CHAPTER VIII

THE ENGLISHMAN

In south Africa he bursts forth in all his multifarious shapes. Now

he is the little liquor seller, braving full rivers and prohibitive

legislation, with a wagon full of bad brandy made by the Boers, to

sell to the natives and return to the Colony with a pile. Then he is

a female missionary, buried in a remote native village to instruct

heathen girls and women, with the enthusiasm of a St. Catherine. Over

the way he is running guns and selling powder and shot which will be

taken from the natives as soon as we have made our full gain in selling

them. Now he is a cultured, sympathetic, freedom-loving man, talking

humanity and consideration for the weaker classes; and then he is a

Hart, tying up and flogging to death his black brothers. To sum him up,

to say what he is and is not, would be as futile as to sum up the Jew:

"We are anything, so please your worship; but we are a deal of that."

Probably no country in the world to-day gives more scope for individual

action; therefore our extremes and intensities show themselves on a

large scale. We are not weighted by traditions and the growths of an

old society. If we speculate, pray, preach, or farm, we do it in our

own fashion; the assertion which holds of one does not of another.

Nevertheless, broadly speaking, one or two things may be postulated of

us as a whole.

One is, that we in South Africa represent the modern nineteenth-century

element, with high material development and complex wealth of

ideas, as compared with the primitive savage and hardly less simple

seventeenth-century Boer. Whatever is evil in modern civilization is

ours, and also whatever is good.

In the complex problem of South Africa--the welding together of its

peoples--we have the leading part to play; we are at least the cement

which must bind into a whole the separate stones. And the main question

before us is--how is this to be done?

For the moment, the incomparably more important question, involving,

as it does, the world's greatest problem of how the primitive and

aboriginal peoples are to be wrought into our social system, is almost

obscured by the smaller and comparatively simple problem of the union

of the two European folks of the country. That it is desirable may or

may not be certain, but that it is inevitable and will take place is

certain; how and when are the only questions left open to us.

We have before shown how mixed and interblended already are the two

races throughout South Africa. Our so-called English colonies are

largely peopled, and in parts almost exclusively, by Boers or their

descendants, and the so-called Boer Republics, daily and hourly

becoming more densely peopled by English and the nineteenth-century

folk who come under their flag and speak their language, till the

leading cities of these states are more intensely and really English

than the majority of towns in the English colonies. Further, every week

and month, as the descendant of the Boer obtains nineteenth-century

culture, he learns the English speech, he adopts English methods of

dress, and above all he imbibes English ideas. So that to-day in a

South African drawing-room you are already unable to tell whether the

grandfather and mother of the well-dressed English-speaking man or

woman beside you were living on a Yorkshire moor or a Lancashire fen,

or trekking in their ox-wagon across South African plains. Already, so

mingled are our peoples, that the Free State Boer is often born and

reared in the Colony;[76] his parents or his wife's live there; his

children are being educated there; while his eldest son is studying

medicine in Edinburgh and his daughter married to an Englishman. An

English Johannesburg merchant, often born in Europe, may have taken

a wife from Natal, have his children at school in Cape Town, and

his business connections with the farmers of the Free State. Ten or

fifteen years ago, the Boer and the Englishman, though living side by

side, kept almost distinct in breed; to-day, throughout the colonies,

Free State, and Transvaal, there are few large families some of whose

members have not married into families of the other race.

[76] That is, the Cape Colony.

This amalgamation is proceeding always with increasing frequency. In

thirty years half the men in South Africa from the Transvaal to Cape

Town would have to fight against their own parents in any war of race.

And there is no prospect of this process of amalgamation being stayed;

it must go on with always increasing velocity as education draws the

races together.

In answer to the question, then, how are the Boer and English races

to be amalgamated? we would reply: By one who in this case will work

unfailingly and without fail--by Time! In fifty years, fight and

struggle against it as we wish, there will be no Boer in South Africa

speaking the Taal, save as a curiosity: only the great English-speaking

South African people. This movement cannot be hindered, it cannot be

stayed, it is inevitable.

