THE NEW PHASE OF THE WAR.
SEPTEMBER 15th has come and gone and with- out much result, but the war will now, we hope, enter upon a new phase. Whether the Transvaal authorities will at once be able to act upon that part of the proclamation which places the cost of the keeping of a man's wife and family on the man himself remains to be seen. We imagine that in most cases the bill has, as it were, been already made out—for the operation of the failure to surrender will, we presume, be retrospective —and that the Government will at once be able to put up, say, a house in Bloemfontein or Pretoria to auction in order to provide money to pay for the keep of the family of its owner since last June. We do not, however, profess to know what will be the exact way in which the burghers will be forced to pay for the keep of their families, but we cannot believe that the High Commis- sioner, who with his Council is armed with the most complete powers, legislative and administrative, will find any difficulty in giving practical effect to the proclama- tion. It is easy to make a parade of legal difficulties in regard to the matter, but they are not substantial. Lord Milner and his Government have plenty of power to enforce the proclamation if they desire to do so,—as, in our opinion, they most certainly ought, for the failure to 'act on proclamations when once made is ruinous. But though we are not concerned about the technical difficulties of enforcing the proclamation, we most ardent', hope and desire that those responsible will realise that the time has come when the war must be made to enter on a new phase, and that from the present time there must be no hesitation, no change of plans, no attempts at negotia. tion, but merely the most strenuous endeavour to carry to the end what has come to be a. piece of police work. in order to bring back peace to South Africa the first thing is to carry on the war with the utmost vigour and deter. mination. Every one, from the Commander-in-Chief to the humblest private, must remember, and make others remember, that there is no primrose path to success in war, and that it is idle to think of finishing the war except on the Duke of Wellington's principle,—" Hard pounding, gentlemen, but we'll pound hardest." Unless and until we pound hardest we shall never beat the Boers. Pound hardest we must. If fresh men—i.e., men not stale with campaigning—are wanted, then fresh men must be sent. If our generals are grown languid, they must be replaced, and 'stronger and more vigorous men must be put in their places. If our existing tactics are not well suited to the present state of things, then new tactics must be devised. For example, if the Boers break up into little commandos of a hundred, our columns must be broken up into small commands also and sent in pursuit of them. No doubt these little forces will run risks of capture, of starvation, of complete destruction ; but these risks must be run, and, in truth, are not important. That officers and men will be only too eager to run them we cannot doubt. If twenty or thirty Captains were asked to organise such small mounted forces, and were told that they must while hunting down the enemy live like Boers and expect no relief and no help from our main bodies, we do not doubt that there would be a ready response. Some of these little bands would fare badly, no doubt, but on the other hand districts would become infested by them, and so made impossible for the Boers, which now afford the enemy complete security. But, of course, we cannot in London presume to lay down the exact way in which the war is to be carried on ; we merely desire to insist that an effort must be made from now to carry it on with greater vigour, and that if one form of fighting does not prove successful, then other forms must be tried in turn till an effective form is discovered. The notion that we are to be permanently beaten by a few bands of roving Boers cannot be endured, and our generals must be made to feel that if their present system of fighting and military organisation does not meet the case they must devise one that will. War is a business where ingenuity and imagination are required quite as much as they are in any trade or profession, and such difficulties as " character of the country," " want of transport," "want of food," "want of water," "badness of horses," and the like ought merely to be incentives to strenuous effort, not reasons for inactivity. After all, every one of the difficulties encountered by our troops is encountered by the Boers, and often in a worse form, for they are without our resources in the way of remounts and the material of war.
We place a vigorous prosecution of the war as the essential thing,—the one thing which really matters, and by which we shall achieve complete success. Next, and of great importance, though not of supreme moment, is a proper use of the legislative and administrative powers possessed by the British Government in the Orange Colony and the Transvaal. If those powers are well and wisely used a good deal may be done to assist the military authorities. Though we are entirely in favour of the most drastic methods in the field, we are not in favour of drastic action by the civil authorities. That is, we would not attempt to declare the unsurrendered burghers rebels, or to inflict the death penalty except on spies and conspirators. We greatly prefer to strike men's properties rather than their lives,—to make them bankrupts rather than martyrs. We should, of course, continue the plan of charging the keep of the burghers' families against their property as the merest act of common-sense and common justice, but we would go a good deal further. We would—as we have often before suggested in these columns—refuse to recognise any titles to land and houses in either of the new Colonies unless the owner attended at some central place-1alf.9P dozen places might be named in each Colony—and there entered his name on the new register and took the oath of neutrality. The land of any person who failed to do this within a given time--unless that person could prove that he was in prison or too ill to move— should be declared tobe derelict and without any owner, and so the property of the State. In this- way either the burghers would be forced to come in and surrender, or else the Government would become possessed of very valuable properties out of which to reward the men from Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, from the Cape and from Natal, or from home, who have fought on our side in the war, and on which also to plant military colonists. To keep the titles to their land indefinitely open to men who are fighting against us while we could be using that land to much better purpose seems to us most unbusinesslike. We may be quite sure that the Boers would not have acted in that way had chance placed them in the position in which we now find ourselves. They would have thought no excuse needed for using the threat of confiscation to bring in their enemies.
But though we think these things ought to be done in order to bring the war to an end, and though we hold that the soldiers should bestir themselves to find newer and better methods for meeting the most recent tactics of the Boers, we entirely and absolutely refuse to take a pessimistic view of the war. We shall accomplish our task even if we take longer than we need or we ought over it, and if we waste an unnecessary amount of life and treasure. Of the end we are as certain as ever we were. Nor are we any more pessimistic than formerly as to the settling down of the two races in South Africa and their ultimate consolidation, and the incorporation of the various States of South Africa as a free nation within the British Empire. The pressure of the natives on the one hand, and the great material prosperity which is bound to take place directly the war is over on the other, will bring the two peoples together. Those two forces will act as an amalgam,—especially the latter. We see from America how the change and movement produced by a rapid and vigorous growth of material prosperity tend to weld a nation together, and we cannot doubt that like causes will produce like results in South Africa. To 'talk about creating a new Ireland in South Africa seems to us non- sense. To begin with, our Ulstermen in South Africa even now almost equal the non-British population ; and next, the flow of new elements into South Africa which must take place in the course of the ensuing thirty years will submerge or sweep away all old boundaries, and with them all old animosities. Change is the greatest of anodynes,
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