DR. LEYDS ON SOUTH AFRICA.*
DR. LEYDS, it appears, has been spending his leisure in preparing an indictment against Britain's policy in South Africa during the past century, and the fintfruits of his toil have now been given to the world. It was fitting that he should undertake the task, for of all the Dutch protagonists • The First Annexation of the Transvaal. By W. J. Leyds, LL.D. London : T. Fisher Unwin. [2ls. net.J in the late struggle he alone—with the exception, perhaps, of Mr. Reitz—had any talent for literature. Nor have we been disappointed. The book is well written, orderly in arrauge- ment, adroit in argument, and extremely readable. It is the case against Britain, and its conduct has fallen into the cleverest of hands. The supple ex-State-Attorney of the Transvaal is a past-master in the art of ingratiating himself with an audience. He writes with a great air of discretion, moderation, and apparent accuracy. He quotes mainly from Blue-books, though now and then he descends to a Dutch authority. Moreover, he has cunningly preserved a tone of bluff righteousness. He does not angle for the sympathy of the Radical Party, for to him Radical and Tory are involved, as Englishmen, in a common guilt. It is refreshing, after so much rubbish has been written and spoken, to find some one who has at least the air of working for no immediate political concession. He is not even bitter about England, though he is very bitter about English Colonists, and cannot mention the name of Sir Percy Fitz- Patrick without losing his temper. His manner is that of the just man made perfect who chronicles his wrongs more in sorrow than in anger. Above all, he poses as the earnest seeker after truth, sifting all evidence with a lawyer's scrupulousness. "It has been the misfortune of South Africa," he writes, "that, with one or two brilliant exceptions, those Englishmen who have undertaken to enlighten their fellow-countrymen in regard to its history have been either novelists, such as Mr. Rider Haggard and Sir Conan Doyle, or gentlemen whose previous experience of literature has been derived from the equally imaginative work of concocting gold-mining pros- pectuses for the beguilement of the British investor." We think that the writer by his implication does himself an injustice, for from his old office in Pretoria he issued many documents which reached a high level of imaginative power. But the pose is a good one for his purpose, and decidedly Dr. Leyds is a very clever man.
As every lawyer knows, it is easy to construct a plausible case against any human policy or institution. History can be adroitly written for an object other than the truth with only small departures from verbal accuracy. No one denies that Britain's South African policy from the start has been very full of blunders. We attempted to administer a white Colony without representative institutions, and since means of com- munication were slow and the Colonial Office had scarcely awakened to its duties, we drifted into many errors. Dr. Leyds has three principal methods. One is to select every possible British blunder and set against it in the highest relief only those instances where the Boers behaved well. In this we think he has a little overshot the mark. His narrative is too much a design in snow and ink to convince even the ill- informed reader. The second is to interpret every blunder as if it were part of a serious and consistent British policy. The third is to take some case where the Boers were in the right, and to spread the merit thereby acquired over a number of other instances where the Boers were as clearly in the wrong. A good example is his treatment of the whole period of the abolition of slavery and the Great Trek. We are among those who think the latter a heroic enterprise, and see in the former the cause of many genuine Boer grievances. Lord Glenelg and missionaries like Dr. Philip and Dr. Vanderkemp were not the wisest of men. Emancipation meant a general dislocation of credit, and no steps were taken to meet this result. Since the compensation claims were paid only in London, the Dutch farmer had to sell his claim to an agent at a ruinous discount. The Kaffir policy of Lord Glenelg, again, made life on the eastern border exceedingly precarious and difficult. If Dr. Leyds had stuck to these certain facts his case would have been irrefutable. But lie has chosen to endow the Dutch in their dealings with the natives with a kindly and infallible wisdom ; he makes them protectors of the Bushmen, the true friends of the Kaffir as against the folly of the missionaries. Such a view is simply not in accordance with facts. There is another side, which the missionaries may have exaggerated, but which was sub- stantially true, and the curious will find it set forth con- vincingly in Professor Cappon's Britain's Title in South Africa, a reply to certain statements of Dr. Theal. Dr. Theal is a godsend to Dr. Leyds ; but with all respect to tintt volu- minous and learned writer, in this portion of his history he seems to us to have strayed widely from his authorities.'
