TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE LITTLE CLOUD IN SOUTH AFRICA. THERE is nothing to be gained by impatience ; the war in South Africa halts; and taking as the test what is the only valid test, the character of the generalissimo, the probability is that it ought to halt•. Lord Roberts is not the man to let his enemies recover courage, and con- centrate their forces, and fortify new positions, except for reasons which he considers irresistible. This is not a campaign like that of 1870, in which great masses of French and Germans fought great pitched battles, but rather a clearing-out movement like Wellington's advance into Spain, to be made over equal distances, though with much larger forces and better means of transport. Wellington never moved till be was ready. Lord Roberts has to reduce his Portugal into order so that his com- munications may never be threatened, to remount part of his strong force of cavalry, to collect supplies almost bewildering in their mass, and in the multitude of details to be arranged which they involve, to make sure that Sir Redvers Buller's army is equally ready with his own, and to collect by what scholars would call " a process of colla- tion " the accurate information which in such a country is the first condition of victory. Precipitancy in such cir- cumstances does not secure success, and does waste lives ; and Lord Roberts, who understands politics, and Lord Kitchener, who fought " the cheapsst campaign on record," are not the men to fling away two millions a week in unnecessary delays. The country must be patient, satisfied that when movement begins it will be as astonished as the Boers with its energy and unexpected- ness.
During the delay a bad feature of the struggle is developing itself,—an increase of inter-racial bitterness. The fighting men on both sides have hitherto behaved un- usually well. The Boers, no doubt, have resorted to tricks of savage warfare most unbecoming in men who aspire to be considered civilised, and our own soldiers may occasionally have forgotten in the ardour of pursuit that the object of war is rather the defeat than the slaughter of the enemy ; but the war has been singularly free from barbarities on either side. We hear plenty about looting, little or nothing of executions of civilians. Nobody has been publicly hanged. Quarter has never been refused on either side, there has been no Bazeilles or approximation to Bazeilles, the soldiers have never got out of hand, and prisoners have been decently, or even kindly, treated. We expect, be it remembered, for our own men rather much, much more than we gave to French prisoners in the old war. As the struggle advances, however, the tone of unreasoning bitterness which always marks a civil war has been imported into it. The loyalists are growing savage, and have infected some of the correspondents and makers of bulletins with their momentary temper. No one can doubt this who reads letters describing Cronje's followers when they trooped after him to surrender their arms as misshapen though powerful dwarfs, the trolls, in fact, of Scandi- navian legend; or menacing Great Britain, if rebels are not sufficiently " punished," with a United States of South Africa. "Kill our enemies for rebelling," this writer virtually cries, " or we will rebel like them." One corre- spondent actually snarls because Lord Roberts, having promised protection to the submissive, keeps his word. That the loyalists themselves should be bitter to savagery is natural enough. A man may be as good as gold, and yet grow savage when his neighbour, under plea, of being a rebel, loots his house, drives his wife out to wander in the ravines and sleep under the stars, flogs his servants, and perhaps shoots at himself. He feels that he has been subjected to an un- usually treacherous form of burglary, and does not con- sider if he is only compensated that justice has been done. Nor has it been done. Unless the Colonial Boer who has raided his neighbour's house can prove that he was com- pelled by force majeure to raid it—which was often the case when a commando appeared and demanded recruits and supplies—he deserves two years' hard labour or five years' penal servitude. He is not only a rebel against the State, but a dacoit besides, and for the dacoity he must answer to the ordinary Courts in the ordinary way. If juries cannot be trusted, there should be a special Commission to deal with such cases, invested with power to compel evidence, and to punish obvious and determined perjury on the spot. But the loyalists, as we understand, want something more than either compensation or the protection of ordinary judicial proceedings. They want their enemies, as a class, to be disfranchised, to be disqualified for office, to be deprived of their farms,—not because they were dacoits, but because they were not loyalists as they ought to have been. To that we demur, not because we deny the greatness of the offence or because we sympathise with its motive—which after all is no better a motive