THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE BOER
Before turning to consider the English element in our society, we would
linger yet a moment, before we finally leave the Boer, to consider some
of the many assertions made with regard to him, and what of truth or
falsehood appears to us to lie in them, and, above all, how they have
come to be made.
It has been said, though it will probably never be said again by any
person who knows what courage is, that the Boer is a coward and cannot
fight. How, in view of his history during the last two hundred years,
this ever came to be said, even by his bitterest foes, has appeared to
us always a matter of some astonishment. We can explain it in any way
only when we consider the fact that bravery, like every other virtue,
may assume more than one shape, and that men accustomed to recognize
it under one aspect do not readily recognize it under another. In the
animal world, there is the courage of the bull terrier always eager
for a conflict, and seeking a fellow combatant for the pleasure of
fighting him, and the courage of the mastiff, whom you may even tread
on with impunity as he lies sleeping at your foot, but who, should his
master or his master's property be attacked, may be more dangerous than
any bull terrier; there is the courage of the tigress robbed of her
young, who faces fearlessly fire and death to regain it, yet at other
times prefers to slink away from man, and there is the courage of the
game-cock who chafes angrily against the bars to reach the game-cocks
in other cages; and the courage of the red African mier-kat, who
attacked, will try to get to his hole, and, if he cannot, will fight
fearlessly to the death.[71]
[71] There are three species of mier-kat generally known in
South Africa, two of which are mild and easily tamed, and
the red mier-kat, a creature absolutely fearless and which
no one has ever succeeded in taming.
In the human world, there is the same diversity of courage; there is
the courage of the woman robbed of her infant, who climbs where no
other human foot dare tread and recovers it from the eagle's eyrie,
while the crowds below look on with breathless astonishment, and the
courage of the peasant woman, who, after being broken three times on
the wheel, on being asked to give up the names of her confederates,
already almost past speech, shook her head in refusal, is again put on
the wheel, and dies. This courage is quite consistent with an extreme
distaste for conflict and an extreme sensitiveness to pain, and takes
its rise only in natures so constituted that impersonal passions or
convictions are capable of obliterating the natural bias, and this form
of courage is probably the most indomitable. But there is also the
courage, very rare in its way, of the prize-fighter, always showing
his biceps and challenging his acquaintances, and to whom life would
probably not be worth living without the applause and excitement of the
ring; but who, on the other hand, if he knew that the odds were fifteen
to one against him, and that there was neither money nor applause to be
gained if he won, would probably refuse to fight at all.
Now the courage of the old-fashioned Boer tends markedly to resemble
the first rather than the last type; and, why this should be so, a
study of his history makes clear.
In all societies, whether savage or civilized, in which a distinct
military organization exists, and in which military success is the
path to emolument and power, much meretricious glory hangs about the
occupation of the slayer.
From the Bornean savage, who until he has a certain number of skulls
to hang about his waist may not marry or take share in deliberations
of state, and the Zulu who must first wet his spear in human blood to
be accounted a full man, on to many of our so-called civilized states,
where in pageants and pastimes preference always is given to the man
who slays or overthrows over the man who creates or produces, war is
continually surrounded with a certain meretricious tinsel which ends by
making the thing attractive for its own sake. It is to increase this
artificial charm and render war attractive, that the savage hangs cats'
tails round his waist, sticks cock-feathers in his hair, and beats on
his tom-tom, when he is working himself up for battle, and that the
so-called civilized man wears red stripes on his trousers, struts with
his chin high in the air and his shoulders well held back and padded,
and that he wears feathers, tails, or portions of metal, whatever is
believed to make his appearance more striking and important. It is
this which makes war and the warrior so attractive to the ignorant
youth of both sexes. The soldier, dressed and holding himself as other
men, would not be so eagerly sought after by the idle woman of the
ball-room, nor would her cook be so anxious to walk about with the
private if he walked as other human creatures walk and had the same
kind of hat; and the peasant boy who enlists does so, in nine cases
out of ten, because of the drums and the marches and the flags. It is
not generally really the desire to feel the blood and the brain of a
fellow-creature, dismembered by your hand, start out, and still less
to lie with one slug in the stomach and another in the lungs, while
the blood rises in mouthfuls and there is a rattle in the throat, that
tempts the majority of men to become soldiers. It is, in nine cases
out of ten, not the desire to kill or be killed, but a hunger for the
tinsel with which war is surrounded, that influences men who affect a
love for it; it is the hope of fame, metal stars, gilt crosses, the
glitter and glare of the parade-ground, and the possibility of title
and honours, which make the youth to enlist and maiden to say, "How
beautiful is war!"
For the African Boer there has never been this meretricious tinsel
pasted over the ghastly reality of war. His training for two hundred
years has been in a wholly different school. For generation after
generation the Boer has gone out with his wife and child into the
wilderness, and, whether he wished it or no, the possibility of death
for them and for himself, by the violence of beasts or men, has been
an ever present reality. Night by night, as he has gone to sleep in
his solitary wagon or daub-and-wattle house, he has had his musket
within reach of his hand; and his wife hearing a sound in the night
has sat up anxiously, whispering, "What is that!" and together they
have listened while the children slept. If the Boer went out to hunt
lion or buffalo, it was accompanied with no hilarious excitement at
the thought of the applause of friends at his success, of pictures in
the illustrated magazines, and the newspaper paragraph over the mighty
hunter. All it meant was this, that, if he killed the lion, then the
cow that gave milk for his children would be safe, and his small son
could now go out and herd the lambs without danger. If he brought home
a load of springbok or of wildebeest, it meant simply that his wife cut
it up into biltong and hung it to dry outside the house for food. If
his own right arm failed him, or he kept no sufficient watch and fell
by the hands of savages or the jaws of beasts, then it meant that not
only he died, but possibly that wife and children died with him; and it
might be years before the news of their death travelled down to their
kindred if, indeed, it ever reached them. If, single-handed and however
bravely, he defended himself and his against odds of the mightiest
kind, there was no admiring world before which his success would be
blazoned forth. Even were he a commandant, and died at the head of his
little body of men ever so heroically, there was no Westminster Abbey
and no requiem for him; his comrades buried him where he fell, and a
little heap of rough African stones on a wide African plain, with the
African wind blowing over him, was all that he had for recompense.
If he led his little band to victory, there was no triumphal entry
into the city with bunting flying, and bars filled with drunken men,
and hoarse mobs shouting incoherently, or delirious women anxious to
kiss him, or present him with weapons gilt and jewelled--simply, he
went home to his house or wagon, and his old wife kissed him and said
she was glad he had come back; and his comrades said, "He is a good
fighter," and next time there was war he had to go in front again.
If his aim were true and his hand never shook and his courage never
failed, then it meant life for himself and all dear to him; if he
failed, then it was death; but that was all.
In this stern, silent school for generations the Boer has been trained.
Courage has become inherent and hereditary with him; he sucks it
in with his mother's milk; and, with it, an equally uncompromising
antipathy to war and conflict. For generations, deadly strife and
conflict, or the possibility of it, was part of the daily unending
discipline of his life. He regards it now as one of life's crowning
evils, to be avoided if possible--never to be flinched from when
inevitable.
It is this attitude which has led to so much misunderstanding of the
Boer's character by those who do not know him, and even by those who
think they know him. His view with regard to the chase illustrates
exactly his attitude toward human slaughter. If the leopards or wild
dogs decimate his flocks, he will spend days in the most unwearied,
skilful, and daring hunting; yet when he has killed them he will often
return home, and say with a sigh of relief, "Now it will be six months
before I need go after them again." If you inform him that in England
at great expense men keep and breed up foxes which, with great damage
to crops and hedges, they afterwards spend days in hunting, he will
look at you as though doubting the truth of your assertion, remarking
quietly: "But the Rednecks must then be mad? What do they want with the
wild beasts?"[72]
[72] A young Englishman, coming out to Africa some years
ago, for the purpose of distinguishing himself by shooting
some big game, and hearing there was an old Boer on a
farm near by who had the reputation of having been a most
noted hunter, endless lions having fallen to his gun, in
addition to large game and bucks, determined to visit him.