Following the three methods we have noted, Dr. Leyds makes out a formidable case against Britain from the Great Trek to the Pretoria Convention. We have no apses to review him as he should be reviewed, carefully and in full detail ; but we may notice his handling of some of the chief episodes. He is very indignant about the annexation of Natal, urging that a republia had been founded there by Retief and Pretorius. These voortrekkers in the search for independent kingdoms may have had some cause to consider themselves hardly used ;
but it Must not be forgotten that so far as prior occupation went England's title to the country was the better. Besides— and this applies to the whole question of the Great Trek— emigrants into unoccupied lands did not acquire these lands for themselves, but, according to a well-established doctrine- of English law, for the Crown. The legal right of annexation remained with England, and it was only as an act of grace that she ever relinquished it. Dr. Leyds's account of Boomplats and the trouble with the early Orange Free State is characteristic of his whole method. He quotes a story of a British atrocity for which there is no evidence save gossip, and he grossly exaggerates Boer successes against Afoshesh. Here, again, there was a legitimate grievance, and the supplying of arms to, and making treaties with, the natives would be condemned by British South African opinion to-day, as it was condemned by Boer opinion then. But the explanation of our action was not a settled malevolence towards the Dutch farmers, but the exaggerated view of the native status which at that time pre- vailed in Britain. The British protectorate over Basutoland is one of Dr. Leyds's grievances. Why, we cannot imagine. The Orange Free State would have been involved in perpetual strife had we not taken on ourselves the burden of that country. We showed in many ways a singular disregard of our own peace and comfort ; but it is hard to see where the treachery to the Dutch appears. The Diamond Fields annexa- tion is less easy to defend ; but again a good case is spoiled by exaggeration. To say that the Transvaal's native wars were caused in the main, or in any appreciable degree, by our Basuto policy, or even by the sale of arms to natives which went on at the Diamond Fields, is simply nonsense. There was a very good reason for these wars, as every one who has travelled through the native districts of the Transvaal and studied the Boer attitude towards native landholders is well aware. But Dr. Leyds has set out with the thesis that from start to finish the British Government had the conscious pur- pose of exterminating the Boers, and prove it he must. As long as Napoleon III. lived, he says, his activity tied England's hands ; but when Sedan set her free she joyfully resumed her career of South African. spoliation. We could almost wish that our country had this capacity for resolutely and patiently pursuing an end, however harsh. One of the most delightful deductions from the thesis appears in a note on p. 174, which chronicles the fact that ever since the Jameson Raid British officers were attempting to map the Dutch Republics with a view to future invasion. On this reasoning, every Great Power with an Intelligence Department must entertain the intention of conquering the globe.
We have no space to deal in detail with the account of the first Transvaal annexation. Dr. Leyds attempts to disprove the various reasons which were urged for the necessity of annexation,—the native imbroglio, the bankruptcy of the State, and the willingness of its people to come under the British flag. In this he is partly successful, but only partly. The Transvaal was undoubtedly in very low waters, and while there was certainly not the enthusiasm for annexation among the burghers which some writers have alleged, we see no evidence of any passionate aversion from it. The performance of Sir Theophilus Shepstone must always be a vexed question. To Dr. Leyds it is a monument of deceit and folly, but to others it would seem that the fault lay, not in Shepstone, but in those who slackened in carrying out his policy. At first the Boer leaders were content to become British officials ; it was only after they saw a chance of ousting their vacillating suzerain that they forced on an apathetic people a "passion for freedom." The real blunder of Britain at the time was the attempt to play off black man against white, Zulu against burgher, a mistake for which she was to pay dearly. That the burghers behaved well in the Zulu Wars we gladly acknow- ledge; but why spoil a fine story with a piece of mendacious malevolence like this P "It was a temptation almost as great as that which they [the Boeral faced—and also overcame —many years later, in 1900, when more than one powerful tribe offered to help them against the British at a time when the Boers knew that the British were employing thousands of blacks against them." With the Pretoria Convention of 1881 we get to the old quibbling about "suzerainty," a question of which we shall no doubt hear more in the next volume. On the legal point—a matter of the interpretation of documents —we are of opinion that our contention was the better, but we have never denied that the Transvaal had an arguable case. In all human quarrels there is much to be said on both sides, and on the broad South African question we think Britain was right on the whole. By all means let the balance in which she may have been wrong be fully set forth ; but, as we have said before, Dr. Leyds, for all his cleverness, is too obviously a special pleader to be a really effective advocate. His parade of quotations from British authorities does not help matters, for as a nation we have always shown an almost undue readiness to ar,gne the case against ourselves. Nor does his austere advocacy of public morality ring quite true in our ears. He has a vast contempt on paper for corruption of all kinds, for speculators, for land-grabbers, for all the parasites of politics. But that the chief agent of a Government by no means conspicuous for its purity should adopt this lofty tone is a little like the Gracchi reproving sedition.
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