But it may be said, "Of what use is this amalgamation which may take

place only when we are in our grave? The average adult man cannot

safely reckon on ten, much less on fifteen or twenty, years of life,

and, if we wait for the natural process to complete its work, what

chance is there for us to gain the kudos, fame and immortal honour

which we desire to make out of the amalgamation of these peoples? Is

it not a great chance thrown away? Must we not amalgamate them now--by

force, by--well--diplomacy, by anything! You can't lose such a fine

chance as this."

To which we would reply: "Yes, the life of the individual is short,

but the life of the nation is long; and it is longer, and stronger,

more vigorous and more knit, if it grow slowly and spontaneously than

if formed by violence or fraud. The individual cannot afford to wait,

but the nation can and must wait for true unity, which can only come

as the result of internal growth and the union of its atoms, and in

no other way whatsoever. For ages England has tried to fasten Ireland

artificially on to herself, and after four hundred years it still hangs

at her side a dislocated arm, almost as ready to drop off as when four

hundred years ago Oliver Cromwell tried to plaster it on with blood

and sword. A nation grows, but it cannot be manufactured. Were there

no inherent mixture and tendency to sympathy in the different parts

of our community, not only would it be impossible to unite them, but

it would be undesirable. Were we divided into separate well-organized

states without intermixture of peoples, and without that curious racial

sympathy which _does_ unite Cape colonials of the old and new races

when they are brought together, they would be better left separate;

would grow into healthier, stronger and truly greater communities,

because they were separate, because they were able to develop their

individual genius and gifts untrammelled by alien influences. Mere

increase in size never means necessarily increase in vitality and

beauty, as little with a country as with an individual man who, as

he grows in bulk, so it be only an accretion of superficial adipose

tissue, diminishes in vigour and vitality. The world's great nations

have never been large; England, Greece, Rome, Holland, Switzerland,

have all been nations, minute in territory and small in comparative

numbers, and the hour of external expansion is often the hour of

internal death."

The reason why the conception of the union of South African peoples

is forced on us is that no germs of separate organic national life

exist among us (except among the native states). The composition of

our states is common, and the little walls that divide us are nothing

when compared with the identity of the substance of which we are all

internally composed.

If it be suggested: "But if there is so much internal unity, why

should we not just hasten on the consummation of the unity by a little

external and artificial welding together of the states, so gaining

great honour ourselves and helping on a good, at least an inevitable,

end?" our reply is that all vital union must be spontaneous and

natural, and by attempting to hasten it by a year you may defer it for

a century or altogether.

The half-grown youth and maiden, who are slowly and coyly being

drawn together, must be left severely alone and untouched if their

undeveloped inclinations are to grow into the interknitted sympathy

and interest which make the adamantine and indestructible basis of a

union that is vital and life-long. Kind aunts and mothers may wish to

hasten the matter; _they_ wish to have the pleasure of forming the

match; they may even die without seeing the consummation they desire

if they let it grow on along nature's delightful lingering ways; and

they may succeed--either in rupturing the union altogether, and turning

what was still a dream into the revolt of forced inclination--or they

may succeed in what they wished, and may wed the still immature boy

and girl, whose affections are not yet ripe and who physically are not

yet strong enough for union; and the great, healthy fellowship of the

ripe man and woman rejoicing in the fulness of freedom in a relation

that was their own spontaneous choice, may be supplanted by the sickly

fellowship of two souls who never forget that theirs was not a free

choice and who, in place of a vital healthy offspring, bear the puny

descendants of a premature mating.

When we are ripe and ready we will wed state with state, people with

people; and not before. The attempt to wed us sooner by force or fraud

will result in possible loss to the match-makers, and in certain loss

to us.

Once already we have been interfered with, and the result has sent

union back twenty years; and if to-morrow it were effected by external

force, the blow at our internal and vital unity would be almost

irrecoverable. If the external union comes without the internal, it

will be to the irreparable loss of South Africa. If at any time in

any of our states the people themselves change in their composition,

and those who were in the minority should become the majority, let

them do justice to themselves in their own state and demand their own

independence; and not only will they succeed, but they will succeed

backed by the conviction of even their opponents that they are in the

right.

"_Wag 'n bietje, als zal reg kom_" ("Wait a bit, all will come right").

