SOUTH AFRICA AND IRELAND
In the years 1836-37, when Wentworth was agitating for self-government
in New South Wales, and when Canada was in rebellion for the lack of it,
thousands of waggons, driven by men smarting under the same sort of
grievance, were jolting northward across the South African veld bearing
Dutch families from the British Colony of the Cape of Good Hope to the
new realms we now know as the Orange River Colony and the Transvaal. The
"Great Trek" was a form of protest against bad government to which we
have no parallel in the Empire save in the wholesale emigrations from
Ireland at various periods of her history--after the Treaty of Limerick,
again after the destruction of the wool trade, again in 1770-1777, after
the Ulster evictions, and lastly after the great famine. The trekkers,
like the Irish emigrants, nursed a resentment against the British
Government which was a source of untold expense and suffering in the
future. Indeed, the whole history of South Africa bears a close
resemblance to the history of Ireland. In no other part of the Empire,
save in Ireland, was the policy of the Home Government so persistently
misguided, in spite of constantly recurring opportunities for the repair
of past errors. Fatality seems from first to last to have dogged the
footsteps of those who tried to govern there. Before the British
conquest the Dutch East India Company and the Netherlands Government
were as unsuccessful as their British successors, whose legal claim to
the Cape, established for the second time by conquest in 1806, was
definitely confirmed by the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The Dutch
colonists were a fine race of men, whose ancestors, like the Puritan
founders of New England, had fled in 1652 from religious persecution,
and who retained the virile qualities of their race. Though in many
respects they resembled the backward and intensely conservative
French-Canadian inhabitants, they differed from them, and resembled
their closer relatives in race, the New Englanders, in an innate passion
for free representative government. They had rebelled repeatedly against
their Dutch oppressors, and had gone through a brief Republican phase.
It is an example, therefore, of the thoughtless inconsequence of our old
colonial policy that we gave the French-Canadians, who were the least
desirous of it, the form, without the spirit, of representative
institutions, while we denied, until it was too late to avert racial
discord, even the form to the Cape Dutch. In truth, the Colony seems to
have been regarded purely in the light of a naval station, while the
British and Irish inflow of settlers, dating from about the year 1820,
contemporaneously with the advent of free settlers in Australia,
suggested the possibility of racial oppression by the Dutch majority.
Yet if there was little real reason to fear oppression by the French in
Canada, there was still less reason to fear such oppression in the Cape,
where Dutch ideals and civilization were far more similar to those of
the British. In America the absorption of the Dutch Colonies in the
seventeenth century had led to the peaceful fusion of both races, nor
was there any reason why, under wise rule, the same fusion should not
have occurred in South Africa. Until 1834 authority was purely military
and despotic. In that year was established a small Legislative Council
of officials and nominated members, with no representative element. In
1837 came the Great Trek.
No one disputes that the Dutch colonists had grievances, without the
means of redress. As usual, we find a land question in the shape of
enhanced rents charged by Government after the British occupation; the
Dutch language was excluded from official use, and English local
institutions were introduced with unnecessary abruptness; but the
principal grievance concerned the native tribes. Slavery existed in the
Colony, and its borders were continually threatened by these tribes. The
Dutch colonists were often terribly brutal to the natives; nevertheless
there is little doubt that a tactful and sympathetic policy could easily
have secured for them a more humane treatment, and the abolition of
slavery without economic dislocation. But a strong humanitarian
sentiment was sweeping over England at the time, including in its range
the negro slaves of Jamaica and the unconquered Kaffirs of South Africa,
but absolutely ignoring, let us note in passing, the economic serfdom of
the half-starved Irish peasantry at our very doors. Members of this
school took too little account of the tremendous difficulties faced in
South Africa by small handfuls of white colonists in contact with hordes
of savages. The Colonial Government, with a knowledge of the conditions
gained only from well-meaning but somewhat prejudiced missionaries,
endeavoured from 1815 onwards to enforce an impracticable equality
between white and coloured men, and abolished slavery at one sudden
stroke in 1833 without reasonable compensation. A large number of the
Dutch, unable to tolerate this treatment, deserted the British flag.
Those that remained were under suspicion for more than thirty years, so
that political progress was very slow. It was not till 1854 that the
Colony received a Representative Assembly, and not until 1872, eighteen
years later than in Australia, and twenty-five years later than in
Canada, that full responsible government was established.
Piet Retief, one of the leaders of the voluntary exiles, had published a
proclamation in the following terms before he joined the trek: "We quit
this Colony under the full assurance that the English Government has
nothing more to require of us, and will allow us to govern ourselves
without its interference in the future. We are now leaving the fruitful
land of our birth, in which we have suffered enormous losses and
continual vexation, and are about to enter a strange and dangerous
territory; but we go with a firm reliance on an all-seeing, just, and
merciful God, whom we shall always fear and humbly endeavour to obey."
This was high language, yet after-events proved that a steady,
consistently fair treatment on our part would even then have reconciled
these men to a permanent continuance of British sovereignty.
Unfortunately, our policy oscillated painfully between irritating
interference and excessive timidity. First of all attempts were made to
stop the trek by force, then to compel the trekkers to return by cutting
off their supplies and ammunition, then to throttle their development of
the new lands north of the Orange and Vaal Rivers by calling into being
fictitious native States on a huge scale in the midst of and around
them, then tardily to repair the disastrous effects of this policy; but
not before it had led to open hostilities (1845). Hostilities, however,
had this temporarily good result, in that it brought to the front one of
the ablest and wisest of the Cape Governors, Sir Harry Smith, who
defeated the Boers at Boomplatz in 1848, established what went by the
name of the Orange River Sovereignty, and in a year or two secured such
good and peaceful government within its borders as to attract
considerable numbers of English and Scotch colonists. The malcontents
retired across the Vaal. Then came an abrupt change of policy in the
Home Government, a sudden desire actuated mainly by fear of more native
wars, to cancel all that was possible of our commitments in South
Africa. The Transvaal, by the Sand River Convention, was declared
independent in 1852, the Orange Free State, by the Convention of
Bloemfontein, in 1854. This was to rush from one extreme to the other.