He returned much disappointed. Instead of finding the house
filled with trophies of the chase, which he hoped he might
perhaps purchase, he found not one skin or pair of horns in
the little three-roomed house. After very much difficulty,
and as a matter of politeness to the stranger, the old man
was at last induced to recount one or two hunting stories.
The thing which he appeared to be most proud of was a frame
of everlasting flowers which a daughter of his, who had
been to school, had made and placed round a cheap print on
the wall. He asked the young man whether they had those
flowers in his country; and, when told they had not, smiled
softly to himself at the manifest superiority of South
Africa. It is, of course, not only the true Boer hunter
who manifests this simplicity. If the works of the great
African hunter, F. C. Selous, with their unvarnished tale
of occurrences, be compared with the gilded narratives
of some persons who have once shot a tiger from the back
of an elephant or a tree-platform, the same unconscious
simplicity will be manifest, dividing the man who can do
the thing from the man who desires it to be thought that he
can do it.
His attitude toward human conflict is exactly the same.
We say advisedly, after a long and intimate knowledge of the
old-fashioned Boer, that never, in one instance, have we heard man
or woman speak of war with joy, desire, or elation. For this folk
there is no more glamour or amusement about war than for a nurse who
has attended hundreds of cases of small-pox and cancer there is a
glamour and glory about these diseases. It is with extreme difficulty
that old men and women can be got to describe the conflicts they have
lived through in their youth. After speaking a few minutes they will
suddenly break off with: "Ah! but war is an awful thing! God grant that
you may never see what we have seen, or go through what we have gone
through." Not in any single case have we known the old Boer to vaunt
himself on any success or act of courage. (With the young fashionable
nineteenth-century descendants in towns, who have seen no fighting, it
may be different.)
Having known intimately for five years an elderly man, and having
always noticed certain marks on his face, we inquired one day the
cause, and were surprised to learn that he had been an actor in some
most heroic scenes; having in one instance gone up a mountain alone
to fetch down the wounded, and that he bore on his body at least ten
scars, gained in different conflicts. Neither by this man nor by any
of his family, whom we had known intimately for years, had the fact
been mentioned. "Yes," said a close female relative quietly, when we
questioned her on the matter, "he is a man who can fight; he is not
afraid"; and that was all. She regarded his action in the same light as
a ploughman's wife might regard her husband's power to plough twenty
acres in a given time and who would show no lofty pride in stating
it--it was "all in the day's work." The old-fashioned Boer never speaks
of war without becoming solemn and reverential, and, metaphorically
speaking, taking off his hat. "Man fights; but victory is of God."[73]
[73] (_Note added in 1899._) This was illustrated when
speaking some time back to a young Boer who was present at
Doorn Kop, where Jameson surrendered, and who took part
in that fight. We asked him what he thought of Jameson's
men. He replied, slowly and quietly, that they were "flukse
kerels" ("smart men"), adding: "You see, it was not that
_we_ were better men than they were, but God was with us!"
It is this solemn, reverent, almost shy, manner of speaking of
conflict, which misleads the ignorant stranger. In conversation several
years ago with a man newly from Europe, we dwelt on what we believed
to be the superb fighting and staying power of the African Boer. "How
is that possible," said the newcomer, "when every individual Boer you
meet is an arrant coward?" And he proceeded to illustrate his assertion
by stating that a short time before in conversation with three young
Boers, all greatly his superiors in size, he had offered to fight all
of them in succession to show which was the better man, an Englishman
or a Dutchman. They declined the contest, and one of them, smiling
sheepishly, walked up to him and asked him to take a cup of coffee.
"They funked it! They funked!" cried the newcomer. "They dared not
stand up to me, and I was the smallest of the four!" It was not easy to
explain to the Public School man that while he was regarding the Boer
as an arrant coward, the Boer was regarding him, good-naturedly, as a
fool! The Boer looked upon the offer, without any cause of quarrel,
to break each other's skulls much as a horny-handed ploughman, the
son of six generations of ploughmen, would regard an offer to plough
six acres of land in which nothing was to be planted, simply in order
to see who could plough the fastest. "He talks too much; he cannot
fight," was probably the comment of the Boers after he had left them,
and possibly each man merely misunderstood the other. The Englishman
might have fought well, in spite of all his talk, and the Boer in spite
of his silence. It is the difference in mental attitude, doubtless,
which has misled the ignorant newcomer, and often the old inhabitant of
the country who is not gifted with the power of reading human nature
beneath its surface, into holding the view that the Boer is not a
fighter. The truth is, the African Boer, devoid as he is of all passion
for conflict, regarding war as part of the stern and unavoidable evil
of life, to be quietly faced, but never sought, will, if his people,
his land, or his freedom, are attacked, go forth to meet war with the
same grim unbending resolution with which his forefathers went out to
found their homes in the desert. As long as the African Boer remains
the African Boer, whenever these things are touched, he will be found
among his plains and on his kopjes ready to die, the silent, bravest
child of our broad veld.
* * * * *
It has been said of the Boer that he is conservative; that he follows
line by line the manners and traditions of his fathers; that that which
has been sacred to his forebears is sacred to him; that he is immobile,
and does not change. This is in part true; in part, untrue.
It is true that the primitive Boer has preserved in the South African
wilds the ideals and manners of his ancestors of two centuries ago;
that in him the seventeenth and even remnants of the sixteenth century
are found surviving as among few peoples in Europe; but, if this
survival of the past be taken to imply an organic incapacity on his
part to adapt himself to change, if it be taken to imply the immobility
of a weak and therefore unadaptable nature, which has not the vitality
and strength to change, it is wholly untrue. Nothing so indicates the
dogged, and almost fierce, strength of the South African Boer as this
unique conservatism. Placed in a new environment, removed from all the
centres of European culture and thought, thrown out into the African
deserts, surrounded by the most crudely primitive conditions of life,
and often by none but savage human creatures, nothing would have been
easier, or would have seemed more inevitable, than that rapid change
should at once have set itself up in the African Boer; nothing more
difficult, and almost impossible, than that he should maintain that
degree of cultivation and civilization which he had brought from Europe
and already possessed. Again and again, under like conditions, men of
lofty European races have been modified wholly. Thrown amid new and
savage surroundings, when, after a few generations of isolation from
European life, they again come into contact with us, we find that
whatever of culture or knowledge they brought with them has vanished;
their religion has atrophied; their habits of life have become
modified, and, often inter-blending with the savage races about them,
they have lost all, or almost all, the old distinctive European marks.
They are a new human modification, but a modification often lower
in the scale of life than even the savage peoples by whom they were
surrounded, a degenerate and decayed people. On the east and west coast
of Africa, in South America and elsewhere, again and again this has
happened. Europeans, not having the conserving strength to retain what
they possessed, and not being able to emulate the primitive virtues
of the savage, have gone back in the scale of being. With the South
African Boer this has not been so.
After two hundred years we find him to-day with that little flag of
seventeenth-century civilization which he took with him into the
wilderness two hundred years ago, still to-day gallantly flying over
his head, untorn and hardly faded after its two centuries' sojourn in
the African desert. With the instinct of a powerful race the Boer saw
or rather felt his danger. The traditions, the faiths, the manners of
his fathers, these he would hold fast by. To move, to be modified in
any way by the conditions about him, was to go backwards; he would not
move; so he planted his foot and stood still.
