THE JUSTICE OF THE WAR.
"AN Old Subscriber," whose letter we publish in another column, goes back to the origin of the war, and asks us certain questions in regard to its justice and inevitability. We thought that we had answered these questions fully enough at various times during the last two years, but as the moral justification for the war is one in regard to which we feel strongly, we are personally not in the least disinclined to meet our correspondent's demand. Our only fear is that we may weary our readers with a twice-told tale, for we fully believe that to the great majority of them the matter presents itself as it does to us. But though we answer our correspondent as he desires, we cannot promise to open our columns to any further correspondence on the subject, which is almost certain to be unfractuous and is quite certain to be voluminous.
"An Old Subscriber" asks us, to begin with, whether the acceptance of arbitration would not have avoided the war. Very possibly it might, for it necessarily involved a surrender in regard to the Boer aspiration of a Dutch supremacy in South Africa, and an acknowledgment of their claim to be an independent State with a Dutch oligarchy in power and a community of British Outlanders under them, and with such a surrender of principle the Boers would for the time have been content. Arbitration would have meant a peaceful surrender to the Boer claim, and that is why it was rejected by the British Government and British people. Just before the outbreak of the American Civil War various anxious and well-meaning people tried to press upon Mr,. Lincoln the acceptance of conciliation schemes in the nature of arbitration. That great and wise patriot, though no man can accuse him of bloodthirstiness, rejected them utterly. He absolutely refused to admit that the existence of the Union could be a subject for arbitration. Arbitration between us and the Transvaal—a State, remember, not really sovereign and independent, but only possessing a qualified. independence — was as impossible as between the Union and any of the Southern States, and was to be rejected on legal, though still more on the wider grounds of patriotism. Arbitration on a boundary quarrel with the Republic of Venezuela was a perfectly different matter. We possessed no paramount rights in Venezuela, and Venezuela was not full of British citizens who were denied political rights and tyrannised over by a corrupt and arbitrary oligarchy. Between the two cases there is, in fact, no sort of analogy, legal or moral. Our correspondent next asks us : "If it would be wrong to go tower with a Colony which desired to set up for itself, how is war right to establish British ascendency in South Africa by force, and destroy. the independent existence of two Republics ? Why has Cape Colony not the same moral right as Cana& to independence if desired by a majority of its citizens ? " Was there ever a more extraordinary begging of the question than is contained in this interrogatory ? Not only has Cape Colony never demanded her independ- ence, but it is almost certain that if a poll had been taken of Cape Colony in 1899 there would have been a sub- stantial majority against breaking out of the circle of the British Empire. In Natal not only would avast majority have been absolutely certain against leaving the Empire, but any man proposing such a thing would have done so with a rope round his neck. Take the Transvaal next. If before the war Ole Outlanders had had the political rights which they would have had in America or in any British Colony, a poll would have given a majority against excluding British influence from South Africa. In ' Rhodesia (for South Africa, as our correspondent evidently sees by his use of the phrase, must be taken as a whole) there would hardly have been a dissentient from the determination to remain in the British Empire. But this is not all. We do not know whether our correspondent thinks that natives have any right to express an opinion as to whether Dutch or British political institutions shall predominate in South Africa. But if their opinion is to receive any weight, then the consensus of South African opinion is still more strongly predominant against the claim to leave the Empire. What would be thought in Basutoland of the prospect of a South Africa outside the British Empire ? The notion of a united South Africa striving to get free from the tyranny of Britain is a pure delusion founded upon the ingenious, but wholly unsubstantial, declarations of the Boers that they are fighting for liberty. They are no more fighting for liberty than were the slave-owning, slave-breeding, slave-flogging oligarchy of the Southern States. Our correspondent has been as much misled by Pro - Boer sophistries as was Mr. Gladstone by the sophistries of the South when he declared that Jefferson Davis had made a nation, and when it was said that the North were fighting for domination and. the. South for freedom. Two aspirations are in conflict in. South Africa. That for Dutch supremacy, with its evil traditions of oligarchy, exclusiveness as regards whites of non-Dutch blood, and. of ferocity towards the natives ; and that for British supremacy, with equal