It was as though in 1847 we had erected Quebec into a sovereign State
instead of giving it responsible government under the Crown, or as if in
1843 we had been so deeply convinced by O'Connell's second agitation for
repeal that we had leapt straight from coercive government to the
foundation of an independent Republic in Ireland, instead of giving her
the kind of Home Rule which she was asking for.
It was not yet too late to mend. In 1854, when the cession of the Free
State had just been carried out, Sir George Grey, whom we have met with
in Australia and New Zealand, came as High Commissioner to the Cape. In
1859 he made the proposal I alluded to in the last chapter for
federating all the South African States, including the two new
Republics. There is little doubt that the scheme was feasible then. The
Orange Free State was willing to join, and, indeed, had initiated
proposals for Federation. Its adhesion would have compelled the
Transvaal, always more hostile to British rule, to come in eventually,
if not at once; for the relations of the two Republics were friendly
enough at the time to permit one man, Pretorius, to be President of both
States.
The scheme was rejected by Lord Derby's Tory Cabinet, and Grey, a
"dangerous man," as Lord Carnarvon, the Colonial Secretary, dubbed him,
was recalled.
Sixteen years later, in 1875, Lord Carnarvon himself, as a member of the
Disraeli Ministry, revived the project. Converted in his views of the
Colonies, like many of his Tory colleagues at this period, he had
carried through Parliament the Federation of Canada in 1867, and hoped
to do the same with South Africa. But it was too late. The Cape
Parliament, now in possession of a responsible Ministry, was hostile,
while twenty years of self-government, for the most part under the great
President Brand, had changed the sentiments of the Free State.
Federation, then, was impossible. On the other hand, the Transvaal was
in a state of political unrest and of danger from native aggression,
which gave a pretext for reversion to the long-abandoned policy of
annexation, and to that extreme Carnarvon promptly went in April, 1877.
He took this dangerous course without ascertaining the considered wishes
of the majority of the Boers, acting through his emissary, Sir T.
Shepstone, on the informal application of a minority of townsmen who
honestly wished to come under British rule.
Rash as the measure was, lasting good might have come of it had the
essential step been taken of preserving representative government. The
promise was given and broken. For three years the Assembly, or
Volksraad, was not summoned. Once more home statesmanship was blind, and
local administration blunderingly oppressive. Shepstone was the wrong
man for the post of Administrator. Sir Owen Lanyon, his successor, was
an arrogant martinet of the stamp familiar in Canada before 1840, and
painfully familiar in Ireland. The refusal of an Assembly naturally
strengthened the popular demand for a reversal of the annexation, and
this demand, twice pressed in London through a deputation headed by Paul
Kruger, obscured the whole issue, and raised a question of British
national pride, with all its inevitable consequences, where none need
have been raised. There was a moment of hope when Sir Bartle Frere, who
stands, perhaps, next to Sir George Grey on the roll of eminent High
Commissioners, endeavoured to pacify the Boer malcontents, and drafted
the scheme of a liberal Constitution for the Transvaal. But one of the
last acts of the Tory Government, at the end of 1879, was to recall
Frere for an alleged transgression of his powers in regard to the Zulu
War, and to pigeon-hole his scheme. Mr. Gladstone, who in opposition
had denounced the annexation with good enough justification, though in
terms which under the circumstances were immoderate, found himself
compelled to confirm it when he took office in April, 1880. But he, too,
allowed the liberal Constitution to sleep in its pigeon-hole. He was
assured by the officials on the spot that there was no danger, that the
majority were loyal, and only a minority of turbulent demagogues
disloyal; and in December, 1880, the rebellion duly broke out, and the
Transvaal Republic was proclaimed. What followed we know, war, Laing's
Nek, Majuba, and one more violent oscillation of policy in the
concession of a virtual independence to the Transvaal.
Whatever we may think of the policy of this concession, and Lord Morley
has made the best case that can be made for Mr. Gladstone's action, it
is certain that it was only a link in a long chain of blunders for which
both great political parties had been equally responsible, and of which
the end had not yet come. The nation at large, scarcely alive until now
to the existence of the Colonies, was stung into Imperial consciousness
by a national humiliation, for so it was not unnaturally regarded,
coming from an obscure pastoral community confusedly identified as
something between a Colony, a foreign power, and a troublesome native
tribe. The history of the previous seventy years in South Africa was
either unknown or forgotten, and Mr. Gladstone, who in past years had
preached to indifferent hearers the soundest and sanest doctrine of
enlightened Imperialism, suddenly appeared, and for ever after remained
in the eyes of a great body of his countrymen, as a betrayer of the
nation's honour. Resentment was all the greater in that it was
universally believed that Laing's Nek and Majuba were unlucky little
accidents, and that another month or two of hostilities would have
humbled the Boers to the dust.
This illusion, which is not yet eradicated, and which has coloured all
subsequent discussion of the subject, lasted unmodified until the first
months of the war in 1899, when events took place exactly similar to
Laing's Nek and Majuba, and were followed by a campaign lasting nearly
three years, requiring nearly 500,000 men for its completion, and the
co-operation of the whole Empire. It is impossible to estimate the
course events would have taken in 1881 had the war been prolonged. If
the Free State had joined the Transvaal, it may be reasonably
conjectured that we should have been weaker, relatively, than in 1899.