than the motive of a Highlander who hates his neighbour because that neighbour's grandfather oppressed his own ancestor—but because such punishment is not states- manlike. The business of the government which triumphs in a civil war—and as regards Colonial Boers born subjects of her Majesty the war is a civil one—is to turn rebels into quiescent subjects as quickly as may be, and the only way to do that is to teach them that apart from any crimes they may have committed they are regarded as good subjects from the first. To make of them a subject and degraded caste is to give them every motive for rebelling again, and for educating their children in the doctrine that revenge, instead of being a very stupid as well as un-Christian indulgence, is a sacred duty. The disloyal Boer so treated is a humiliated man, and like every man humiliated by mere power, thinks himself a plundered and oppressed one, whose duty to himself is to recover his property, to avenge himself on the oppressor, and to regain the ascendency of which he has been wrongfully deprived. A silent civil war is perpetuated which needs nothing but opportunity to break into open flame. Suppose we had garrisoned French Canada as a consequence of its rebellion, disfranchised all rebels, and disqualified them for office, what would have been the result ? We should have had in the Canadas a million of white subjects whose first object in life would have been to upset British authority, who would see in every enemy of Great Britain a friend of their own, and who would have sedulously endeavoured to exasperate every occasion of difference with the United States. Instead of this, we treated French Canadians as wilful but well-meaning British •subjects, admitted them to every privilege enjoyed by their rivals, and even recog- nised their language as one of the established languages of the State. Therefore French Canadians are dying on our side in the battle with the Boers, and a Roman Catholic Premier of French extraction declares himself, in words that come evidently from the heart, a devoted servant of the Empire. There is no need, however, to go so far afield for an illustration. We tried the plan recom- mended by the bitter section of the South African loyalists in Ireland under the most favourable circumstances, with the full support of the British masses, in an island which no enemy of ours could reach, and on a people whose efforts at insurrection have always failed ; and we all know the result,—a hatred which has outlived oppression, seems inextinguishable by kindness, and is the occasion of hope to every enemy we possess throughout the world. Most of the maxims of statecraft are liable to modification by circumstances ; but if there is one which is always, every- where, and with all races true, it is this : " Never make martyrs."
But, say the bitter section as their final argument, surely this is a question for us, "the British inhabitants of South Africa," to settle, and not for the British Parliament ? Why ? That the British loyalists have done their duty in a very fine way we are acknow. ledging every week, and would acknowledge more amply if we knew how; but still this war is being fought through by our children at our expense, and by our generals, and we may surely claim the right of settling the terms of peace, one of which, in fact though not in form, must be the amount of protection we will accord to rebels who submit. If we consider that mercy, even weak mercy, accords better with the permanent interests of the Empire than vindictiveness, surely it is for us in the end and after discussion to decide. If Cape Town is to send Parliament orders as to its general policy, what did we fight for ? It was in that case the business of Cape men to beat back the Boers, and not ours. We need not, how- ever, enter on that unpleasing phase of the discussion, or even remonstrate with British South Africa on the megalo- mania which bulletin-makers are betraying in every message, for we believe that counsel of the savage kind is born of most natural but temporary local irritation, that the wiser of the loyalists reject it already, as Mr. Rose-Innes has done, and that in a very few months the British in South Africa will be chatting with their Boer antagonists over the events of the war. They do not hate each other half as hard as Yankees and Southerners did. The triumphant are always dis- posed to lenity, and the British elector in South Africa need not be afraid of being permanently outnumbered at the polls. No country open to immigrants ever obtained such an advertisement as South Africa has received from this war, and if the loyalists will but exert themselves to make settlement easy, swarms of friends, Englishmen, Scotchmen, Germans, and Italians, will speedily reduce the Boers to an insignificant minority. London holds cities-full of men of all races, many of them deadly enemies of the Briton, and in London all men but the English are practically invisible.
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