Time is on our side in this South African difficulty. What to-day might

be effected with blood and tears will come with little trouble in five

years' time, and be inevitable in ten. "_Wag 'n bietje, als zal wel reg

kom._" Let us remember that the oak that grows the slowest outlives the

most centuries; _and that peoples are not made but grow_.

We as English have above all least to lose by waiting. Every hour

that passes, the descendants of a thousand Boers are learning the

English speech, are adopting the English dress, are absorbing through

literature and social intercourse our nineteenth-century ideals; every

month that passes is landing on our shores scores or hundreds of

Englishmen to inhabit the land and mingle their blood with the great

South African people of the future. "Wait a little," and in this matter

"everything will come right." When that time comes, when common ideals

animate us, and common blood runs through us, we will be absolutely one

folk, but not before; and time is labouring for it.

But it may be said: "If we cannot by force, or by that subtle series

of deceptions which in public matters we call policy, bring about this

external union, at least we are bound to labour vigorously for internal

union between the races if that will help forward our designs. At all

costs and at all prices we must keep the Boer pleased with us, that we

may carry out our plans with his consent."

Now, to this we would reply: "Union is a very beautiful thing whether

between races or persons--but the most ideal marriage that ever was

conceived may be bought too dearly; there is a price too high even

for union, the price of the integrity of the parties composing it.

As in the world of individuals, the union between a man and woman

otherwise most desirable, may become a crying evil and a living death

when, to attain to it, it is necessary for either or both to sacrifice

that which is of more value than any union--their own integrity. If

union be not possible while each holds to what he or she believes to

be best, if it be purchased at the price of whatever is highest in

either character, then, however desirable such a union would on other

terms have been, it becomes an unmixed evil, a prostitution and not a

marriage. Only those souls united by what is greatest in each, not what

is weakest and lowest, and reserving their integrity and independence,

can form an enduring and noble union. Where this cannot be, it is

better to wait, so by chance the day will come when both will see eye

to eye; even if, as the lives of individuals are short and growth slow,

the waiting for them should be eternal."

It is sometimes said: "We must pander to the Boer. We don't, of course,

agree with his views on this and that matter, but union, you know, we

are working for that! We don't believe that the quickest way to raise

natives, and the best way, is to flog them; it's an antiquated idea;

but the Boer likes it and we must vote for it for the sake of union.

The Boer likes us so much if he thinks we share his little follies."

The native tribes have trusted us, have _given_ themselves up to us;

we pass them over to the Boer, for the sake of union. And so we barter

point after point on a matter infinitely more important to the ultimate

destiny of the country, for the sake of settling the difficulties of

the hour. We barter our birthright of free, open speech and the frank

defence of the lines which we rightly or wrongly believe to be those of

justice and mercy at the shrine of a political chimera.

It is not by watering down our civilization and robbing it of its most

developed attributes, it is not by affecting to sink to his level in

the matters in which he is behind us, that we shall draw him into a

great and ennobling union or that we shall in the end win his trust and

confidence.

It is by standing firmly and serenely by our own highest traditions

of development, it is by wisely and generously seeking to understand

him, and in the end by infecting him with all that is best and greatest

in ourselves, not by selling our birthright for a mess of pottage,

that the great and royal union of the two South African stems will be

effected. It is not by the reckless bartering, on either side, of that

which our convictions hold as best that any ennobling cementing between

us can ever take place.

The seventeenth-century Boer has hardly less, perhaps much more, to

teach us than we to teach him; let us each hold by our own till we have

convinced and enlightened each other.

The one great lesson of a broad humanity, and the rights of man as man,

which, amid fields of war, the European family has learnt in the last

two hundred years, and which we, without any inherent virtue, have

learnt from our fathers and imbibed from the life about us, we have to

teach him. It is our contribution to the solution of the problem of

our land; amid all the noise and hurry and fœtid decay which underlies

much of our nineteenth-century civilization this knowledge is our great

gain, and to betray ourselves on this matter is to rob our fellows of

almost the only truly great and noble attribute we have to bring to our

union, to which he brings much.

For the child of the seventeenth century, if he will but be true to

his traditions and convictions, has much to bring to the union and to

transmit to the people of the future. The seventeenth century, too, has

its message for the nineteenth, a message which it needs not less than

the seventeenth the nineteenth.

