SEVERITY AND LENITY.
WE publish elsewhere, on account of its ability, a letter on the right way to deal with the Boers with which we heartily disagree. We do not believe that the alternatives lie between great severity of repression and a policy like that of Bismarck in Bavaria, which amounted to granting Home-rule on all but military and Imperial questions. Great severity with white men whom you have to govern afterwards never succeeds. It failed in Brittany, now one of the most faithful provinces in France ; it failed in Ireland, and had the Irish been Boers would when they were seven millions have cost us the country ; it has failed in Poland, where after a hundred years of domination a people of twenty-five millions, without organisation and without the plant of an armed revolution, still make of themselves a subject of anxious thought to three great military Empires. The single instance in modern times of successful severity is Sherman's devasta- tion of the Shenandoah Valley ; that was followed by sub- mission; but was the submission due to the devastation ? We doubt it greatly, believing that the South yielded because its leaders, who, being slave-owners, were soldiers from their birth upwards, felt that their resources were exhausted, and accepted the fall of Richmond, as France accepted the fall of Paris, as the unmistakable signal that it was time to terminate the war. On the other hand, the policy adopted by Prince Bismarck in Bavaria, though attractive, is inapplicable to the Transvaal,—first, because the Boers are not, as the Bavarians were, of the same race as their rulers ; secondly, because the Boers of the Cape Colony agree at heart with the Boers of the Transvaal, and would not, therefore, work the Bismarck policy ; and thirdly, because the Boers have not learned, as all Germans have learned, that agreements in the nature of paroles ought to be invariably kept. They do not keep them, or at all events do not keep them so strictly that we can let them go free upon a promise of obedience. They must, therefore, for a time be governed. and directly governed ; but we see no reason, either in justice or in the situation, why that Government should be based on principles other than those which dictate our action in other conquered lands, say the Punjab, or Burmah, or New Zealand.
First as to justice ; for if we do visible injustice, we shall in the end produce a reaction in this country fatal to either energetic or consistent policy. It is just that the Boers should be ruled because they invited war. The belief, universal on the Continent, that they are patriots battling fiercely for "their country " unjustly invaded by the British, is for the most part an illusion. They con- quered the country from its savage owners, and becoming very rich, and having accumulated a great store of arms, they thought the time had arrived to assert their ascendencv throughout their division of the African Con- tinent. They despised the natives, they knew their kins- folk in the Colony would be friendly, and they made the natural blunder committed at intervals by every other enemy of Great Britain. They fancied that the British Colossus had feet of clay. It has feet of tempered steel, but we all in our self-depreciation bespatter them so persistently with mud that till the Colossus is in motion and the dirt falls off they look as if they were only clay. It was a huge blunder, and the Boers must take the consequences, as the Sikhs took them in 1848, in the loss of an independence which had become threatening ; but we see nothing in the blunder calling for cruel repression. The Boers have not behaved like the Sepoys or the Chinese,—have not massacred women, have not poisoned wells, have not, in fact, departed in any general way from the ordinary usages of war. They have not, we fear, when liberated on a promise not to fight again, kept their promise ; but have German or French prisoners always kept theirs ? Certainly generals do not think so, or they would after every battle release the captured, and so relieve themselves of a most serious nuisance and embarrassment. The Boers, in fact, should be treated, from the point of view of justice, as civilised nations generally treat defeated peoples,—that is, through a severe and persistent exertion of the civil power as it is usually employed in a disaffected province. Sir Alfred Milner, supported by a strong body of armed police and as many soldiers as are deemed necessary, should be invested with absolute authority, extending, of course, to the right of proclaiming martial law, and left to tranquillise his province as best he can. If recalcitrant Boers plot against him, they must be arrested. If they take to the bush as irregular com- batants, they must be shot. If they assassinate, or attempt to assassinate, or terrorise individuals, whether soldiers or civilians, they must be hanged; and if they fly, the pursuit must go on, if necessary, like the pursuit of Nana Sahib, in- flexibly and unfalteringly for twenty years. But for the rest they should be governed for the time just as English women are governed ; that is, invested with every legal right except the vote. Such measures will not at once secure peace any more than they did in .La Vend6e or Burmah, but they will secure in a short time that sullen acquiescence in an alien rule which is all that this genera- tion has now to hope for. The great mass of mankind, Boers included, are ordinary, self-seeking, and rathet stupid people. When they find by experience that if they will stay quiet, and only curse below their breath, they will be let alone, that they are free to cultivate and trade and make money in any way they like, they will pursue those interesting occupations, and regard flight to the veldt, with its accompanying exposures and dangers, as at best a counsel of perfection, to be talked about after supper, as Jacobites talked about Legitimacy, but not followed. There should be but one exception to the rule in quiet districts of the ordinary civil laws. The instru- ments of civilisation, railways, telegraphs, and the Queen's mails, must be specially protected, and though we would not destroy neighbouring villages, we would decree that if such villages did not arrest or denounce the men guilty of interrupting communications, all real property within the area in question should pass ipso facto to the Crown.
But these Boers, we shall be told, hate us so hard. Grant it, and what have their un-Christian feelings to do with the matter ? When they have done hating they will leave off. Our own Highland clans used to hate each other very hard, and now support one another in battle whenever the descendant of Marjorie Bruce asks them to do it. Is it really imagined that the Celtic Bretons, who held their Revolutionary conquerors to be atheistic blood-suckers, ever loved them, or that the Southerners are devoted to the Yankees, or that the Poles reverence and admire the Prussians ? They hate them hard, and would expel them if they could, not without kickings ; but as they cannot they trade with them, and marry with them, and dine with them, pending the day when the tables shall be turned. If experience teaches anything. it is that there is not in average mankind the power to resist the atmospheric pressure of laws severe but just, and justly administered, unless those who obey them are suffering for the sake of a creed, or are liable to insult, or are tortured with the thought that but for the conquerors' confiscations they would be well-off folk. Expulsion, confiscation, burnings, unjust judgments, religious insults, these are the things that linger in men's minds for generations, not the deaths, which must have happened in any case, perhaps in more painful ways. The Irish Celts still remember the transfer of property that followed the battle of the Boyne, and still curse the memory of the house of Orange. It was William who sanctioned the massacre of Glencoe; but if Queen Wilhelinina stood in the Pass which witnessed that atrocious scene, is there a Highlander alive who would cast a stone at her ? Capital punishment for brigandage, not devastation, is, we feel convinced, the panacea for the Transvaal, capital punishment with a right of commutation when the crime becomes uu- important.
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