You say that he still wears the little short jacket of his
great-great-grandfather's great-grandfather? Yes, and had he given that
up, it would have been to wear none at all! So, line by line, his wife
made it, carefully as his father's forefather's had been. You say he
stuck generation after generation to the straight-backed elbow chair
and the hard-backed sofa of his forefathers? Yes--and had he given them
up, it could have been to adopt nothing more æsthetic; it would have
been to sit on the floor; so he held solemnly to the old elbow-chair
and the straight-backed sofa, almost as a matter of faith.
You say that he had only one book, and clung to that with a passion
that was almost idolatry? Yes--but had he given up that one book, it
could not have been to fill a library with the world's literature; it
would have been to have no literature at all! That one book, which
he painfully spelled through and so mightily treasured, was his only
link with the world's great stream of thought, morals, and knowledge.
That compilation of the history, poetry, and philosophy of the great
Semitic people was his one possible inlet to the higher spiritual
and intellectual life of the human race. In that he clung to it so
passionately, worshipped it so determinedly, he showed his intense
hankering after something other than the mere material aspects of life.
He was not a man with a thousand avenues open before him toward thought
and spiritual and intellectual knowledge, who wilfully shut his eyes to
them, saying, "I will see none but this one": he had no other to see.
If the Boer had forsaken his Bible we should have found him to-day a
savage, lower than the Bantus about him, because decayed. In nothing
has he so shown his strength as in clinging to it.
To one who wisely studies the history of the African Boer, nothing is
more pathetic than this strange, fierce adherence of his to the past.
That cry, which unceasingly for generations has rung out from the Boer
woman's elbow-chair, "My children, never forget you are white men!
Do always as you have seen your father and mother do!" was no cry of
a weak conservatism, fearful of change; it was the embodiment of the
passionate determination of a powerful little people, not to lose
itself in the barbarism about it, and so sink in the scale of being.
To laugh at the conservatism of the Boer is to laugh at a man who,
floating above a whirlpool, clings fiercely with one hand to the only
outstretching rock he can reach, and who will not relax his hold on it
by so much as one finger till he has found something firmer to grasp.
That the conservatism of the Boer has in it nothing of the nature of
mental ossification, and that he has preserved his pliability intact,
is shown by the peculiar facility with which, when the time comes, the
Boer leaps in one generation from the rear of the seventeenth-century
thought and action to the forefront of the nineteenth.
The descendant of generations of old seventeenth-century Boers
returns from his studies in Europe an enthusiast over all the latest
inventions, an advocate of new ideas and an upholder of the newest
fashions. In colonial life, it is a matter of common remark, none are
more attracted to the new and the modern than the nineteenth-century
educated Dutch, whether man or woman. It would almost seem as though
that very dogged strength of character, which for ages has made him
capable of retaining his hold upon the old, when the necessity for
doing so passes, makes him equally resolute to grasp the new.
It has been said of the African Boer that he used his old flintlock gun
for a generation after Europe had discarded it. That was true; but had
he discarded it, it could only have been to adopt the assegai of the
Kaffir. The day he was shown the Mauser, he recognized it and grasped
it, and he has used it--not without effect!
In very truth, if one should speak frankly of what one most fears for
the African Boer, it is a too rapid renunciation of his past, and an
acceptance of the new without a sufficient and close examination. Were
it possible that our words should reach him, fain would we apostrophise
our old-world Boer and his wife thus:--"_Hou maar vas, Tant' Annie! Hou
maar vas, Oom Piet!_"[74] Be not too ready to give up the past, we pray
you. All that is new is not true, and that which comes later is not
always an improvement on that which went before. We English have an old
saying that if you keep your grandmother's wedding-dress sixty years,
times will have come round and it will be in the fashion again. For
the world goes round, O Oom and Tante!--unwilling as some of you may
still be to believe it!--and that which was new becomes old, and that
which was old becomes new again! Do not be too anxious to change your
old customs, your simple modes of life, your deep faiths, till you know
what you are exchanging them for: the world goes round; and the day may
come when you, South Africa, and the world will have need of that which
you now are so willing to throw away.
[74] "Hold fast, Aunt Annie! Hold fast, Uncle Piet!"
practically meaning, "Stand where you are and hold your
ground."
"Oom and Tante, I will whisper to you a secret! Here, in the very heart
of this great material civilization of ours which swells itself so
bravely and makes so much noise--here, in the heart of it, there are
some of us men and women who are beginning to have our doubts of it; we
are beginning to find it out. We may not be very many now, but we shall
be more by and by; and we are beginning to question what all this vast
accumulation of material goods in certain hands, this enormous increase
in the complexity of the material conditions of life, necessarily leads
to?
"We ask ourselves this:--Though we increase endlessly the complexity
of our material possessions and our desires, does the human creature
who desires and possesses necessarily expand with them? And the answer
which comes back to us when we deeply consider this question is: No.
"There are times, when, looking carefully at this nineteenth-century
civilization of ours, it appears to us much like that concretion which
certain deep-sea creatures build up about themselves out of the sand
and rubbish on the deep-sea floor, which after a time becomes hard and
solid, and forms their grave. It appears to us that under this vast
accumulation of material things, this ceaseless thirst for more and
more complex material conditions of life, the human spirit and even the
human body are being crushed; that the living creature is building up
about itself a tomb, in which it will finally dwindle and die.
"We vary endlessly the nature and shape of the garments we wear; but
the bodies for which they exist do not grow more powerful or agile;
we multiply endlessly the complexity of our foods; but our digestions
grow no stronger to deal with them; we build our houses larger and
larger, but the span of life for inhabiting them grows no longer:
the Bedouin of the Desert inhabits his tent as long: our cities grow
vaster and vaster, but our enjoyment of life in them becomes no more
intense: our states expand, but the vitality of their component parts
rises no higher: we rush from end to end of the earth with the speed of
lightning, but we love it no better than men who lived in their valley
and went no further than their feet would carry them: we put the whole
world under contribution to supply our physical needs, but the breath
of life is no sweeter to us than to our forefathers whom the products
of one land could satisfy.
"For the life of the human creature is but a very little cup in
relation to the material goods of life; like the bell of a flower which
can hold only one drop of dew, all which you pour in after that can
only crush and drown it; it cannot contain it.
"You know, O Tante and Oom, that in South Africa your beasts suffer
sometimes from a disease, of which the leading feature is that, while
the creature eats more and more, it grows thinner and thinner. By and
by it dies, and when you cut it open you find fastened upon its vitals
a parasite, which consumed all its strength, which was never satisfied.
"Tante and Oom, it is a disease like unto this which eats deep at the
heart of our civilization. It is no new disease; nations and persons
have died of it before: the plains and riversides on this planet of
ours are studded with the mounds beneath which are buried the remains
of societies which once suffered from this disease. Some call it
degeneration; some decadence; some over-civilization; some excess of
luxury; some forgetfulness of God; it matters not what you call it:
though the external symptoms may vary, internally it remains always the
same.
"The horse-leech of our material civilization, in which endless wealth
and material luxury is thrown into the hands of one section of the
community at the cost of others, has three daughters which cry ever:
'Give! Give! Give!' They are fastened on to the very vitals of our
modern life, and they cry never--'It is enough.'
"Fixed upon us as individuals, we hunger for more houses, more clothes,
more furniture, more jewels, more shares, more dividends, whether we
can use what we already have or not; and we hunger and strive after
these things with as much passionate avidity as the savage after the
hare, which if he nets will save him from death by starvation.
"Fixed on us as nations we cry, 'More lands, more trade, more fruits
of the labour of other men in other lands, higher dividends drawn from
foreign countries; more--though our national skin should crack, and we
burst and die of it at last--more!--more expansion!'