In the whirl and din of our material advancement, in the fierce

struggle for external gains and progress, there is a side of life we

have well nigh forgotten, and the Boer on his solitary South African

plains has saved up a tradition we have forgotten and for need of which

we may yet die. To a curious extent Boer and Englishman, if they will

be faithful to their profoundest convictions, seem fitted to complete

and complement each other's growth and make possible a people rarer

than either might have produced alone.

While we bring to the Boer the doctrine of a higher humanity, the

external literary culture which enlarges the power of the man, he has

his own lessons for us. While we have set gold on a pedestal and dance

till we are drunk around it like the Israelites about their calf, the

Boer, nurtured in his primitive solitude, still knows there are things

our god cannot give us, and that material luxury and wealth are not

the beginning and end of life, that the man is not greater because his

name can stir three millions in the bank, that the cut of a coat is an

accident, and that a man sees God as nearly face to face from the front

box of his wagon as from the steps of a queen's palace.

A broad, simple conception of human life and its relations, without

varnish or finesse, is, if he remains true, his contribution. And if

through what is still, in many houses, the impenetrable wall of the

Taal, our cry could reach him, we would adjure him, "_Hou maar vas, Oom

Piet; hou maar vas, Tant' Annie!_ We have one great lesson to teach

you, but you have more to teach us! We will not pander to the one

weak spot in your soul, where the trouble and conflict of ages and of

tradition has made a gangrene; but, if we hold out firmly and teach you

our lesson, teach us yours. Do not let yourself be blinded and misled.

All is not gold that glitters. Our trains and our large houses and our

grand French clothes, they are all very well; but the greatest men the

world ever knew trod the sand with bare feet or rode upon an ass; and

a train is better than an ox-wagon only when it carries better men;

rapid movement is an advantage only when we move towards beauty and

truth; all motion is not advance, all change is not development, and a

train full of soldiers bent upon an inhuman attack is a more ghastly

sight than a squad of Indians with their scalping knives and arrows

on their prairie horses, in so far as the one mode of progression is

more effective than the other. The size of our houses and the labour

of a thousand weary hands upon our walls do not necessarily give us

the happiness you would think. Believe us, the kiss of the man on

the lips of the woman he loves, and the joy of the mother over her

babe, can be as intense in the little house your own hands built as

in a mansion raised and decorated by the hands of others. When a man

accumulates too much about him he gets buried under it. Our French

clothes are very well; but do you know that in forty years time your

portly figure in its black skirt and white kappie, if painted as they

are to-day, would seem to the men of that time more things of beauty

than the misproportioned productions of the fashions of the day. Hold

but fast, Tant' Annie! Under that capacious waist of yours lie sleeping

the ancestors of heroes of a larger, freer mould than would ever have

sprung from you if the iron band of fashion had compressed you to a

point. Hou maar vas! We have need of your simplicity to save us from

the disease of our artificiality, we have need of your faith in the

value of things that cannot be bought and sold, to save us from the

terrible scepticism that is creeping over us, that perhaps there is

nothing worth living for but success, and that success means wealth.

Hou maar vas, Tant' Annie! Hou maar vas, Oom Piet! And if we will

faithfully teach you our lesson and you will teach us yours, the day

will come when we will build up between us a people of whom the world

will not be ashamed. We will try to heal you of the disease that exists

in your condition; we look to you to save us from the disease that

battens on ours."

The question of the relation of Englishman and Boer differs from the

question of the relation between Caucasian and African races in this,

that, while our problem of relation to the Boer tends to simplify and

finally to dissolve itself as the mere result of the course of time,

the question of the relation of African and European races does not so

tend to dissolve and solve itself.

When any two peoples inhabiting one country are so physically related

that they have a powerful sexual attraction for each other, and that

individuals brought face to face are unconscious of racial difference,

the problem of union can be one of great moment, but cannot be one of

permanent difficulty. Wait, do nothing, and in time, literally and

not figuratively, love finds out the way, smoothes away difficulties,

and makes of the two races one. Where races are so far removed that

they are more or less sexually repellant to one another, that not

difference of speech and training divide them, but marked differences

of physical and mental conformation, of colour and build, then,

if these two races are obliged to inhabit the same territory, the

difficulty of arranging for their happy and useful interaction becomes

steadily greater as time passes, _and does not tend to solve itself_.