Though the Boers were less numerous, less well organized, and less
united as a nation in 1881, they were even better shots and stalkers
than in 1899, because they had had more recent practice against game and
natives; nor was there a large British population in the Transvaal to
counteract their efforts and supply magnificent corps like the Imperial
Light Horse for service in arms against them. Our army, just as brave,
was in every other respect, especially in the matter of mounted men and
marksmanship, less fitted for such a peculiar campaign, and could have
counted with far less certainty upon that assistance from mounted
colonial troops without which the war of 1899-1902 could never have been
finished at all. Our command of the sea was less secure; the Egyptian
War of 1882 was brewing, and Ireland, where the Great Land Act of 1881
was not yet law, was seething with crime and disorder little
distinguishable from war itself, and demanding large bodies of troops.
If the further course of a war in 1881 is a matter of speculation, what
we all know for certain is, first, that the conditions which led to war
were produced by seventy years of vacillating policy, and, second, that
war itself would have been a useless waste of life and treasure, unless
success in it had been followed, as in 1906, by the grant of that
responsible Government which all along had been the key to the whole
difficulty, the condition precedent to a Federal Union of the South
African States, and to their closer incorporation in the Empire.
Few persons realized this at the time. The whole situation changed
disastrously for the worse. Arrogance and mutual contempt embittered the
relations of the races. Then came a crucial test for the Boer capacity
for enlightened and generous statesmanship. Gold was discovered in the
Transvaal, and a large British population flocked in. The same problem,
with local modifications, faced the Boers as had been faced in Upper and
Lower Canada, and for centuries past in Ireland. Were they to trust or
suspect, to admit or to exclude from full political rights, the
new-comers? Was it to be the policy of the Duke of Wellington or of the
Earl of Durham, of Fitzgibbon or the Volunteers? They chose the wrong
course, and set up an oligarchical ascendancy like the "family compact"
of Upper Canada and Nova Scotia. Can we be surprised that they, a rude,
backward race, failed under the test where we ourselves, with far less
justification, had failed so often? Their experience of our methods had
been bad from first to last. Their latest taste of our rule had been the
coercive system of Lanyon, and they feared, with only too good reason,
as events after the second war proved, that any concession would lead to
a counter-ascendancy of British interests in a country which was legally
their own, not a portion of the British dominions. We had suffered
nothing, and had no reason to fear anything, from the Irish and
French-Canadian Catholics, nor from the Nonconformist Radicals of Upper
Canada. It would have been well if a small fraction of the abuse
lavished on the tyrannical Boer oligarchy six thousand miles away had
been diverted into criticism of the government of a country within sixty
miles of our shores, where a large majority of the inhabitants had been
for generations asking for the same thing as the Uitlander minority in
the Transvaal--Home Rule--and were stimulated to make that demand by
grievances of a kind unknown in the Transvaal.
But the British blood was up; the Boer blood was up. Such an atmosphere
is not favourable to far-seeing statesmanship, and it would have taken
statesmanship on both sides little short of superhuman to avert another
war. The silly raid of 1895 and its condonation by public opinion in
England hastened the explosion. Can anyone wonder that public opinion in
Ireland was instinctively against that war? Only a pedant will seize on
the supposed paradox that a war for equal rights for white men should
have met with reprobation from an Ireland clamouring for Home Rule.
Irish experience amply justified Irishmen in suspecting precisely what
the Boers suspected, a counter-ascendancy in the gold interest, and in
seeing in a war for the conquest of a small independent country by a
mighty foreign power an analogy to the original conquest of Ireland by
the same power. It is hard to speak with restraint of the educated
men--men with books and time to read them, with brains and the wealth
and leisure to develop them--who to this very day abuse their talents in
encouraging among the ignorant multitude the belief that the Irish
leaders of that day were, to use the old hackneyed phrase, "traitors to
the Empire." If we look at the whole of these events in just
perspective, if we search coolly and patiently for abiding principles
beneath the sordid din and confusion of racial strife, we shall agree
that in some respects Irishmen were better friends to the Empire than
the politicians who denounced them, and sounder judges of its needs. Yet
there can be no doubt that the Transvaal complications, followed
unhappily by the Gordon episode in the Soudan, reacted fatally on
Ireland, and that the Irish problem in its turn reacted with bad effect
on the Transvaal. When the statesman who refused to avenge Majuba in
1881 proposed his Irish Home Rule Bills in 1886 and 1893, it was easy
for prejudiced minds to associate the two policies as harmonious parts
of one great scheme of national dismemberment and betrayal. Boers,
Irish, and Soudanese savages, all were confusedly lumped together as
dangerous people whom it was England's duty to conquer and coerce.
The South African War of 1899-1902 came and passed. People will discuss
to the end of time whether or not it could have been avoided. Parties
will differ to the end of time about its moral justification. For my own
part, I think it is pleasanter to dwell on the splendid qualities it
evoked in both races, and above all on the mutual respect which replaced
the mutual contempt of earlier days. I myself am disposed to think that
at the pass matters had reached in 1896 nothing but open war could have
set the relations of the two races on a healthy footing.