"Oom and Tante, we beg of you, if you must partake of our
nineteenth-century civilization with us, examine it carefully, and see
what it is you are taking in. It is a brightly coloured flower, but at
its centre sits a little gilded worm: if you must eat of it, eat the
flower, but spew out carefully the worm, which spells death if once it
fastens and breeds inside of you.
"There are certain things indeed, good and fair, which have got
embedded in this nineteenth-century civilization of ours, O Oom and
Tante, like diamonds in a mud stream: which are in it, but necessarily
not of it.
"In the two centuries which have passed since you left Europe, certain
things became common property which you know little of, and which are
wholly good and fair; but we beg of you to understand they are not
the outcome of that which comes to you with so much blare and glitter
as 'nineteenth-century civilization'--the civilization of the bar,
the stock exchange, the gambling saloon, the racecourse, gorgeous
furniture, and ceaseless changing fashions; nor even of the railway
train and the national debt. Do not think, we pray you, when you have
grasped with both hands at the mud of our civilization, that you have
therefore grasped the gems that may here and there be imbedded in it.
"There is music which you have not yet heard--Beethoven's; and there
is Mozart's, as sweet as the twitter of the birds when you wake up in
your wagon in the early dawn and hear them in the bushes round you in
the veld, and as gracious as the sound of the raindrops falling on
your roof after a long drought; but do not dream that the man who made
it had any relation with the speculators whose loud talk overpowers
you with its smartness, or the gorgeously dressed women who make you
ashamed of your old black skirt. Believe me, it was made by a man
leading a life poor and simple as yours, and who lies in a nameless
grave; in poverty and loneliness the music came to him, and he made
mankind for ever richer by it; and you can hear it as well in fustian
and serge, on a wooden seat as from the king's box, with a band of
diamonds above your forehead.
"We have also what you have not yet seen, a Moses, cut in stone. When
you look at it you are conscious of strength and joy such as you have
when you look up at one of our flat-topped African mountains, with
the krantzes on its head, casting a deep blue shadow in the early
morning;--it is well to look at it; but do not believe that all the
millionaires of all the states on earth if they pooled their wealth
could ordain that one line of that great figure should have been
created: it was shaped by a man who, seeking after beauty and truth,
found his God: a man who so lived with his creation that for weeks
together he forgot to remove his boots, so that when he did so the
skin came off with them: the fine gentlemen of the boulevards and the
parks who talk of their superiority to you because they 'possess art'
(meaning that they have made money enough out of other men's labour to
buy the works of dead great men) would hardly have cared to walk down
the street with him; his rough, strong face would have befitted better
a Boer laager than a circle of modern fashion.
"There are books, O Oom and Tante, other than the one great book
which you took into the wilderness with you; books which so widen
the soul of the man who makes them his that he might, when dying,
well thank the power behind life that he had been made man, and lived
to read them: but, do not believe that they are the products of any
trade demand, or have any relation with the wealth and luxury of the
modern world. Rich men may buy them and bind them in vellum, and put
them in their libraries; but that gives them no hold upon them. In
simplicity, and often in solitude and in poverty, the great souls of
earth have secreted that immortal honey of thought on which the soul
of humanity feeds. And whether it be the wisdom of the great Greek who
lay in the Agora in his coarse mantle, instructing without pay the
youth of Athens; or the vision of the Puritan Englishman which visited
him in poverty, blindness, and old age; or the immortal dream of the
Italian exile; or the deathless trill, sweeter than the song of his
nightingales, of the young English apothecary who died in Rome; or the
philosophy of the great German who lived for thirty years in a little
house in the little street of a little German town, desiring no more;
or the human cry from the heart of the Scotch ploughman; or the sweet
musings of the modern American who communed with his God at Concord for
many years--there is no message of beauty or wisdom which it has been
given to the soul of men to propound for its fellows, for which luxury
or material complexity of life were necessary. There is no message of
wisdom which has ever been uttered which you may not as well absorb,
seated on the kopje behind your square mud-house, as in the velvet
armchair of a duke's palace, with lackeys waiting your commands and
the spoils of the universe gathered round you. Two narrow shelves of
dingily-bound books will contain more of the world's true intellectual
pabulum than a man has time in sixty years to absorb and make his own;
and he who at the door of his hut in the veld has spelt out the book of
Job and the chants of Isaiah, till he knows them by heart, may have a
firmer hold on the world's loftiest literature than if he had hired a
librarian to tend his ten thousand costly volumes. Let no man deceive
you, O Oom and Tante, nor make you believe that literature is a grand
thing, only to be enjoyed by men eating several courses at dinner and
dwelling in capacious houses, nor that it can only be produced by
men who have consumed thousands of pounds of the world's labour. The
world's literature has been produced in simplicity and in poverty, and
often in suffering; and that which was good enough for the men who
wrote, is good enough for the men who would absorb it. They lie, Tante,
they lie, Oom, who tell you that literature is dependant on luxury, or
the material complexity of life, for its existence, or is in any way
related to it. It is from the barren heath, not from the drawing-room
carpet, however many coloured, that the wild bee extracts its honey.
"Even that knowledge of the conditions of existence which governs
the relation of matter with matter, and which yields what is called
scientific knowledge, and in a manner seems to mark what is called
modern civilization, has yet no causative relation with the greater
part of its material phenomena. It does not depend in any way upon
the enormous amount of material luxury and wealth concentrated in a
few hands which marks our material civilization. It was the Chaldean
shepherd watching his flocks at night under a sky as clear and
white-studded with stars as that which bends over the Karroo, who
first noted the times and seasons of the heavenly bodies. It was the
chemist labouring amid the painful fumes of his laboratory with hands
as stained by contact with matter as are your sons' to-day when they
come in from shearing who first discovered those combinations of atom
with the atom, and the reactions of substance on substance, which are
letting us slowly a little way into the secret of nature's workshop. It
is the mathematician, oblivious of all externals, pondering year after
year in his dingy study, with his outlandish garb, who masters at last
those laws of relation, the knowledge of which gives to man half his
mastery over matter. It is not even the man with the padded shoulders
and gilt ornaments upon his dress, who boasts so loudly to you of the
superiority of his nineteenth-century weapons of death, who ever made
one of them, or even understands how they were made: nor does he always
know how to use them! It is not the gaudily dressed man or woman who
travels in the first-class compartment of an express train, and looks
with wondering contempt at the slow-rolling old ox-wagon which your
grandfathers made, who ever made or comprehends one crank or one piston
in all that wonderful creation of human labour and thought in which
they are luxuriously borne along; or who could invent or shape even the
round solid wheel of a primitive donkey-cart. These wondrous material
objects have been the outcome of the work of the labouring brains
of the ages, and of the toil of hard-handed mechanics more roughly
clothed and simply fed than you who have toiled beneath the earth,
and in the fetid workshops, that those things might be. Our little
long-tailed African monkey of the bush, if he should see one of his
captured brothers, gorgeously arrayed and dancing on a barrel-organ,
might well think what a wonderful brain his brother must have, and how
much superior to himself he must be in mechanical skill to have made
all these things. But in truth we know he made neither the clothes he
wears, nor the organ: nor can he even turn the handle; he only dances
to the music another makes. It is the little wild monkey out in the
woods who has to find food for himself, to know which nuts to eat and
where to find them, and who can choose his own pool to drink and dabble
his hands in, who has to exercise brain and arm. It is not the jackdaw
with the peacock's feathers tied on to his tail, who flaunts them round
so overpoweringly, on whom they ever grew.