All thoughtful trainers of young children are aware that there are

certain faults or defects extremely troublesome and unpleasant for

the moment, but over which no wise elder ever seriously troubles

themselves; they are aware that time will heal these things and of

necessity do away with them; while there are faults, for the moment

far less inconvenient, which every wise trainer regards as of infinite

import because they are exactly those which tend to grow with years,

and the teacher or parent who should devote all his energies to

training down the boisterous noise and roughness of childhood which

must naturally cure themselves with adolescence, and regarded with

indifference the germs of selfishness or cruelty, which tend to ripen

only with adult years, would be universally regarded as unfit for his

labour.

Yet such often appears to be our action in South Africa. To render

smooth our trivial and momentary difficulty with the Boer, which time

will inevitably remove and smooth out, we are willing to complicate

and make more difficult a problem which in thirty years' time Boer

and Englishman's descendants will alike have to face in its huge

proportions.

Every step in civilization, in education, in approach to the European,

which the African makes, will render the problem more difficult, not

necessarily more easy, of solution.

What we consider the attitude of the Englishman in South Africa should

be to the alien, and especially the African, races beneath him, depends

mainly on the view we take of his nature and his world-wide functions

in the unfolding of human life on the globe generally.

There are four views on this matter.

Firstly, that of the average Englishman who has no view in the matter

at all, who eats, sleeps, begets children, and accumulates as little

or as much wealth as he is able without ever reflecting that he forms

part of a great people, or considering the future of the organism of

which he is part. The views of these persons, by the _vis inertiæ_ that

they impart to the whole body of which they form part, are not without

their powerful practical influence on the actual condition and action

of the race.

There is a second view, held with more or less clearness or mental

confusion, but with a great deal of vivacity and sometimes emotion, by

a large number of Englishmen.

It is difficult to represent with justice and exactitude ideas that

are held somewhat vaguely and with varying degrees of intensity by

the individuals holding them, but we believe we most accurately sum

up the views of this party by stating that they more or less vaguely

hold that the whole world was made for the Englishman, much as in our

childhood we were taught that the sun and stars were created to give

light to the earth, which probably came into existence a few trillion

years after many of the youngest of these. This party has a very vague

but vigorously held conviction that at some time or in some way, which

they do not specify, the English inhabitants of the British Isles

invented all that is known as modern civilization; we have never heard

it directly asserted that literature, art, science, and religion took

their rise on the globe eight or nine hundred years ago in Britain, but

it is tacitly assumed that it was so, if any logical structure is to be

placed on the assertions made; in right of this inherent superiority

over all earth's people, the same party assumes, still with a certain

vagueness but with intense warmth, that the English race is destined

ultimately to possess the whole planet and people it. How this is

to be done--whether all earth's multifarious peoples, compared with

whom the Englishmen on this earth are to-day but a handful, are to

be exterminated by means of fire, of sword, of poison, or simply by

infection with the diseases of our civilization, with our liquor and

kindred institutions--is not often, perhaps ever, clearly stated. The

strength of this party lies not in clear and lucid thought, but rather

in somewhat florid assertion which, questioned, leads quickly to

irritation and warm blood.[77]

[77] One skinny Frenchman,

Two Portugee,

One jolly Englishman,

He lick all three!

We remember in our childhood to have heard an improved

version of this statement to the effect that one Boer might

equal four niggers, but one Englishman would lick fifty

Boers. We remember lying in our bed at night and pondering

over this problem--why with such terrible partiality the

God who loves all equally, should have confined all courage

and fighting power to the inhabitants of Great Britain--and

we had before us a vivid picture of the one solitary

British soldier standing on a kopje waving his gun, while

before him fled frantically fifty powerful Boers armed

to the teeth but making no endeavour to secure him. The

adventure of Majuba Hill came strangely to terminate this

vision, nor have we ever been able to recall it save as an

exploded nightmare.

He takes it as understood that the Englishman is to dominate and

populate the entire globe, and the descension to the questions of how

and when, and the grounds for the desirability of such an occurrence,

he regards as unpatriotic and childish.

