THE PROBABLE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA.
WE have not the smallest desire to raise an alarm by predicting an immediate war between the English and the Boers, and, we need not say, not the smallest desire that such a war should arise. The weary Titan has plenty to do, without stooping her shoulder to take up that burden in the interior of a giant peninsula of which we do not possess the coast. The alarm would do no good, for the public cannot interfere, and the Government, which is kept well informed by Sir Henry Loch, the active and far-sighted Chief Commissioner of South Africa, is certain to be as ready as English ways of action will admit. We must repeat, however, that we think war very probable, and that Lord Ebrington's figures make no sort of hopeful impression on our minds. They are like those calculations about the condition of a Treasury so often employed to show that a Great Power cannot go to war. They always go when they choose, deficit or no deficit. The simple answer to Lord Ebrington's elaborate calculations is, that the Boers have trekked before, have fought us before, and have, on one occasion at least, inflicted on us a discreditable defeat. That they can trek, we hold to be as undoubted a fact from the whole history of South Africa as that Irishmen can emigrate. Whether they will trek is a different matter ; but the a priori pro- babilities, the rumours of the hour, and the weight of authority all point in that direction. Nobody doubts the discontent of the Boers, or questions that they mean emi- grating, or denies that if they emigrate they will do it as they always have done, in a great armed body, and with the intention of setting up an aristocratic slaveholding govern- • long to be alone, and they believe, with the utmost fervour of conviction, that their system is blessed of the Lord, who has given to them over all blacks the rights of the Jews over the invaded Canaanites. If Mashonaland is wide and pleasant, and a goodly land for herds, there is no reason in the world, in their minds, why they should stay in the Transvaal to be pressed upon and taxed, and possibly by- and-by eaten up by the race which they defeated at Mitjuba Hill. That they will therefore depart, is asserted on all hands, the Cape papers reporting even the routes they will adopt, and is certainly believed by Mr. Rhodes, by President Kruger, and by Lord Salis- bury. Mr. Rhodes is the last man in the world to cause a division between Boers and English settlers, which must in the end be fatal to his personal policy ; he cannot be misinformed, and he not only affirms that the trek is to occur, but, according to the latest reports, is gathering forces to be ready, if possible, to pre- vent its success. He can count, we presume, as well as Lord Ebrington, and he does not think that the question of commissariat will induce the Boers to give up a cherished purpose. That question of commissariat seems formidable at home, but the Boers move as Attila moved, carrying provisions with them, and if hard-pressed, eating their own beasts of burden. Lord Salisbury, again, is the last man to anticipate prematurely an expensive little war, and set all tongues in Parliament wagging to no purpose, mainly against himself ; yet he has explicitly threatened the Boers with war if this trek is carried out. It is foolish to say there is no danger, when the Premier not only says there is, and is entirely confirmed in so saying by Presi- dent Kruger, who is not the kind of man to issue procla- mations against his own people when nobody is moving, but when the Premier acts in an unusually strong way upon the conviction that he is well-informed. Lord Ebrington says that if the Boers move in parties, they will be cut up in detail ; but he must surely be ignorant of the state of feeling among the Boers they leave behind. They are as mach bound to each other as the English in India, or white men anywhere when liable to be attacked by coloured savages. The stoppage of a single party of Boers on its march, with the inevitable consequent bloodshed, would be regarded and described as a massacre by the English, and would call up the whole Boer popula- tion, from the Transvaal to Bloemfontein, to avenge the "outrage." The Boers are among the bravest of man- kind, they think us their inferiors, and the rapidity with which they can collect over great distances is the very secret of their strength. How many men they can muster we do not pretend to know, but they had. 2,000 at Majuba Hill ; the local authorities talk of twenty thousand men ; and if they have half that number, they will not be defeated without the intervention of the Queen's troops. A writer in the Civil and Military Gazette, an early copy of whose article reaches us as we write, and who at all events professes possession of complete local knowledge, declares that if such a collision occurs, the whole Boer population will attack us, and most earnestly warns the Government that war is certain. "The danger," he says, "and the pecu- liarity of the case lies in this, that no one can possibly guess how far such a movement may spread and how many may join it. If, in the first instance, three or four thousand Boers come in collision with English troops, it is not the fighting-power of this advanced. party alone that has to be feared. The danger lies in the contagion being caught by the old Boers generally. They have learnt utterly to despise English troops. They have learnt that if only they can give England one or two small and local defeats, England will begin to talk about bloodguiltiness,' and will give up the contest. Therefore, they have every motive for going forward. It takes a long time to send our troops from England to those distant regions. If our troops on the spot, by any accident, sustain the slightest reverse before they can be supported, it is impossible to say how great the danger may become."
It is all very well to rely on the Colonists alone against natives, for, brave as the natives are, in such a contest race and. intelligence will tell; but the Boers are, man for man, better suited for fighting than our own people,—as much better suited as American frontiers-men would be than the labourers of an English county. We must use trained men if the result is to be made secure, and as we cannot give up Mashonaland as we did the Transvaal, the more certain the result at first, the less will the bloodshed be, which we deprecate as strongly as the most fanatic advo- cate of peace. We have not the slightest desire for "the final contest" between English and Boer influence in South Africa, though we think it likely to arrive. It would be infinitely better if a struggle could be avoided, and the two races could consent to live together, the Boer furnishing, as he did in early New York, the sturdiest element in the population. But we cannot accept peace at the price of allowing the Boers to set up, in a province of our own, an independent slaveholding Republic. Our best justification for being in South Africa at all is that we put a final stop to that sort of thing, and take up new countries for th13 Whites without allowing the scattered black popu- lation to be reduced to slavery. We have no wish for the war, or for the huge new responsibilities we are taking on ourselves in South Africa ; but still, we have taken them, and if the Boers insist on fighting us upon the slavery issue, so be it. All we ask, then, is that it be on our side a fight maintained by regular troops, and not the series of murders into which inter-colonial warfare, with its in- decisive skirmishes and personal feuds, cannot help degenerating. If the despatches from the Cape announce that all efforts to stop the trek have failed, the force in South Africa ought to be rapidly strengthened, and the Indian Government, in particular, requested to send some of its lightest mountain artillery,
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