But bold and generous statesmanship was needed if the fruits of this
mutual respect were to be reaped. The defeated Republics were now
British Colonies, their inhabitants British subjects. After many
vicissitudes we were back once more in the old political situation of
1836 before the Great Trek, and the policy which was right then was
right now. Bitter awakening as it was to our proud people after a war
involving such colossal sacrifices, it was still just as true as of old
that in Ireland, Canada, Australia, South Africa, or anywhere else, it
is utterly impossible for one white democracy to rule another properly
on the principle of ascendancy. It was physically possible, thanks to
Ireland's proximity, to deny that country Home Rule, but it would not
have been even physically possible in the Transvaal and Orange River
Colony. Yet the idea was conceived and the policy strongly backed which
could only have had the disastrous effect of bringing into being two
Irelands in the midst of our South African dominions. It is not yet
generally recognized that we owe the defeat of this policy in the first
instance to Lord Kitchener. From the moment he took the supreme military
command in South Africa at the end of 1900, while prosecuting the war
with iron severity and sleepless energy, he insisted on and worked for a
settlement by consent, with a formal promise of future self-government
to the Boers. In this he was in sharp opposition to Lord Milner, who
desired to extort an unconditional surrender. Of these two strong, able,
high-minded men, the soldier, curiously enough, was the better
statesman. In temperament he recalls the General Abercromby of 1797 on
the eve of the Irish rebellion, still more perhaps General Carleton, who
administered French Canada in the critical period after its conquest and
during the American War. Lord Milner, in political theory, not in
personality, corresponds to Fitzgibbon. His view was that British
prestige and authority could only be maintained in the future by thus
humbling the national pride of our adversaries, who, moreover, by the
formal annexations of 1900, carried into effect when the war was still
young, were by a legal fiction rebels, not belligerents. Lord Kitchener,
besides seeing, as the responsible soldier in the field, the sheer
physical impossibility of lowering the Boer national pride by any
military operations he had the power to undertake, from the beginning of
the guerilla war onwards, was a truer judge of human nature and a better
Imperialist at heart in realizing that the self-respect of the Boers was
a precious asset, not a dangerous menace to the Empire, and that the
whole fate of South Africa depended on a racial reconciliation on the
basis of equal political rights, which would be for ever precluded by
compelling the Boers to pass under the Caudine Forks.
Fortunately Lord Kitchener was supported by the Home Government, and the
Peace of Vereeniging took the form of a surrender on terms, or,
virtually, of a treaty, formally guaranteeing, among other things, the
concession "when circumstances should permit" of "representative
institutions leading up to self-government." The next ordeal of British
statesmanship came when the time arrived in 1905 to redeem this promise.
There were two distinctly defined alternatives: one, to profit by
experience and to give responsible government at once; the other, for
the time being, to copy one of the constitutional models which had long
been obsolete curiosities in the history of all the white Colonies,
which had never failed to produce mischievous results, whether in a
bi-racial or a uni-racial community, and which were in reality suited
only to groups of officials and traders living in the midst of
uneducated coloured races in tropical lands. The Government, and we
cannot doubt that their traditional policy toward Ireland warped their
views, declared for the latter alternative, and issued under Letters
Patent a Constitution which happily never came into force. Like the Act
of Union with Ireland, it gave the shadow of freedom without the
substance. It set up a single Legislative Chamber, four-fifths elective,
but containing, as _ex-officio_ members, the whole of the Executive
Council as nominated by the Crown. Executive power, therefore, together
with the last word in all legislation, was to remain wholly in the hands
of the Crown, acting through a Ministry not responsible to the people's
representatives. It would have been difficult to design a plan more
certain to promote friction, racialism, and an eventual deadlock,
necessitating either a humiliating surrender by the Government under
pressure of the refusal of supplies, or a reversion to despotic
government which would have produced another war. With wide differences
of detail and with the added risk of financial deadlock, it was sought
to establish the kind of political situation prevalent in Ireland after
the Act of Union. The executive power in that country, and, with the
exception of the Department of Agriculture, the policy and personnel of
the host of nominated Boards through which its affairs are administered,
still stand wholly outside popular control, while legislation in
accordance with Irish views is only possible when, in the fluctuation of
the British party balance, a British Ministry happens to be in sympathy
with these views, and only too often not even then.
Statesmen who looked with complacency on the history of a century in
Ireland under such a system naturally took a similar view of the
Transvaal, deriving it from the same low estimate of human tendencies.
The literature, despatches, and speeches of the period carry us straight
back to the Canadian controversies of 1837-1840, and beyond them to the
Union controversy of 1800. In one respect the parallel with the Irish
Union is closer, because, while British opinion in Lower Canada was
predominantly against responsible government, there was in Ireland a
strong current of unbribed Protestant opinion against the Union.
Similarly, in the Transvaal, there was a strong feeling among a section
of the British population, coinciding with the general wishes of the
Dutch population, in favour of full responsible government. In other
words, the mere prospect of self-government lessened racial cleavage,
brought men of the two races together, and began the evolution of a new
party cleavage on the normal lines natural to modern communities. The
whole question was keenly canvassed at public meetings and in the Press
from November, 1904, to February 5, 1905, and in Johannesburg a British
party of considerable strength took the lead in demanding the fuller
political rights, and formed the Responsible Government Association. The
controversy was embodied in a Blue-Book laid before Parliament,[35] and
at every stage of its progress the facts were cabled home by Lord Milner
to the Government, who thus had the whole situation before them when
they came to their decision.
It would be worth the reader's while to study with some care the terms
of the despatch announcing that decision.[36] He will feel himself in
contact with fundamental principles, undisturbed by individual bias; for
no one could suspect Mr. Lyttelton, the genial and popular Secretary of
State who penned the despatch, of any violent prejudices. Yet the spirit
of the whole despatch, though gentle and persuasive in its terms, is the
spirit of Fitzgibbon's brutally outspoken argument for the extinction of
the Irish Parliament, and the complete exclusion of Irish Roman
Catholics from influence over their country's affairs. The despatch
begins, it is true, by explaining that the proposed Constitution is only
intended to be temporary; that it had been the invariable custom to
grant freedom to the Colonies by degrees, and that the custom must be
followed; but the reasons adduced for following it, if we consider that
they were adduced in the year 1905, instead of a century and a half
back, constitute one of the strangest of all the strange inversions of
historical cause and effect which a Home Rule controversy has ever
suggested to the human brain. Instead of inferring from our bitter
experiences in Upper and Lower Canada, which are mentioned in the
despatch, and in Ireland, which is not, that race distinctions increase
instead of lessening the necessity for responsible government, Mr.