"Let no man deceive you, O Oom and Tante; it is not the men and women
revelling in a surfeit of the material products of the labour of
others, and scorning you because you have them not, who ever made the
very material civilization they boast of. It is not the people scorning
your little simple work and life, who could do even that which you can
do. It is not the woman lolling back in her double-springed carriage
who has the knowledge or invention or perseverance to originate or
manufacture one of all those endless materials which cling about her;
it was the Hindoo with a cotton cloth about his loins toiling at his
loom for twopence a day who made the diaphanous muslin she wears; and
the loom on which it was woven and the thread of which it is made were
invented by his swarthy-skinned ancestors generations ago. The fairy
frill upon her petticoat was sewn on by a needle-girl between snatches
of weak tea and bread and butter and fits of coughing. It is not the
general, gorgeous in gold lace and trappings, who could make even the
jacket he wears; the fine steel dust from the sword at his side cost
the life of the man who made it; it is the general's to sport, nothing
more. It is out of the labour of hands grimed and hard as yours, and
the toils of brains more weary than yours have ever been, that this
material civilization is built up. If you accept it for you and yours,
know what it is you are accepting. _Do not mistake the cat that laps
the milk for the cow that gave it._ When you open a wild bees' nest
and find inside a Death's-head moth, you are never fool enough to
believe it had anything to do with the making of the honey: you know
it is there to feed and--destroy. O Oom, O Tante, do not mistake the
Death's-head moths of our civilization for the makers of its honey, or
for the honey itself.
"Art, literature, science, the mastery over material conditions,
whatsoever there is in this nineteenth-century civilization that
strengthens the arm, or widens the heart, and broadens the intellect,
and makes fuller the joy of life--extract it and make it yours.
"In our nineteenth-century civilization there is a little kernel of
things rare and good and great, that have come down to us through the
centuries, and that brave souls of labour have added their little
quota of matter to even in our day. If you must crack the nut of our
nineteenth-century civilization, we pray of you eat only this little
kernel and throw away the great painted shell. For God's sake, do not
try to eat the shell and throw away the kernel.
"You know, O my Oom and Tante, that, when the Jew smouses go round the
country selling their goods, they sometimes sell to you clocks that
glitter like gold; and you give for them your best sheep and oxen.
But, when you take them to be tested by the town jeweller, you find
they are not gold, but tin, gilt with brass; and they will not go.
"There is much, O Oom and Tante, in our civilization that is like
to the Jew smous's clock! We warn you, be careful how you exchange
your good old African wares for our modern merchandise. There is much
brummagem about.
"For, believe us, Oom and Tante, there are some of us who have
travelled the world round; we have seen and handled this thing, called
nineteenth-century civilization. We have lived in vast cities, a few
unconsidered streets in which contain as many souls as your whole
land. We have seen half their population labouring continually without
sunlight or fresh air, and, by a labour that knows no end, producing
material things they never touch. We have seen white-faced children,
who shall be the thinking, labouring, fighting men and women when we
shall be in our graves, suck their white crusts dipped in tea, and
look up at us with famished eyes: we have seen old men, after a long
life of toil with no fireside to sit by, creep into the cold shadow
of the workhouse, to die there. And we have seen also other sides of
nineteenth-century civilization. We have been in the houses that are
palaces, which all the world labours to make full and fair; we have
pierced to their centres, and found there fair women surrounded by all
earth yields, wearing silks which the Indian made for twopence a day,
with which he bought a handful of rice and melted butter to keep him
alive, and laces bending over which human eyes grew dim, and beside
them in delicate cups stood tea which Tamil women near their hour of
labour may have plucked with quivering fingers; and they have sat up
on their sofas and looked at us with weary eyes, and asked, 'Is life
worth living?' We have watched the fevered faces of men in the world's
great stock exchanges, till pity seized us, and we could have cried:
'Is there no antifebrile that will slow this pulse and give these souls
rest and peace?' We have stood at Monte Carlo, and seen prince and
millionaire throw down coin as though it were not the life-blood of the
peoples. We have seen lock-hospitals and the men and women that are in
them, and also those who fill it but never come there; we have seen
the parade, where human slaughter hides the dirt and ugliness of its
trade behind plumes and gilt: we have seen the ballroom and the regal
procession. We have seen, on the other hand, what is fair and beautiful
in art and wonderful in science; we have seen brave and rare spirits,
even amid the rush and dross of our civilization, walking peacefully on
their own lofty little path, absorbing little, and imparting much. Yet,
believe us, that in the still night we lie awake, and all that we have
seen rises up as in a picture before us,--from Ratcliffe Highway with
its drunken sailors and hopeless women, to Monte Carlo with its princes
and prostitutes; from the Champs Elysées to the Karoo; from Grosvenor
Square to Bethnal Green,--there yet rises up no picture of life more
healthful and full of promise for the future, more satisfying to the
whole nature of man on earth, than yours in the wide plains of South
Africa. We know all its deficiencies, its lack of a certain variety,
the absence of certain brilliant elements which the human spirit may
feed on elsewhere; and, yet, it rises up before us as something wholly
strong, and virile, and full of promise. There are even times when
we have felt we would rather be the little naked Kaffir children who
play, fat and shining, with the kids on your kraal walls in the African
sunshine than be most of the modern men and women we have known; for
the life is more than meat and the body than raiment.
"Hold fast, Tante! Hold fast, Oom! You have much to lose. Be careful
how you exchange it. Cling to your old manners, your old faiths, your
free, strong lives, till you know what you are bartering them for.
"Tante, dear Tante, be not too anxious to change your old, straight,
black skirt for the never-ceasing vagaries of modern fashion, that sap
at the life of the modern woman as an open running tumour saps at the
strength of a body. Do not be too anxious to change, for a pile of
gauze or straw and textile flowers, that old black kappie of yours,
that has shielded you for so many generations from the African sun and
the African winds, in peace and in war, on kopje and on plain.
"Believe me, if some great artist should see you as you sit there by
your out-spanned wagon, in your old black dress with your infant at
your breast, and the African sky above you and the still veld round
you, and should paint you as you are, you would hang in the world's
great galleries, and generations to come of men and women would say,
'How strong, how harmonious!' For your old black dress, and the veld
and the sky, and the baby at your bosom can never go out of fashion, as
the hoop, and the patch, and the tilted hat, and fashionable furniture,
go; for they have that eternal dew of the morning upon them which rests
on all things growing up out of nature and necessity, for use and not
for show. And if it should have happened that, in the sterner moments
of your life, one should have depicted you truly when, in laager
or beside wagon, you stood side by side with the man who was your
companion, to defend that you prized, then, believe me, that old black
kapje of yours would have become a helm, and men in future generations,
looking on, would say 'There were giants in those days.'
"Tante, we, the newest of new women, stretch out our hands to you,
the oldest of the old, in the African veld: and we pray of you, stay
where you are, and hold fast by what you have, till we come and meet
you. We are coming to you in our own way. Stay where you are till we
can join hands. In your life of fellow-labour with man, in your social
productiveness and activity, you have realized much of that which we
are seeking. Do not force your great, free, labouring-woman's foot into
the gegawed shoes of the parasite female, from which we are striving
to withdraw ours; do not compel yourself to accept those insignia of
degeneracy, whether in clothing or bearing, from which we to-day are
so passionately striving to free ourselves. Hold by your simple brave
life a little longer, produce your many children, guide your household,
share man's burden with him, peace or war, till in a new social
condition you pass without enervation or degeneration to new labours,
and to a companionship with man in new and intellectual fields of toil.
Do not, we beg of you, believe that, when you wear a French bonnet and
have an eighteen-inch waist or trip to tennis in patent shoes, you have
come any nearer to grasping the good, the true, or the beautiful that
may be embedded in our nineteenth-century civilization. Feel no shame,
we pray you, for that strong capacious form of yours; from that strong
untrammelled body of yours shall yet spring a race strong to do or
dare, such as grows not beneath the waistband of an enervated parasitic
womanhood.
