CHAPTER XXVII

IMPERIALISM AND RACIALISM

THE preferential tariff and other Imperial meas

ures of the Liberal Government, coupled with Sir Wilfrid Laurier's visit to the Old Country, and the surprising growth of Imperial sentiment which these measures and events directly stimulated alike in Canada and in the British Islands, had much to do in fashioning that public temper which sent colonial contingents to the aid of the Empire in South Africa. It is not necessary here to review at length the relations between Dutch and British in the Transvaal, and the course of the negotiations to secure rights of citizenship for the Uitlanders without resort to arms. Probably war was hardly contemplated by the British Government until the British provinces of Natal and the Cape Colony were invaded by the burghers of the Free State and the Transvaal. Few of us now doubt the necessity for the war from the standpoint of British interests and British supremacy. Few of us doubt that Mr. Kruger plotted and waited, resolved to strike at some perilous moment in the fortunes of the Empire. Few of us doubt that if the Transvaal had not issued its insolent ultimatum the war would not have come, and the good Queen would not have

gone down to the grave with sorrow in her heart and tears upon her cheeks for the slain of her Imperial household upon the battlefields and in the camps and hospitals of South Africa.

But while this is true we shrink from any searching examination of the methods employed alike by Dutch and English to heat the blood and inflame the passions of the two races. It has been made very clear that when the fatuous and criminal Jameson raid had failed, the capitalists of the Rand proceeded deliberately and systematically to buy up the English press of South Africa. They established or obtained control of the Cape Argus, the Cape Times, the Johannesburg Star, the Transvaal Leader, the Buluwayo Chronicle, the Rhodesia Herald, the Kimberley Advertiser and the African Review. Into these agencies for the manufacture of public opinion they put hundreds of thousands of dollars, and a hostile British witness has declared that they constituted "nothing else than an elaborate factory of misrepresentations for the purpose of stimulating British action." These papers gave the tone to the smaller and less influential English journals of South Africa. These were the offices which the correspondents of the British press frequented, and from these sources the British world received its interpretations of the motives of the Dutch leaders and its impression of the conditions which prevailed in the Transvaal.

Upon the other hand, the Dutch press was

subsidized and inspired by the corrupt oligarchy at Pretoria, the concession holders who fattened upon the disfranchised miners and mine-holders of Johannesburg, and the greedy Hollanders who plotted and intrigued to establish Dutch supremacy over Natal and the Cape Colony. It was inevitable that under such circumstances the meaner side of every incident, and the darker side of every transaction should be presented alike to Dutch and British, and that suspicion and bad feeling and hatred and passion should infect all the relations between the two populations. The quarrel was fed by charge and counter-charge, by insinuation and misrepresentation, by misunderstanding and misjudgment, by untimely appearances of the ghosts of Slagter's Neck, and by the looming shadows of Majuba Hill.

But to expose and condemn these methods is not to involve the British Government in any deliberate conspiracy to provoke hostilities. It is the fashion to describe Mr. Chamberlain's diplomatic methods as rash and masterful, to suspect his motives and even to pervert his utterances. Perhaps no other public man in the world excites equal rancour and hatred in the breasts of his opponents. But the policy of Mr. Chamberlain was probably informed and guided by Sir Alfred Milner, who when he left Great Britain to assume the post of High Commissioner at the Cape, was universally regarded as a man of moderate counsels, of conciliatory temper, and of singular fitness for maintaining good relations

between the races in South Africa, and for accomplishing a pacific and satisfactory settlement with the Transvaal authorities. It cannot be that he was transformed at once from a man of peace to a man of blood, and from a pacific negotiator to a quarrelsome despot. It is more likely that he discovered that the relations between President Kruger and the Rand capitalists had become hopelessly estranged, that Kruger's hatred of the capitalists extended to the British Government, and that he was resolved to drive the British out of South Africa in case the Empire should become involved in a quarrel elsewhere. It became therefore the policy of Sir Alfred Milner to force recognition of the rights of the Uitlanders by strenuous negotiation, and by a transfer of political power to the disfranchised citizens of the Transvaal to limit the authority of President Kruger and reform the administration at Pretoria. Mr. Kruger resisted even to the point of war, and as a last desperate expedient invaded and attacked the British colonies. This will probably be the final reading of history and the substantial justification of the British Government.

In the summer of 1899, an agent of the Uitlanders came to Canada, and represented to the Canadian authorities the situation in South Africa. The Government at Ottawa probably also understood that the British Ministry hoped that a display of the moral force of the Empire would induce Mr. Kruger to yield to the demands of Sir Alfred

Milner and Mr. Chamberlain, and agree to a satisfactory compromise of the grave questions at issue. In any event, on July 31st, 1899, Sir Wilfrid Laurier introduced and Parliament unanimously adopted a resolution declaring that the House viewed with regret the complications which had arisen in the Transvaal Republic, of which Her Majesty is Suzerain, from the refusal to accord to Her Majesty's subjects now settled in that region any adequate participation in its Government; that the House had learned with still greater regret that the condition of things there existing had resulted in intolerable oppression and had produced great and dangerous excitement; and that therefore, "This House, representing a people which has largely succeeded by the adoption of the principle of conceding equal rights to every portion of the population, in harmonizing estrangements and in producing general content with the existing system of Government, desires to express its sympathy with the efforts of Her Majesty's Imperial authorities to obtain for the subjects of Her Majesty who have taken up their abode in the Transvaal such measures of justice and political recognition as may be found necessary to secure them in the full possession of equal rights and liberties."1

In introducing the resolution the Prime Minister spoke very briefly. He said: "If I be asked: 'What is the reason of this expression of sympathy; what 1 Hansard, July 31st, 1899, page 8,994.