Lyttelton complacently quotes bi-racial Lower Canada as a precedent for
his Transvaal Constitution. Quite frankly, though in curiously
misleading terms,[37] he records the fact that a similar Constitution
there led to deadlock and rebellion. Without intention to deceive, he
ignores the fact that wholly British Upper Canada reached the same pass
for the same reasons; and he appears to look forward with equanimity to
the passage of the unfortunate Transvaal through an identically painful
phase of history toward the same sanguinary climax. The radical error
in the official version of events in Canada appears in the comparison
between the rebellions of 1837 and the South African War of 1899-1902.
To contrast the "brief armed rising" in Canada with the three years' war
in South Africa, and to argue that a degree of freedom could safely be
given after the former, which would involve great danger after the
latter, was to show ignorance of the chain of historical events and
blindness to their true moral. The underlying idea is the one applied to
the old American Colonies and for centuries to Ireland, namely, that the
more mutinous a dependency is, the less reason for giving it Home Rule,
with the paradoxical corollary applied even to this day in Ireland, that
if it is not disorderly it does not need Home Rule. So from age to age
statesmen run their heads against facts, perpetuate the errors of their
forefathers, and do their unconscious best to intensify the evils they
deplore. It was erroneous to regard either the Canadian Rebellions or
the Boer War as events which rendered responsible government more or
less dangerous. Each of these events was itself the climax of a long
period of irresponsible misgovernment dating from about the same period,
the second decade of the nineteenth century, and demanding the same
remedy. In the Boer case, continuity was twice broken by grants of
independence, and the climax proportionally delayed, but the origin of
the trouble was the same. If the Boers had not trekked _en masse_ from
Cape Colony in order to escape from misgovernment, both movements--in
the Cape and Canada--might have come to a head in exactly the same year,
1837.
In sober, weighty, tactful phrases, carefully chosen to avoid giving
needless offence to the Dutch, the despatch laboriously overthrows the
Liberal theory of government, and works out the negation of all Imperial
experience. It deplores the "bitter memories" of war, which free
institutions, by tending to "emphasize and stereotype the racial line,"
will make more, not less bitter, and which can be effaced only by the
"healing effect of time." We think of the Durham Report, of Ireland, and
marvel. We recollect the bulky Blue-Book at Mr. Lyttelton's elbow as he
wrote, full of speeches and articles by Englishmen, showing quite
correctly, as has since been proved, that the "racial line" in
Johannesburg was growing fainter daily with the mere prospect of
responsible government. These men were not afraid of the Dutch, and said
so. The answer was that they ought to be, or, in the persuasive language
of diplomacy, as follows:
"His Majesty's Government trust that those of British origin in the
Transvaal who, with honest conviction, have advocated the immediate
concession of full responsible government, will recognize the soundness
and cogency of the reasons, both in their own interests and in those of
the Empire, for proceeding more cautiously and slowly, and that under a
political system which admittedly has its difficulties they will,
notwithstanding a temporary disappointment, do their best to promote the
welfare of the country and the smooth working of its institutions."
Then came a chivalrous compliment to the Dutch for their "gallant
struggle" in the war, coupled with a reminder that they are not to be
trusted with political power, a reminder so courteously worded that it,
too, becomes a compliment:
"The inhabitants of Dutch origin have recently witnessed, after their
gallant struggle against superior power, the fall of the Republic
founded by the valour and sufferings of their ancestors, and cannot be
expected, until time has done more to heal the wound, to entertain the
most cordial feelings towards the Government of the Transvaal. But from
them also, as from a people of practical genius, who have learned by
long experience to make the best of circumstances, His Majesty's
Government expect co-operation in the task of making their race, no
longer in isolated independence, a strong pillar in the fabric of a
world-wide Empire. That this should be the result, and that a complete
reconciliation between men of two great and kindred races should, under
the leading of Divine Providence, speedily come to pass, is the ardent
desire of His Majesty the King and of His Majesty's Government."
The tone recalls the tone of Pitt and Castlereagh in proposing the
Union. But Fitzgibbon went more directly to the point in saying outright
that, Ireland having been conquered and confiscated, the colonists "were
at the mercy of the old inhabitants of the island," and that laws must
be framed by an external power to "meet the vicious propensities of
human nature." Let us recognize unreservedly that the words of the
Transvaal despatch were the outcome of deep and sincere conviction. That
is the worst of it. From age to age Ireland has to suffer for the depth
and sincerity of these convictions. There, too, the cleavage of race and
religion, never complete, always defying the official efforts to
"stereotype and emphasize it," to quote the despatch of 1905, grows
fainter with time, and will grow fainter as long as the national
movement lives to draw men together in the common interest of Ireland.
The Volunteers, Wolfe Tone, Emmet, many of the Young Irelanders, Isaac
Butt, Parnell, were Protestants. And there is a strong band of
Protestant Home Rulers to-day in Ulster and out of it, landlords,
tenants, capitalists, labourers, Members of Parliament, and clergymen,
who declare that they are not afraid of Catholic oppression, and who are
told by Unionists that they ought to be. And in Ireland, too, the Roman
Catholic majority are told, rarely, it is true, in the courteous phrases
of Mr. Lyttelton's despatch, that they "cannot be expected to entertain
the most cordial feelings towards the Government." In Ireland, also, is
a "political system which admittedly has its difficulties," ironical
euphemism for a system whose analogue in the Transvaal could have been
used by the subject race, had they so willed, to bring civil government
to a standstill, without the means of furnishing anything better, and
which under the Act of Union can be, and has been, used to dislocate the
Parliamentary life of the United Kingdom. The Boers were asked "as a
people of practical genius" to assist the "smooth working" of an
unworkable Constitution, so as to promote the "reconciliation of two
great and kindred races." The Irish are pursued with invective for
legitimately using the constitutional power given them in order, while
freeing Parliament from an intolerable incubus, to gain the right to
elicit character and responsibility in themselves by shouldering their
own burdens and saving their own souls.