"Tante, wait for us, we are coming; you have something to teach us,
we have something to teach you; and it may be that when we have met
and joined hands we will work out something fairer and better for our
people and the world than has often been. Only do not decay from your
ancient simplicity of living and toiling before the time is ripe and
you can move forward to new labours. It would have been better that you
should have fallen in your early conflicts with savages and beasts,
and that nothing were left of you now but a name and a heap of stones
on the African plains, than that you should absorb the diseases of an
enervated and voluptuous modern womanhood--for then you would only have
died and not rotted.
"Oom Piet, we pray of you, be not anxious to adopt the fashions of
the nineteenth-century gentlemen of the club and front stalls in the
theatre. Be not too ready to discard your velschoens and your moleskin
trousers and your short jackets. In these things your fathers did
gallant deeds and loved freedom. Any coat that a brave man wears is
fashion enough: and the world comes to recognize that in the end.
Cling to your independence; and the day will come when your old round
felt hat will hang on the walls of the African houses of the future as
Oliver Cromwell's ancient hat hangs to-day in an English mansion; and
men of the future generations will say, looking at it reverently: 'Such
wore our fathers in the days when they did great things!'
"Do not think too lightly of your own knowledge; nor dream that the
man who knows well the path to the brothel and the bar, and knows how
to bear and bull the share-market, or who gains in one night's play as
much as your farm yields you in a year, has any advantage over you. It
is better to know how to find your way without a guide over hills and
plains of your native land, and to be able to sleep well out under the
stars with your head on a saddle, and when necessary to die for freedom
on your kopjes, than to know all the paths of the modern city. Hold by
your past; and the day will yet come when, instead of following the
fashion, you will set it.
"South Africa has still need of her old African lion and lioness. Hold
on a while longer; let your past die hard!
"Is it a wholly unrealizable dream, that, if you could but cling
for a while longer to your own simple healthful forms of life and
gold-untouched ideals, you might make it possible for us in South
Africa to attain to a fairer and more healthful form of civilization
than has elsewhere been reached? Is it wholly unrealizable that you
might help us to escape in their worse forms the diseases of modern
life, and attain to its good: while eschewing its evil? That we might
arrive at that condition of simple living and high thinking, under
which alone the spirit and body of man attain their full development,
and continual progress is possible? Or must you, too, fall before the
molten calf, and worship it?
"Does it seem strange to you, O Oom and Tante, that we sometimes think
of you as an antidote? That in the heart of this nineteenth-century
civilization we remember you sometimes, with your simple, free, strong
lives, as a man living in some torrid valley, where all around him were
fever-smitten, might remember a hardy mountain plant which he had seen
growing on the hill-tops in his youth, and cry: 'Ah, could they but eat
of it they might yet be saved!'
"Therefore we ask of you, _not_ to accept too readily all that the men
of this generation offer you, nor to be dazed by the glitter of our
wares; but to select slowly and carefully, if you must select at all.
"For this nineteenth century is not the last century; nor is its
civilization the last civilization; nor its ideals the last ideals! The
twentieth is coming! And before it ends, it may be that this nineteenth
will seem strangely distant! Men may then look over its mental wares
as, after twenty years, one might look over a box containing the
clothes of a dead elder sister, saying: 'This bit of real lace is still
good, and that silk scarf; but the rest is all brummagem and long out
of date.'
"For we, to-day, O Oom and Tante, with our new-found mechanical
inventions, and our accumulations of material goods, are like little
children who have just been given a rattle, and who spring it, till it
deafens themselves and every one else besides, and can hear nothing
else. We are like little long-tailed monkeys, who having found a bag of
sugar think that there is now nothing left in life but to sit round it
and eat it till they die.
"We are like to the children of Israel, when they built themselves the
golden calf and then danced about it, saying: 'Thou art the Lord our
God, and there is none like unto thee! From everlasting to everlasting,
thou art God, and thy years shall have no end!'--till a Moses, it may
be, shall come, and smite it into powder: and of that powder, mingled
with the waters of life, shall all the nations that worshipped drink,
and they shall call it Marah. And then it may be that they will seek
for a new God.
"We say it, well knowing the soft burst of laughter which will arise
now to-day, when the door is not yet closed on the nineteenth century,
and its ideals are yet dominating the men and women of the age--that
the time may come when even men of the world, those who live in the
present, who labour not for the future nor learn from the past, will
recognize that man is a complex creature, and that material wealth
satisfies only a moiety of his nature, and that material goods
possessed in excess by one portion of the community and lacking wholly
to the other, mean a condition of disease--that the time will come when
men will profess it in order to be called sane; that the railway-train
which brings the prostitute, the stock exchange, and the foes to
the freedom of a people, into the heart of its land, had better for
humanity have been the slowest ox-wagon crawling across the plains;
and had it taken two million years to come, so much better for the
nation and the world; that the value of a species of conveyance whether
for men or goods depends entirely to mankind on the nature of what it
brings; that even that Ark of the Covenant of the nineteenth century--a
new railway run by a joint stock company--is worthy of adoration, or
is not, entirely by the increased strength of body, width of sympathy,
clearness of intellect and joy in life it tends to confer on the folks
among whom it runs; that a submarine cable used to whisper lies from
land to land, and stir up the hearts of people against people, and to
urge on the powerful to attack the weak, is the devil's own tube and
has a connection direct with Hell; that a daily paper, not based on an
earnest determination to disseminate truth, is a cup of poison, sent
round fresh every morning to debilitate the life of the people; that
the man who from his place in the national assembly rises and states
the increase in his nation's imports and exports as though he were
describing its entire weal or woe, without consideration of the human
suffering and degradation or joy and good it may have cost to produce
them, or without calculation of the benefit or disease to be caused by
their consumption--is a fool; that it is more disgrace to a land to
have in it one hungry, work-crushed soul than to have no millionaire;
when it shall be recognized that the greatest nation is not that which
numbers most bodies, but most fully-grown free spirits, and fewest
crushed and broken; that an empire over human flesh and lands, and not
hearts, is an empire of disease; that a central power which cannot
propel the blood of sympathy and a common fellowship to the remotest
member of its group is on the path to cardiac failure and a sudden
death.
"We know that thus to speak is to enter into the Holy of Holies of the
nineteenth century, and therein to blaspheme. Nevertheless, O Oom and
Tante, it is possible that the day is coming when the stock exchange
and the share market, in which the men of this generation worship the
Lord their God, may pass away as the gladiatorial shows of the Roman
Empire and the rule of the Inquisition, so mighty and overpowering
in their days, have passed: it may be that a new Telemachus will yet
leap down into the arena where men traffic with the life-blood of the
nations, and, torn to pieces by the howling crowd, it will yet be said
by future generations, 'From that day there were held no more share
markets after the old fashion!'
"For this nineteenth century is not the last century! Nor are its
institutions the last institutions! Nor is its God the last God!
"Therefore, seeing that these things are so, O Oom and Tante, and that
we know not what part of our nineteenth-century wares shall be consumed
up as stubble, be cautious how you traffic with us. Do not barter your
old seventeenth-century wares, poor and simple as they may be, for
that which you may have to part with again the next day. The twentieth
century is coming: and it may be that, before it has reached its close,
it may be found nearer the seventeenth than the nineteenth.
"_Remember the Jew smous's clock!_ There be many Jew smouses going up
and down in this civilization of ours; and they deal in other things
besides clocks. They will traffic with you for your land, your freedom,
your independence, your very souls--for they hold that '_every man has
his price!_'--and they will give you in exchange that which will not
wear--a gilt-lined robe, which, soon as you wear it, will eat the flesh
of freedom from off your bones and lick up the blood of liberty within
your veins. Therefore, beware how you deal with them! That little which
you have, hold fast till you see what shall come to pass.
