The Englishmen and others who refused to fight in Johannesburg, or
fled rather than run the risk of remaining, pursued the only course
open to wise and honorable men. Had they resolved to remain permanently
in South Africa, and to become citizens of the Transvaal Republic, the
case might have been otherwise. As it was, they could not run a knife
into the heart of a people which had hospitably received them, and
attempt to destroy a land in which they had found nothing but greater
wealth and material comfort than in their own; and they could also
not enter upon a deadly raid for a man whom personally the workers of
Johannesburg cared nothing for, and with whom they had not a sympathy
or interest in common. In leaving Johannesburg and refusing to fight,
they pursued the only course left open to them by justice and honor.
Rightly to understand the problem before the little Transvaal Republic
to-day, it is necessary for Englishmen to imagine not merely that,
within the space of ten or twelve years, forty millions of Russians,
Frenchmen and Germans should enter England, not in driblets and in time
extending over half a century, so that they might, in a measure, be
absorbed and digested into the original population, but instantaneously
and at once; not merely, that the large bulk of them did not intend to
remain in England, and were there merely to extract wealth; not merely,
that the bulk of this wealth was exported at once to other countries
enriching Russia, France and Germany out of the products of English
soil; that would be comparatively a small matter--but, that the bulk
of the wealth extracted was in the hands of a few persons, and that
these persons were opposed to the continued freedom and independence of
England, and were attempting by the use of the wealth they extracted
from England to stir up Russia and France against her, that through the
loss of her freedom they might the better obtain the command of her
wealth and lands. When the Englishman has vividly drawn this future
for himself, he will hold, as nearly as is possible, in a nutshell an
image of the problem which the people and government of the Transvaal
Republic are called on to face to-day; and we put it straightly to him
whether this problem is not one of