If the official view of the Transvaal was mistaken, the summit of error
was reached in the view taken of the Orange River Colony. In that
Colony, which was almost wholly pastoral and Dutch, and which until the
war had enjoyed free institutions uninterruptedly for half a century,
and had made remarkably good vise of them, representative government,
even of the illusory kind designed for the Transvaal, was to be
indefinitely postponed, postponed at any rate until the results of the
"experiment" in the Transvaal had been observed.
The Government "recognize that there are industrial and economic
conditions peculiar to the Transvaal, which make it very desirable in
that Colony to have at the earliest possible date some better means of
ascertaining the views of the different sections of the population than
the present system affords. The question as regards the Orange River
Colony being a less urgent one, it appears to them that there will be
advantage in allowing a short period to intervene before elective
representative institutions are granted to the last-named Colony,
because this will permit His Majesty's Government to observe the
experiment, and, if need be, to profit by the experience so gained."
What is the train of reasoning in this strange specimen of political
argument? It was important to "ascertain the views" of the bi-racial
Transvaal, but needless to ascertain the views of the practically
homogeneous Orange River Colony. The "question" there is a "less urgent
one." What question? Why less urgent? Is it that the British minority,
being so very small, is more liable to oppression by the Dutch? That is
a tenable point, though by parity of reasoning it would seem to make the
question more, not less, urgent, and the importance of "ascertaining the
views" of the different sections of the population, greater, not less.
Or is it the diametrically opposite train of thought, namely, that an
assumed improbability of disorder owing to the homogeneity of the
population is a reason, not for giving Home Rule, but for withholding
it? These contradictions and confusions are painfully familiar in
anti-Home Rule dialectics all over the world. A quiet Ireland does not
want Home Rule; a turbulent Ireland is not fit for it. If the Unionist
element in Ireland is strong, that is clearly an argument for
withholding Home Rule in deference to the wishes of a strong minority.
If the minority, on the other hand, is proved to be small, all the
greater reason for withholding it, because oppression by the majority
will be easier. So the sterile argument swings back and forth, and men
still talk of "experiments" and "profiting by experience," while the
demonstration of their errors is written in the blood and tears of
centuries, and while masses of facts accumulate, demonstrating the great
truth that free democratic government, whatever its disadvantages and
dangers--and it has both--is the best resource for uniting,
strengthening, and enriching a community of white men.
The Transvaal Constitution of 1905 was cancelled on the incoming of the
Liberal Ministry at the end of that year, and in the following year full
responsible government was granted both to the Transvaal and Orange
River Colony, with the results that we know. Instantaneously there
permeated the bi-racial urban society in the Transvaal a new sense of
brotherhood. Men of different race, as far apart in spirit as the
members of the Kildare Street Club, the Orange Societies, and the
Ancient Order of Hibernians, met and made friends because it was not
only natural but necessary to make friends, since on all alike lay the
burden of doing their best for their country on a basis of equal
citizenship. Nobody out there called the new system an "experiment." The
wrench once over, the thing once done, there was general unanimity that
whatever the difficulties--and there were great difficulties--it was the
right thing to be done under the circumstances, and if this unanimity
was combined, rightly or wrongly, with a good deal of resentment against
the Liberal attitude at home towards Chinese labour, nobody is any the
worse for that. The day will come when even that burning question will
be seen in its true perspective as an infinitesimally small point beside
the great principle of responsible government, which includes the
decision of labour questions, together with all other branches of
domestic policy.
Conservative opinion at home has been slower to change than British
opinion in the Transvaal. But, again, this was natural. Parties had long
been divided on the South African question. The abrupt reversal of
policy was felt as a humiliation, and the ingrained mental habits
engendered by the traditional policy towards Ireland yielded slowly,
grudgingly, and fearfully to the proof of error in South Africa. It is
not for the sake of opening an old wound, but solely because it is
absolutely necessary for the completion of my argument, that I have to
recall the angry and violent speeches which followed the announcement of
the new policy; the dogmatic prognostications of Imperial disruption, of
financial collapse, and of a cruel Boer tyranny in the emancipated
Colonies; the charges of wanton betrayal of loyalists, of disgraceful
surrender to "the enemy." Some of the leading actors in these scenes,
notably Mr. Balfour and Mr. Lyttelton, have since acknowledged that they
were wrong, while apparently feeling it their duty as honourable and
loyal men to give a somewhat misleading turn to an old controversy in
their praise of Lord Milner's services to South Africa. That Lord
Milner, in his administration during and after the war, did, indeed, do
a vast amount of sound and lasting work for South Africa is perfectly
true, and he deserves all honour for it. Probably no public servant of
the Empire ever laboured in its service with more unstinted devotion and
a higher sense of duty. But good administration is not an adequate
substitute for knowledge of men, and that knowledge Lord Milner lacked.
He did no service to the British colonists of South Africa in telling
them that they had been shamefully betrayed by the Home Government in
1906. It would have been wiser to advise them to rely on themselves and
on the justice and wisdom of their Dutch fellow-citizens. His violent
speeches in 1906-1908 about the calamitous results of permitting Dutch
influences free play in South Africa--speeches breathing the essential
spirit of Fitzgibbonism--would have wrought incalculable mischief had
they coincided with effective British policy; while his view, as
expressed in the House of Lords,[38] that a preparatory régime of
benevolent despotism, showing "the obvious solicitude of the Government
for the welfare of the people," and taking shape "in a hundred and one
works of material advancement," would "win us friends and diminish our
enemies," evinces an ignorance of the ordinary motives influencing the
conduct of white men, which would be incredible if we had not Irish
experience before us. "Twenty years of resolute government," said Lord
Salisbury. "Home Rule will be killed by kindness," said many of his
successors. In later chapters I shall have to show what well-meant
kindness and resolute government have done for Ireland. If even at this
late hour Lord Milner would frankly acknowledge his error, I believe he
would enormously enhance his reputation in the eyes of the whole Empire.