"The last Belshazzar's feast has not been held! Be careful that, when
the finger appears writing on the wall, you be not found also sitting
at that table.
"Hold fast a little while longer, we pray of you, by your old ideals,
your old manners, your simple old-world life. We--South Africa--the
world, have need of you!"
So, were it possible that our words should reach him, we would
fain apostrophize our old-world Boer and his wife. For our fear
indeed is, not that he will exhibit any incapacity for accepting
nineteenth-century ideals, but that he may swallow them too readily;
and that South Africa, whose backbone he forms, may also suffer from
that curvature of the spine, brought on by an excessive addiction to
luxury and an ill-distribution of wealth, from which certain other
peoples are dying.
* * * * *
To the other indictments which have been made, by those who have not
understood him, against the Boer, it would seem hardly worth now
referring, yet before we finally turn from him we may glance at them.
* * * * *
It has been said that he is priest-ridden.
It is undoubtedly true that the clergy of the Dutch Reformed Church
held in the past, and still to a limited extent hold to-day, a unique
position among their people as compared with the mass of modern clergy.
We in the heart of the nineteenth-century civilization regard, and most
rightly, with an almost unqualified scorn the modern man or woman who
submits to priestly dictation. Where the priest has no means of gaining
information, experience of life, or abstruse knowledge not shared by
other members of his society, submission to his dicta or dependence on
his advice can spring only from two causes--an intellectual feebleness,
which prevents the use of the man's reason, or a moral cowardice,
which causes him to shrink facing the responsibility of dealing with
the moral and spiritual problems of life, and renders him desirous of
having them dealt with vicariously.
But it has not always been so. In the middle ages, when war and the
struggle with crude material conditions of life occupied almost the
entire bulk of the population, the clergy, as the one class exempt from
these labours, and therefore leisured and with facilities for travel
or abstraction in study, were of necessity much more than clergy. They
absorbed in themselves several now wholly distinct social functions.
Their monasteries were the repositories of learning; they themselves
were the guardians of national tradition, law, and history; their
knowledge of plants and leisure to study disease made them the healers
of the folk; experiments and improvements in agriculture were made in
their grounds; born of the people, they were naturally their political
as well as moral and intellectual guides, and it was to them that the
oppressed people turned everywhere for advice and leadership. In such
a social condition, every individual born with unusual intellectual
aptitudes or inclinations was almost inevitably bound to gravitate
towards the Church; and the priesthood therefore were, not merely
through training and position, but by a species of natural selection,
the intellectual leaders of the folk. Therefore, for some centuries
the inclination towards culture and progress in a monarch, a nation,
or an individual might be measured, strange as it now seems, by their
esteem of and devotion towards the clergy. It was under the influence
of the clergy that those Gothic churches rose which are the glory
and incarnation of their age; and it was round the monastery and the
church that the intellectual and socialized life of the people centred.
Incidentally, it happened that those who were the ghostly guides of the
people were also at the same time the leaders of the people in learning
and the upholders of their human rights.
On a minute scale, and under very different conditions, the clergy of
the Dutch churches have for nearly two centuries fulfilled the same
complex functions towards their people in South Africa. They have, it
is true, been the sacerdotal consolers and guides of their folk; but
they have been infinitely more. They have been the representatives of
that higher learning and culture which circumstances denied to the mass
of their people; the parsonage and the church have been the social
points round which the national life centred, and from which have
radiated whatever of culture and social organization was attainable.
It has often been scornfully described how when, in some remote Boer
farmhouse, one son showed unusual mental alertness, he was predestined
for the Church; how often, by rigid economy on the part of other
members of the family, the money was accumulated to send him to college
in Europe, and how on his return Mynheer was regarded with profound
reverence and almost awe, even by his aged parents and the boys with
whom he had minded lambs in childhood. This is true; but to suppose
the feeling took its rise merely in a superstitious reverence for the
black coat and ghostly prerogatives of the preacher would be to err
profoundly. The man who returned from his studies differed materially,
in the extent of his information and in his grasp on many aspects of
life, from his brothers and companions who had remained tending the
paternal flocks, or labouring in the family vineyards; and he had
therefore necessarily certain social functions to perform, which could
be performed by no other members of his community, and this apart
entirely from his priestly office. The feelings with which he was
regarded combined, with relation to one person, the feeling which the
modern man entertains for his skilled lawyer, his family physician, his
favourite writer, and his political leader. For years the clergy of
the Dutch Church formed of necessity the connecting link between the
Boer, widely scattered through remote districts, and the outer world.
They were his advisers, often his representatives when he entered into
contact with keen social and political elements of the hungry modern
world. It was largely through them that such conditions of culture and
knowledge as he had brought with him into the desert were maintained
and enlarged; and they formed the channels through which were conveyed
to him whatever influence of the modern world reached him. And nobly,
on the whole, have they performed their task.
We believe that no one who is aware of our attitude towards
sacerdotalism generally, to dogmatic theology everywhere, will accuse
us of any undue bias in favour of the Dutch Reformed clergy on account
of their function or abstract theological views, when we say that not
only the Boer but South Africa generally is under debt to them.
Undoubtedly there must have been cases of self-seeking and
self-assertion; and a certain narrowness is perhaps inherent in _all_
forms of sacerdotal rule; but, viewed as a whole, their influence
must be pronounced as having been beneficial, and this far beyond
the ordinary mean. They have striven manfully to introduce both
in education and social life much of what was healthiest and most
vitalizing in our modern civilization, and to exclude much of that
which was lowest and most sordid; and with singleness of purpose,
with but few exceptions from the days when Erasmus Smit followed the
fortunes of the early fore-trekkers and his aged wife harangued the
British Commissioner at Maritzburg, they have stood faithfully by and
headed their people in all times of oppression and need.
The time is very rapidly approaching when the unique relation between
the Dutch pastor and his flock will finally have ceased. For the last
twenty years the intellect of the Boer race has rapidly been finding
openings for itself; the bar, the side-bar, the medical profession,
the professor's chair, administrative and political life are absorbing
the brilliant youths. The time is very rapidly approaching when the
minister will differ from his flocks only in the fact that he has gone
through a course of dogmatic theology, and when he will be equalled or
excelled in general culture and knowledge of life by the large mass of
his congregation; and, with this change, he will take his place side by
side with other clergy, whose usefulness is confined to the performance
of their ghostly functions; and, with this change also, the Church will
cease, save in exceptional cases, to draw the best intellects of the
people, as it has done in the past. But we believe that in the future
no impartial survey will be possible of the history of South Africa
during the last two hundred years without it being perceived how large
is the debt which, not the Boer alone, but South Africa generally, owes
to the clergy of the Dutch Reformed Churches.
Not only does it imply a curious miscomprehension to state that the
rule of the clergy has been autocratic and oppressive, but it has been
his Church which has formed for the Boer his most valuable exercise
ground in Republican Government, and his relations to it and to his
clergy exemplify markedly his curious inborn gift for self-government.
Not only have his pastors been men of the people, rising up from among
them and from no selected class, and imposed on him by no authority
from without; but in every case each particular congregation selects
its own leader, and frees itself of him when proved undesirable. The
submission with which, in a still largely oligarchically governed
country like England, a single individual is allowed to select, by
his own autocratic will, son, brother, or dependant, and place him in
control of a church and parish with all its inhabitants for a lifetime,
is a condition unintelligible to the free South Africa Boer, and one he
would not tolerate for an hour.
On the other hand, while he would not tolerate, and still less submit
to, or respect, or regard as valid, any authority imposed on him
from without, having once for himself selected an individual in whom
he reposes full confidence, he is peculiarly willing, not merely to
support and follow him, but to submit to his administration of the
law, provided it is a law which he has at first agreed to recognize;
and this is equally true whether the case be that of a pastor,
field-cornet, commandant, or the president of a state. It is this
inborn peculiarity which yields to the Boer his remarkable aptitude
for Republican Government, and prevents him from being amenable to any
other form of rule.
