who began to exploit the riches of that vast territory contrived in a
relatively easy way to build up their fortunes upon a solid basis, but many
of their followers, eager to walk in their steps, found difficulties upon
which they had not reckoned or even thought about. In order to put them
aside they used whatever means lay in their power, without hesitation as to
whether these answered to the principles of honesty and straightforwardness.
Their ruthless conduct was so far advantageous to their future schemes that
it inspired disgust among those whose ancestors had sought a prosperity
founded on hard work and conscientious toil. These good folk retired from
the field, leaving it free to the adventurers who were to give such a bad
name to England and who boasted loudly that they had been given full powers
to do what they liked in the way of conquering a continent which, but for
them, would have been only too glad to place itself under English protection
and English rule. To these people, and to these alone, were due all the
antagonisms which at last brought about the Boer War.
It was with these people that Sir Alfred Milner found
himself out of harmony; from the first moment that he had set his foot on
African soil they tried to put difficulties in his way, after they had
convinced themselves that he would never consent to lend himself to their
schemes.
Lord Milner has never belonged to the class of men who
allow themselves to be influenced either by wealth or by the social position
of anyone. He is perhaps one of the best judges of humanity it has been my
fortune to meet, and though by no means an unkind judge, yet a very fair
one. Intrigue is repulsive to him, and unless I am very much mistaken I
venture to affirm that, in the 'nineties, because of the intrigues in which
they indulged, he grew to loathe some of the men with whom he was thrown
into contact. Yet he could not help seeing that these reckless speculators
controlled public opinion in South Africa, and his political instinct
compelled him to avail himself of their help, as without them he would not
have been able to arrive at a proper understanding of the entanglements and
complications of South African politics.
Previous to Sir Alfred's appointment as Governor of the
Cape of Good Hope the office had been filled by men who, though of undoubted
integrity and high standing, were yet unable to gauge the volume of intrigue
with which they had to cope from those who had already established an
iron—or, rather, golden—rule in South Africa.
Coteries of men whose sole aim was the amassing of
quick fortunes were virtual rulers of Cape Colony, with more power than the
Government to whom they simulated submission. All sorts of weird stories
were in circulation. One popular belief was that the mutiny of the Dutch in
Cape Colony just before the Boer War was at bottom due to the influence of
money. This was followed by a feeling that, but for the aggressive
operations of the outpost agents of certain commercial magnates, it would
have been possible for England to realise the Union of South Africa by
peaceful means instead of the bloody arbitrament of war.
In the minds of many Dutchmen—and Dutchmen who were
sincerely patriotic Transvaalers—the conviction was strong that the natural
capabilities of Boers did not lie in the direction of developing, as they
could be, the amazing wealth-producing resources of the Transvaal and of the
Orange Free State. By British help alone, such men believed, could their
country hope to thrive as it ought.
Here, then, was the nucleus around which the peaceful
union of Boer and English peoples in South Africa could be achieved without
bloodshed. Indeed, had Queen Victoria been represented at the Cape by Sir
Alfred Milner ten years before he was appointed Governor there, many things
which had a disastrous influence on the Dutch elements in South Africa would
not have occurred. The Jameson Raid would certainly not have been planned
and attempted. To this incident can be ascribed much of the strife and
unpleasantness which followed, by which was lost to the British Government
the chance, then fast ripening, of bringing about without difficulty a
reconciliation of Dutch and English all over South Africa. This
reconciliation would have been achieved through Cecil Rhodes, and would have
been a fitting crown to a great career.
At one time the most popular man from the Zambesi to
Table Mountain, the name of Cecil Rhodes was surrounded by that magic of
personal power without which it is hardly possible for any conqueror to
obtain the material or moral successes that give him a place in history;
that win for him the love, the respect, and sometimes the hatred, of his
contemporaries. Sir Alfred Milner would have known how to make the work of
Cecil Rhodes of permanent value to the British Empire. It was a thousand
pities that when Sir Alfred Milner took office in South Africa the influence
of Cecil Rhodes, at one time politically dominant, had so materially shrunk
as a definitive political factor.