As practical men, let us remember that the Constitutions of 1906 would
not have become law if, instead of being issued under Letters Patent,
they had had to pass through Parliament in the form of a Bill. The whole
Conservative party, following Lord Milner, was vehemently against the
Letters Patent. Those who witnessed the debate upon them in the House of
Commons will not forget the scene. I recall this fact without any desire
to entangle myself in the current controversy about the Upper House, but
with the strictly practical object of showing that because a Home Rule
Bill is defeated in Parliament, as the Irish Bills of 1886 and 1893 were
defeated, it does not necessarily follow that its policy is wrong. Nor
does it follow that its policy is wrong if that defeat in Parliament is
confirmed by a General Election. Home Rule for Canada never had to pass,
and would not have passed even the Parliamentary test. Skilful and
determined organization could have wrecked even the Australian
Constitutions. No one, certainly, could have guaranteed a favourable
result of a General Election taken expressly upon the Transvaal and
Orange River Constitutions of 1906, with the whole machinery of one of
the great parties thrown into the scale against them. We know the case
made against Ireland on such occasions, and the case against the
conquered Republics was made in Parliament with ten times greater force.
If anyone doubts this, let him compare the speeches on Ireland in 1886
and 1893 with the speeches on South Africa in 1905-06. With the
alteration of a name or two, with the substitution, for example, of
Johannesburg for Ulster, the speeches against South African and Irish
Home Rule might be almost interchangeable. For electioneering purposes,
evidences, in word and act, of Boer treason, rapacity, and
vindictiveness, could have been made by skilful orators to seem damning
and unanswerable. All the arts for inflaming popular passion under the
pretext of "patriotism" would have been used, and we know that
patriotism sometimes assumes strange disguises. The material would have
been rich and easily accessible. Instead of having to ransack ancient
numbers of Irish or American newspapers for incautious phrases dropped
by Mr. Redmond or Mr. O'Brien in moments of unusual provocation, the
speeches of Botha, Steyn, and De Wet, during the war, and even at the
Peace Conference, would have been ready for the hoardings and the
fly-sheets, and they would have had an appreciable effect.
Am I weakening the case for democracy itself in pressing this view?
Surely not. One democracy is incapable of understanding the domestic
needs and problems of another. Whenever, therefore, a democracy finds
itself responsible for the adjudication of a claim for Home Rule from
white men, it should limit itself to ascertaining whether the claim is
genuine and sincere. If it is, the claim should be granted, and a
Constitution constructed in friendly concert with the men who are to
live under it. That way lies safety and honour, and, happily, the
democracy is being educated to that truth. If this be a counsel of
perfection; if the difficult and delicate task of settling the details
of Irish Home Rule is to be hampered and complicated by the
resuscitation of those time-honoured discussions over abstract
principles which ought long ago to have been buried and forgotten, let
every patriotic and enlightened man at any rate do his best to sweeten
and mollify the controversy, to extirpate its grosser manifestations,
and to substitute reason for passion.
The grant of responsible government to the Transvaal and Orange River
Colony reacted with amazing rapidity on South African politics as a
whole. It took the Canadian Provinces twenty-seven years (if we reckon
from 1840), and the Australian States forty-five years (if we reckon
from 1855), to reach a Federal Union. Hardly a minute was wasted in
South Africa. Under very able guidance, the scheme was canvassed almost
from the first, and in two years trusted leaders of both races,
representing Natal, Cape Colony, and two newly emancipated
Colonies--men, some of whom had been shooting at one another only five
years before--were sitting at a table together hammering out the details
of a South African Union. Here, indeed, was shown the "practical genius"
which the Government of 1905 had piously invoked for their abortive
Constitution. In the spirit of forbearance, of sympathy, of wise
compromise, which governed the proceedings of this famous Conference,
was to be found the measure of the longing of all parties to extinguish
racialism and make South Africa truly a nation. The Imperial Act
legalizing the arrangements ultimately arrived at by the agreement of
the colonists was passed in 1909. The political system constructed
cannot be called Federal. The framers rejected the Australian model, and
went much beyond the Canadian model in centralizing authority and
diminishing local autonomy; nor can there be any doubt that the
strongest motive behind that policy was that of securing the harmony of
the two white races.
All this was the result of trusting the Dutch in 1906. "We cannot expect
you to trust us, and we shall not trust you," said the despatch of 1905.
We know what the consequences of that policy would have been. It is not
a question of imagination or hypothesis. It is a question of the
operation of certain unchanging laws in the conduct of all white men.
Good or bad, our government would have been detested. We should have
manufactured sedition, lawlessness, and discord. Then the tendency would
have been strong to follow the old Irish precedent, and make the evil
symptoms we had ourselves educed the pretext for tightening the screw of
anti-popular government. It would have been said that we must sustain
our prestige to the end and at all costs, a phrase which often cloaks
the obstinacy of moral cowardice. Or, too late to escape the contempt of
the Boers, we might have abruptly surrendered to clamour. It would have
taken a long time to reach union then. Contempt is a bad foundation.
