THE POLITICAL PROSPECTS IN CAPE COLONY. T HERE has been a
good deal of talk during the past week as to a great movement among the Dutch for boycotting British goods in Cape Colony. A huge Dutch company is to be formed with a vast capital, which is to have branches everywhere, and no Dutch- speaking man or woman is to buy anything more at shops kept by British traders. In all probability the scheme will collapse of itself, but even if it is actually put into operation we have no fears as to any very terrible results ensuing. The boycott will not, of course, be met by any attempts at penal action, but simply by another boycott, and at that the British will be able to by their own. Most Dutch farms are mortgaged, and mortgaged to British banks. Would a demand for the money suit the borrowers ? Again, British buyers are the best customers of the Dutch farmers. But one need not go on and help to make ill-feeling by being too specific. It is enough to know that if the Cape Dutch were mad enough to try a general boycott and to force the loyalists to retaliate it would be the Dutch, and not the British, who would suffer the more.
A matter far more serious than the proposed boycott is the difficulty that is likely to be experienced in the Cape Parliament in regard to the treatment of the rebels. We have, as our readers know, always been in favour of a mild and conciliatory policy towards all the belligerents, whether British subjects or Boers. But though we want the punishment of the rebels to be as mild as possible, we feel that it is intolerable to allow districts that have been actively disloyal, that threw in their lot with the Boers, joined them in arms, and in effect annexed themselves to the Republics, to continue to help govern the loyal portions of the Colony. If the loyalists ask for the blood of the rebels we would refuse, but we cannot see bow we can possibly refuse to listen to the demand: 'You must not .let the men who have been fighting against us and the Empire continue to send representatives to the Cape Parliament to make laws we must obey, and to appoint the men who- are to govern us.' That is a per- fectly just and reasonable demand and must be attended to. No doubt it is the demand which the Dutch politicians and the Afrikander Bond will resist most bitterly. They would far rather that a certain number of the rebel leaders should suffer condign punishment than that the Bond should lose voters. This view is brought out by Mr. Merriman in the political statement which he publishes in Wednesday's Westminster Gazette. He tells us that he and his friends were for " the punishment by the ordinary law of certain selectedmen who might be held to be ring- leaders, and an amnesty for the rank-and-file,"—i.e., an amnesty without disfranchisement. Mr. Merriman's reason for allowing the disloyal to continue to govern the loyal is in effect that not to let them do so would be a great injustice to "the great mass of the Dutch population of the Colony who remained true to their allegiance under the strain of the sentiment of blood relationship." Now we have no desire to do anything harsh or unfair to the Dutch loyalists, and have always degired, as we have'said above, that they should be treated with the utmost'consideration. They should be assumed to be loyal till they have been proved the reverse by overt acts,.and every allowance should be made for excited talking and writing. Even when most violent mere words should be ignored unless translated into action. But thOughwe are all for treating the Cape Dutch generously and magnanimously, we cannot see that the loyal Cape Dutch as a body have any right to feel aggrieved beca.use. men who took up arms, and did not wisely keep quiet as they did, are to be deprived for a time of the right of governing the loyal men of the Colony. The men who rebelled and took up arms and joined the Boers—not merely theoretically and technically, - but actually and literally—threw off their allegiance to the British Empire, and ceased to be its citizens. The men who rose in a body, hauled down the British flag, trans- ferred their district and its government to the Republics, and then proceeded to fire on the British flag and British troops, divested themselves in the most deliberate way possible of their Imperial and British citizenship. To say that these men must now be allowed to remake them- selVisiritO British citizens on their own terms, and to resume their place in the Empire with all their political privileges intact, seems • to us the most unreasonable demand ever made by a responsible citizen, and we cannot help being surprised that a man so able and so well versed in constitutional and political science as Mr. Merriman should make it. If his demand were for clemency and amnesty in the sense of sparing life, we should sympathise with it most strongly ; but as far as we can see, he approaches the matter chiefly in the spirit of a political wirepuller. My party has a right to the votes of those men, and you are a tyrant and a gerry- wanderer if you deprive it of them. Punish a few big men if you like, but leave us our votes.' No doubt Mr. Merriman and his friends here and at the Cape will reply that our demand for disfranchisement is also a wirepuller's demand. Well, of course they have a right to their own opinion, but in-reality the allegation does not bold good, for we base our demand, not on political expediency, but upon a fixed and true principle,—namely, that the rebels of their own act divested themselves of their British citizenship, and that it would be unjust to restore them that citizenship and endow them with the power to govern men who did not abandon their flag but upheld it.
Mr. Merriman in the course of his article in the Westminster twice mentions Lord Durham's policy in Canada, and very truly says that it was "the real foundation of the British Empire." We should judge, however, from the tone of his allusions and from the vague and general manner in which he seeks to support his protest against the disfranchisement of the rebels, that Mr. Merriman has but a very hazy notion of what Lord Durham did, or what was the real nature of Charles Buller's famous Report. In this Mr. Merriman is of course not singular, for we have noticed a very general tendency of late to talk about Lord Durham's action in Canada, rather than to look into that action and see what it really was and how far it applies in the present case. In another column we print a. long letter from a correspondent who has preferred to look up the Report to talking about it, and it will be seen that though Lord Durham and Charles Buller laid down many of the true principles of Colonial government, and of the relations that ought to exist between the daughter and mother States, the Canadian precedent does not give much help in detail, the cases being too dissimilar. Lord Durham, no doubt, pursued a policy of amnesty, and quite rightly, but he did not after a war of the most serious kind, in which the loyal population had made great sacri- fices for the Empire, end by placing those loyalists under the rule of the men who had been attempting to kill them in the field. Of course no one can say exactly what Lord Durham would have done in the present case, but we shall require a great deal of evidence to make us think it probable that he would have approved the policy advo- cated in effect by Mr. Merriman for South Africa. ' Let the rebel first have a try with his rifle, and if he does not succeed, then give him another chance at the polls.' That is hardly a travesty of Mr. Merriman's policy. But though we cannot believe that Lord Durham would have approved such a policy, we are heartily at one with those who urge that the spirit in which Lord Durham approached the Canadian problem is the one in which the South African problem is to be approached. Do not let us fail for a moment in our belief that free representative institutions are the final solution of the South African problem, and that this solution must ultimately be applied without fear of consequences. It was by neglecting this truth that the Transvaal fell, and dragged down with it the Free State, for had President Kruger given the Outlanders the vote they would have been loyal to his State. We must keep the principle of free representa- tive government intact both at the Cape and in Natal, even if we have temporarily to withdraw certain districts from the Cape, and in the end—and a not very distant end—both those districts and the late Republics must be fully endowed with self-government.
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