Sir Alfred Milner found himself in the presence of a
position already compromised beyond redemption, and obliged to fight against
evils which ought never to have been allowed to develop. Even at that time,
however, it would have been possible for Sir Alfred Milner to find a way of
disposing of the various difficulties connected with English rule in South
Africa had he been properly seconded by Mr. Rhodes. Unfortunately for both
of them, their antagonism to each other, in their conception of what ought
or ought not to be done in political matters, was further aggravated by
intrigues which tended to keep Rhodes apart from the Queen's High
Commissioner in South Africa.
It would not at all have suited certain people had Sir
Alfred contrived to acquire a definite influence over Mr. Rhodes, and
assuredly this would have happened had the two men have been allowed
unhindered to appreciate the mental standard of each other. Mr. Rhodes was
at heart a sincere patriot, and it was sufficient to make an appeal to his
feelings of attachment to his Mother Country to cause him to look at things
from that point of view. Had there existed any real intimacy between Groote
Schuur and Government House at Cape Town, the whole course of South African
politics might have been very different.
Sir Alfred Milner arrived in Cape Town with a
singularly free and unbiased mind, determined not to allow other people's
opinions to influence his own, and also to use all the means at his disposal
to uphold the authority of the Queen without entering into conflict with
anyone. He had heard a deal about the enmity of English and Dutch, but
though he perfectly well realised its cause he had made up his mind to
examine the situation for himself. He was not one of those who thought that
the raid alone was responsible; he knew very well that this lamentable
affair had only fanned into an open blaze years-long smoulderings of
discontent. The Raid had been a consequence, not an isolated spontaneous
act. Little by little over a long span of years the ambitious and sordid
overridings of various restless, and too often reckless, adventurers had
come to be considered as representative of English rule, English opinions
and, what was still more unfortunate, England's personality as an Empire and
as a nation.
On the other side of the matter, the Dutch—who were
inconceivably ignorant—thought their little domain the pivot of the world.
Blind to realities, they had no idea of the legitimate relative comparison
between the Transvaal and the British Empire, and so grew arrogantly
oppressive in their attitude towards British settlers and the powers at Cape
Town.
All this naturally tinctured native feeling. Suspicion
was fostered among the tribes, guns and ammunition percolated through Boer
channels, the blacks viewed with disdain the friendly advances made by the
British, and the atmosphere was thick with mutual distrust. The knowledge
that this was the situation could not but impress painfully a delicate and
proud mind, and surely Lord Milner can be forgiven for the illusion which
he at one time undoubtedly cherished that he would be able to dispel this
false notion about his Mother Country that pervaded South Africa.
The Governor had not the least animosity against the
Dutch, and at first the Boers had no feeling that Sir Alfred was prejudiced
against them. Such a thought was drilled into their minds by subtle and
cunning people who, for their own avaricious ends, desired to estrange the
High Commissioner from the Afrikanders. Sir Alfred was represented as a
tyrannical, unscrupulous man, whose one aim in life was the destruction of
every vestige of Dutch independence, Dutch self-government and Dutch
influence in Africa. Those who thus maligned him applied themselves to make
him unpopular and to render his task so very uncongenial and unpleasant for
him that he would at last give it up of his own accord, or else become the
object of such violent hatreds that the Home Government would feel compelled
to recall him. Thus they would be rid of the presence of a personage
possessed of a sufficient energy to oppose them, and they would no longer
need to fear his observant eyes. Sir Alfred Milner saw himself surrounded by
all sorts of difficulties, and every attempt he made to bring forward his
own plans for the settlement of the South African question crumbled to the
ground almost before he could begin to work at it. Small wonder, therefore,
if he felt discouraged and began to form a false opinion concerning the
persons or the facts with whom he had to deal. Those who might have helped
him were constrained, without it being his fault. Mr. Rhodes became
persuaded that the new Governor of Cape Colony had arrived there with
preconceived notions in regard to himself. He was led to believe that
Milner's firm determination was to crush him; that, moreover, he was jealous
of him and of the work he had done in South Africa.