It brings one near despair to see the Union of South Africa used by men
who should know better as an argument against Irish Home Rule. The chain
of causation is so clear, one would think, as to be incapable of
misconstruction. But there seems to be no limit in certain minds to the
prejudice against the principle of Home Rule. If it is seen to work
well, the phenomenon is hurriedly swept into oblivion, and its results
attributed with feverish ingenuity to any cause but the true one. The
very speed with which the antidote pervades the body politic and expels
the old poison helps these untiring propagators of error to suppress the
history of recuperation, and to ascribe the cure of the patient to a
treatment which, if applied long enough, would have killed him. The
Conservative party appear to have now reached this amazing conclusion:
that they and Lord Milner were the authors of the South African Union,
and that that Union is a weapon sent them by Providence for combating
the Irish claims. This is what Ireland has to pay for being the sport of
British parties. Individual statesmen may point at past mistakes; but a
party, as a party, can never admit error: it is against the rules. To
make things easier, there is that question-begging phrase, the "Union."
If South Africa, like Australia, had been federalized, this windfall
would have been lost, because the word "Federal" might have suggested
some form of Federal Home Rule for Ireland. Labels mean an enormous
amount in politics.
There is not the slightest doubt that Mr. Walter Long, and even Lord
Selborne, who, as High Commissioner, actually witnessed the whole
evolution from responsible government in the two conquered States to the
Union of South Africa, are perfectly sincere in their opposition to
Irish Home Rule. But, I would respectfully suggest, it is their duty to
use their knowledge and convictions in the right and fair way. Let them
say, if they will, ignoring the intermediate and indispensable phase of
Home Rule in South Africa: "Here are two Unions; never mind how they
arose. Both are good: all Unions are good. The modern tendency to unify
is sound; do not let us react to devolution." Let them, in other words,
confine their argument to the domain of political science. What, I
submit, they should refrain from, is the imputation of sordid motives to
Nationalist leaders, the prognostications of religious and racial
tyranny in Ireland, and all those inflammatory arguments against the
principle of Home Rule which have been used all the world over, from
time immemorial, for the maintenance of Unions based on legal, not on
moral, ties, which were used against responsible government for the
Transvaal, and which, I venture to affirm, degrade our public life.
I am assuming for the moment that most Conservatives will elect to use
the South African parallel in the way that Mr. Long and Lord Selborne
have used it, that is, while tacitly approving in retrospect of the Home
Rule of 1906, to argue from Union to Union. But it is of no use to blink
the fact that there are pessimists who will put forward an antithetical
case, boldly declaring that we were wrong ever to trust the Boers, that
racialism is as bad as ever, that General Botha's loyalty is cant, the
Cullinan diamond an insult, and that South Africa will go from bad to
worse under a Dutch tyranny. Party propaganda is quite elastic enough to
permit the two opposite views to be used to convince the same electorate
at the same election. Pessimists are always active in these affairs, and
they can always produce something in the nature of a plausible case,
because it stands to reason that the evils of generations cannot be
swept away in a moment, either in South Africa or Ireland. Miracles do
not happen, and the pessimists, who are the curse of Ireland to-day,
will be able to demonstrate with ease that the free Ireland of to-morrow
will not enter instantaneously upon a millennium. It is useless to
attempt to convert these extremists. For a century back, Hansard and the
columns of daily papers have been full of their unfulfilled jeremiads
about Canada, about Australia, and about the very smallest and most
tardy attempts to give a little responsibility to the majority of
citizens in Ireland. The vocabulary of impending ruin has been exhausted
long ago; there is nothing new to be said. But those who care to study
in a cool temper the course of recent South African politics in the
columns of the _Times_, or, better still, in those of that excellent
magazine for the discussion of Imperial affairs, the _Round Table_, will
conclude that extraordinary progress has been made towards racial
reunion, and that in this respect no serious peril threatens South
Africa. The settlement, by friendly compromise at the end of the last
session, of the very thorny question of language in the education of
children, is a good example of what good-will can accomplish under free
institutions. By a laboured construction of fragments of speeches culled
from the utterances of exceptionally vehement partisans, it would be
still possible to make up a theory of the "disloyalty" of the South
African Dutch. It would have been equally possible for a painstaking
British student of the _Sydney Bulletin_ within recent memory to start a
panic over the imminent "loss" of Australia. Some people think that
Canada is as good as "lost" now. Yet the Empire has never been so strong
or so united as to-day.
FOOTNOTES:
[35] Cd. 2479, 1905.
[36] Cd. 2400, 1905.
[37] "It is true that in the case of Canada full responsible government
was conceded, a few years after a troublous period culminating in a
brief armed rising, to a population composed of races then not very
friendly to each other, though now long since happily reconciled. But
the Canadas had by that time enjoyed representative institutions for
over fifty years, the French-Canadians had since the year 1763 been
continuously British subjects, and the disorders which preceded Lord
Durham's Mission and the subsequent grant of self-government could not
compare in any way with a war like that of 1899-1902. It is also the
fact that in the United Colony of Upper and Lower Canada, during the
period of 1840-1867, parties were formed mainly upon the lines of races,
and that, as the representatives of the races were in number nearly
balanced, stability of Government was not attained, a difficulty which
was not overcome until the Federation of 1867, accompanied by the
relegation of provincial affairs to provincial Legislatures, placed the
whole political Constitution of Canada upon a wider basis."
Few would gather from the first sentence that the races were "not very
friendly to each other" precisely because they lived under a coercive
political system; and that, in the long-run, they were "happily
reconciled" because they received responsible government. Nor could it
be deduced from the obscure reference lower down to the union of the two
Provinces that the Union was the one blot upon Durham's scheme, the one
point in which, fearing the predominance of a French majority in Lower
Canada, he shrank from his own principles and recommended an unworkable
Union which tended to encourage the formation "of parties on the lines
of races." From the further allusion to the Federal Union of 1867, no
one would imagine that that great scheme was founded on a cessation of
racial antipathy inside the Quebec Province, and on a voluntary
recognition among all races and parties that it was best for that
Province to have a local autonomy of its own, parallel with that of the
Ontario Province and under the supreme central authority of the
Dominion.
[38] February 26, March 27, 1906.