political rights for all, except the right to maltreat the natives. The picture of a virtually homogeneous South Africa demanding separation is one which has no foundation in fact. A civil war is going on in South Africa, and we are helping, not only our own flesh and blood, but the side which has by far the greater moral claim. But we are really almost ashamed to dwell at such length upon these very obvious truths, and we will only add one more comment. Does our correspondent imagine that if we were forcing homogeneous free white communities in South Africa to come against their will under British domination Australia and Canada and New Zealand would. have come to our aid, • and would have poured forth their blood and. their treasure in such a cause ? They are jealous, and justly jealous, of the slightest infringement of their independence, and :.of their position as free nations in a free Empire, and the notion of their helping to enslave the white nation of South Africa is one which cannot be held. for an instant. Is our correspondent aware of the kind of State th at New' Zealand is ? Does he know that its rights of self-govern- ment are greater and more complete than that of any State in the American Union, that there the democratic principle has been carried out far more completely than anywhere in America, and. that there wealth has less weight and power than in any place in the world.? And further, does he know that this Republicwithin the crowned Republic of the Empire has purely of her own free will sent a proportion of her sons to this oversea war which, had she been a State of • the population of America, would have made her contingents amount to an army of something like a million men ? New Zealand has sent her sons to pre- serve the Empire just as in the year 1863 the thinly popu- lated. Western States sent their young men to preserve the Union. We have chosen the example of New Zealand because none could be more striking, and because of the ultra-democratic nature of that community ; but, the action of Canada and Australia has been none the less ' splendid. When the war is over, and. when the conditions allow us to establish equal political rights for all white men in South Africa, then our correspon- dent may rest assured that we shall fully admit the principle that if South Africa as a whole demands to separate from the rest of the Empire, we shall not resist her demand by force. In the interests of the whole the separate provinces will not, of course, be allowed to secede —we should help Australia to prevent, say, Queensland leaving the Commonwealth and the Empire—but if in after years South Africa as a whole insists on separation, she must have her demand, and without war. That is a principle fully established, and one, as all the Empire knows, which has not been in the least violated during the present war.
We have one word more to say. Our correspondent asks us what we have to say as to the hangings in Cape Colony, and states that there is no American precedent foi such action. The American precedents may not be exactly on all fours, but we may remind our correspondent that during the guerilla stage of the Civil War the guerillas were often shot without trial. We might refer him, for example, to a most striking account by Walt Whitman of the shooting of captured guerillas,—the men had acted, or were accused of having acted, towards wounded men as the Boers acted at Vlaldontein. Rebels like Lotter have been hanged, not for rebellion, but for individual acts of murder proved against them. As far as we know, no Cape Boer taken in the field has been hanged for rebellion. When executed it has been on a charge of murder or of breaking the oath of neutrality. As the Southern States had actually seceded, and had been acknowledged as belligerents, it was impossible to try their soldiers as rebels ; but if citizens of Pennsylvania or of New York who sympathised with the South had taken up arms within those States they would, we imagine, have been treated as rebels.
But we are not anxious to get help from an American prebedent. Where America helps England, and has helped her to a degree incalculable in its effect during the last two years, is in her example. Englishmen take heart when they think of how America fought her war to a finish in spite of hostile foreign criticism, in spite of well-meaning men at home who urged her to give in and submit to the Southern claims on high moral grounds, and in spite of half-friendly onlookers here who told her kindly but plainly that the task of subduing the South was beyond her streng h, and that she had better give in if she wished to avoid ruin. Such voices were raised even during the last three months of the war, but America sternly refused to listen to counsels of surrender. Stubbornly she fought on, and won the victory. By her example she is helping us to-day far more than individual Americans are hindering us by their prophecies of evil. We mean to win, and shall win, not through the advice offered us from America, but by America's example. In that example we shall conquer, and show that the dominant qualities of the race, no m Ater on which side of the Atlantic, are always the same.
Previous page