Incredible as it appears, Rhodes believed this absurd
fiction, and learned to look upon Sir Alfred Milner as a natural enemy,
desirous of thwarting him at every step. The Bloemfontein Conference, at
which the brilliant qualities and the conciliating spirit of the new
Governor of Cape Colony were first made clearly manifest, was represented to
Rhodes as a desire to present him before the eyes of the Dutch as a
negligible quantity in South Africa. Rhodes was strangely susceptible and
far too mindful of the opinions of people of absolutely no importance. He
fell into the snare, and though he was careful to hide from the public his
real feelings in regard to Sir Alfred Milner, yet it was impossible for
anyone who knew him well not to perceive at once that he had made up his
mind not to help the High Commissioner. There is such a thing as damning
praise, and Rhodes poured a good deal of it on the head of Sir Alfred.
Fortunately, Sir Alfred was sufficiently conscious of
the rectitude of his intentions and far too superior to feelings of petty
spite. He never allowed himself to be troubled by these unpleasantnesses,
but went on his way without giving his enemies the pleasure of noticing the
measure of success which, unhappily, attended their campaign. He remained
inflexible in his conduct, and, disdaining any justification, went on doing
what he thought was right, and which was right, as events proved
subsequently. Although Milner had at last to give up, yet it is very largely
due to him that the South African Union was ultimately constituted, and that
the much-talked-of reconciliation of the Dutch and English in Cape Colony
and in the Transvaal became an accomplished fact. Had Sir Alfred been
listened to from the very beginning it might have taken place sooner, and
perhaps the Boer War altogether avoided.
It is a curious thing that England's colonising powers,
which are so remarkable, took such a long time to work their way in South
Africa. At least it would have been a curious thing if one did not remember
that among the first white men who arrived there Englishmen were much in the
minority. And of those Englishmen who were attracted by the enormous mineral
wealth which the country contained, a good proportion were not of the best
class of English colonists. Many a one who landed in Table Bay was an
adventurer, drawn thither by the wish to make or retrieve his fortune. Few
came, as did Rhodes, in search of health, and few, again, were drawn thither
by the pure love of adventure. In Australia, or in New Zealand or other
colonies, people arrived with the determination to begin a new life and to
create for themselves new ties, new occupations, new duties, so as to leave
to their children after them the result of their labours. In South Africa it
was seldom that emigrants were animated by the desire to make their home in
the solitudes of the vast and unexplored veldt. Those who got rich there,
though they may have built for themselves splendid houses while they dwelt
in the land, never looked upon South Africa as home, but aspired to spend
their quickly gained millions in London and to forget all about Table
Mountain or the shafts and factories of Johannesburg and Kimberley.
To such men as these England was a pretext but never a
symbol. Their strange conception of patriotism jarred the most unpleasantly
on the straightforward nature of Sir Alfred Milner, who had very quickly
discerned the egotism that lay concealed beneath its cloak. He understood
what patriotism meant, what love for one's own country signified. He had
arrived in South Africa determined to spare neither his person nor his
strength in her service, and the man who was repeatedly accused both by the
Dutch and by the English party in the Colony of labouring under a
misconception of its real political situation was the one who had from the
very first appreciated it as it deserved, and had recognised its damning as
well as its redeeming points.
Sir Alfred meant South Africa to become a member of the
British Empire, to participate in its greatness, and to enjoy the benefits
of its protection. He had absolutely no idea of exasperating the feelings of
the Dutch part of its population. He had the best intentions in regard to
President Kruger himself, and there was one moment, just at the time of the
Bloemfontein Conference, when a modus vivendi between President Kruger and
the Court of St. James's might have been established, notwithstanding the
difficult question of the Uitlanders. It was frustrated by none other than
these very Uitlanders, who, fondly believing that a war with England would
establish them as absolute masters in the Gold Fields, brought it about,
little realising that thereby was to be accomplished the one thing which
they dreaded—the firm, just and far-seeing rule of England over all South
Africa.
In a certain sense the Boer War was fought just as much
against financiers as against President Kruger. It put an end to the
arrogance of both.