It is often objected, when one questions the wisdom of that unwritten
law which ordains that, in the English Army, out of an empire of
countless millions, all its officers should yet practically be selected
from a comparatively small knot of wealthy families known as Society,
and that such a process must hopelessly cripple the army; that the
English nature is so addicted to oligarchic rule that the bulk of men
born in England could never be made to respect, follow, or submit to,
one of themselves; that the fact that a man was born in their street,
shared the conditions of their daily life, and belonged to their own
class, would cause them to look down upon and despise him. Whether
this be true of the English or not, with the Boers exactly the reverse
is the case. It is precisely the man of the people, growing up among
them, sharing their life and social condition, whom, when he has won
their confidence and they have selected him to his post, they are
willing to follow and support with a whole-heartedness seldom accorded
to rulers or leaders of men.[75] They submit to the man because they
regard him as the incarnation of their own will.
[75] It is clear how large an advantage this gives the
Boer in case of war. A Boer nation containing 30,000 adult
males has the entire 30,000 from whom to select its most
efficient generals and leaders; while in a vast Empire
like that of England the choice is confined to so small a
body as to be absolutely minute when compared to the bulk
of the people. What Oliver Cromwells, Cronjes and de Wets
there may be slumbering among the hard-handed farmers and
working-men of England no man knows or ever will know. The
strength of the dominating oligarchy is too great.
It is further often said, when one animadverts on the fact that
members, connections, or, worse still, dependants of those small
circles of families forming the administrative oligarchy in England,
are almost always sent out as Governors to the Colonies of Canada and
Australia and New Zealand, that the English-speaking people of these
countries would not respect men chosen by themselves, and that no
successful form of government would be possible were not foreigners
sent them. Whether this would be the case in Canada or Australia we
have not had personal means of judging, but in South Africa the very
reverse is true. Were a prince of the Guelph family or a Duke's son
sent out, though loaded with wealth and oligarchic honours, he would
never have one half of the influence over or submission from the
majority of South Africans that a man born among them, growing up among
them, and selected by themselves, would readily obtain. "_He is our
man, who knows us and whom we know; we have chosen him, therefore we
will follow him!_"
It is the complete failure to understand this ineradicable instinct
on the part of the African Boer which has caused so many of those who
have attempted to interfere in South African affairs so grievously to
fail. With a race in which this instinct is so inborn that it manifests
itself in all the relations of life, towards pastor, magistrate, and
general; with an individual instinct for not obeying any person to whom
it has not first consciously and deliberately delegated its authority;
and then an instinct for following and supporting that person,--the
South African nation, in which the Boer element predominates, is bound
ultimately to become free, self-governing, independent, and republican.
* * * * *
It has been said of the Boer that he is bigoted and intolerant in
religious matters. That this accusation should ever have been made
has always appeared to us a matter of astonishment. It can only have
been made by those who either know little or nothing of the true
up-country Boer, or who confuse intolerance with the totally distinct
attitude of a peculiar steadfastness to your own forms of faith.
When we remember that it is not much over a century since the last
execution for abstract opinion took place in Europe; when we recall
the fact that within the memory of those still comparatively young, in
the most enlightened community (or that which so considers itself),
a man cultured, able, and public-spirited, was excluded from the
performance of his legislative duties, imprisoned, and befouled by
the Press and the nation on account of his view with regard to the
nature of a first cause; when we mark that, in the same community, it
was only the other day that Christians holding one form of shibboleth
were with difficulty, and after fierce struggles, brought to admit
brother Christians using another closely-allied shibboleth to any
participation in public life or honours; when we consider the fact that
to-day a Roman Catholic or a Jew is still in England excluded from the
highest offices of State on the ground of his abstract views, and is
on that ground regarded with scorn and disgust by the large mass of
his fellow-countrymen; when we recall the fact that it is not twenty
years since a book speculating on the abstract grounds of religion was
refused at the bookstalls of the United Kingdom, and publicly destroyed
in several cases; when we note the contemptible and grotesque riots
which to-day occur in the heart of our most modern cities over the
cut of a cassock or the burning of a pitiful pot of scent; when the
gift of a work of art representing a mother and child to a board school
is sufficient to rend an Anglo-Saxon community with fierce and brutal
passions; when these things are considered, it is surely unintelligible
that a charge of religious intolerance should be made against the
South African Boer. With every excuse for an exceptional intolerance,
a large portion of his ancestors having come to South Africa to escape
religious persecution in Europe, he yet compares favourably with other
nations in this respect, and the burnings of Quakers and witches which
disgraced even New England have never been known in Africa. No man has
ever suffered death for his religious views on these shores.
Firmly wedded to his own faith and not readily allowing any
interference with his own attitude, he is yet singularly willing to
abstain from interference with the abstract views of others. With
regard to the up-country Boer of the present day, we are personally
exceptionally qualified to pass an impartial judgment, having through
life held views on theological matters not shared by the bulk of the
societies about us; and we can unqualifiedly assert that it is not in
the true primitive Boer farmhouse that an inquisitorial intolerance,
or the desire to suppress the right of the individual soul to its own
convictions, will ever make itself felt. There is far more bigotry
and inquisitorial interference with the right of free thought in the
English parsonage and the nineteenth-century drawing-room than in the
primitive up-country Boer farmhouse. Wherever bigotry and intolerance
make their appearance among the Boers, they will always be found to
take their rise among the more cultured nineteenth-century part of
the population. Many years ago a Boer woman once inquired of us how
it was we never went to any church. We replied that our religion was
not at all the same as hers, and that according to our view it was not
necessary to go to church. She asked us whether we could explain to her
what our religion was like. We replied that we could not, each man's
religion was his own concern: and she dropped the matter, nor referred
to it again till nearly two years later, when she said: "You told me
once that your religion differed from mine; but the more I know you the
more I begin to think we must have the same religion. When I sit alone
with my sewing I think very far away sometimes; and sometimes it occurs
to me like this: If I had many children, and each one spoke a different
language, I would try to talk to each child in the language it
understood; it would be always me speaking, but in a different language
to each child. So, sometimes I think, it is the same God speaking, only
He speaks to you and to me in different languages."
When it is remembered that this remark was made by an unlettered Boer
woman, who could neither read nor write, I think it will be allowed
that the learned, philosophic, modern thinker may sometimes not have
much to teach "the ignorant Boer" with regard to the true basis of
philosophic religious toleration.
* * * * *
The third indictment which is made against the Boer with regard to
religion is that he is superstitious, that he allows his religion
to dominate every concern in his life, instead of confining it to
that small sphere in which alone in modern life conformably with
respectability its influence is allowed.
It may be at once stated that, in a certain sense, the statement that
the African Boer is dominated by his religion is true, but in how
far this indictment is one from which he suffers will vary with the
standpoint of the individual considering it. We, in this latest phase
of the nineteenth-century civilization, are so habituated to seeing men
and women walking about, carrying with them wholly dead or more or less
moribund religions which, like decaying flesh, corrupt the atmosphere,
and render putrid the whole environment of those who bear it, that
large numbers of us have reached a point at which we are unable to
conceive of religion as anything but dead, a thing to be restricted
within the narrowest possible limits, if life is to remain livable.
But the difference between a dead and a living religion is vital; the
first weighs down the man who carries it; the living religion up-bears
him. There is perhaps no life quite worth living without a living
religion, under whatever name or form it may be concealed, vivifying
and strengthening it. The Boer's religion is alive, it is in harmony
with his knowledge, his ideals, and his aims. Therefore it is his
strength.