This theory, in its most developed form, may be described as the

upas-tree theory, which regards the inhabitants of the British Isles

as a kind of growth which is bound to kill out and destroy by its mere

existence all the other infinitely complex interesting forms of human

life on all earth's vast continents, and to exist alone monarch over

a bared earth, like a colossal upas-tree under whose shadow or among

whose branches, according to the old fable, it was impossible for plant

to flower or beast or bird to breathe.

Impossible and repulsive as this conception would appear to many minds,

there is no doubt that, held more or less constantly or vaguely, it

does colour the actions and thought of large numbers of folk and is a

force to be reckoned with.

Thirdly, there is the view which is, generally, that of all non-English

nations and peoples; not only do they not share the upas-tree theory

with regard to the mission, the future, of the British people, but it

is difficult to make them conceive that it is held by any wholly sane

persons. To these non-English nations and peoples, the English are

an energetic folk, shrewd even beyond the Jew in business matters,

and with a subtlety which in every civilized country has appended to

their name the adjective "perfidious." To men, French, German, Russian,

Dutch, who have grown up from childhood to adult years surrounded by

the arts and civilization that are the common inheritance of the modern

world from the ancient, and whose religion and history have never more

than incidentally mentioned the name of Britain to them, there is

something not merely astonishing but ludicrous in the conception that

earth's vast millions, civilized and uncivilized, Asiatic and European,

black and white, are to be swept away by this trading fragment of the

race; nor is it possible to adduce logical grounds on which to convince

them that it will be so. How the Englishman is going to crush out and

annihilate the countless millions of China, India, Russia, Japan and

Europe, and people the earth they now occupy with the descendants

of his body, so that Englishmen may be all and in all on the earth,

is inconceivable to those who consider that in the space of some

hundreds of years the Briton has not been able to annihilate or gain

racial possession of the little island at his side, that Ireland still

contains as many Irishmen as it did a thousand years ago; that America,

their earliest founded colony, is largely filled by Germans, Swedes,

Jews and Irish; that India, though the wealth, wrung from its poverty,

flows into English pockets, and affords a noble exercise ground for

the sons of the upper English classes, still is as thickly inhabited

by men of the darker races as it was before the Englishmen landed.

Looking at these facts it is indeed difficult to maintain the position

which implies, if it does not assert, that the earth of the future will

be peopled by the fruit of British loins, and, when looking round and

inquiring, "Where are the descendants of all the races of earth?"--the

reply will be, "Gone!"

There is, however, yet a fourth view with regard to the functions and

destiny of the English race in the future. It may be that those of us

who hold it are, unknown to ourselves, still blinded by that mist of

race prejudice which, hanging before our eyes from the first moment

of our birth, is perhaps more difficult for even the greatest and

strongest man to brush aside than the obscuring vapours of personal

egoism; nevertheless, it seems to some of us, looking at the matter

with what impartiality we are capable of, that it is a view which

is capable of being defended by logical argument, and that the hope

founded on it is not wholly chimerical; moreover that it is a view, did

they but give themselves time to contemplate it, that would win the

assent of many who now seem to hold untenable views of the Englishman's

upas-like powers.

We who hold this view are perfectly willing to allow that there have

been, are, and will be races as great as and greater than ourselves in

many if not in all respects. We not only know, but hold in mind the

fact, that not much more than a thousand years ago our fathers were

barbarians scarcely higher than the Kaffirs of to-day in the stage of

culture and civilization they had reached; that even religion and the

art of letters and of material civilization were brought to us by the

higher barbarians of the Continent, who had received it as a relic from

super-nations of antiquity, who in turn had received it from those wise

small Semitic and Egyptian folk to whom mankind owe almost all they

are; we did not receive it much more lustily than the Kaffir of to-day.

And Alfred, like some white-skinned Khama, led or strove to lead his

savage children to accept and prize a civilization and a learning they

would never have invented and could hardly grasp.

We are aware that we have not been the leading race of the world in

arts and science; that as those ancient fellow folk of ours, who are

lost in the dawn of history, invented the alphabet and the art of

inscription, and reading, and astronomy, and reared mighty palaces and

wove rare garments when our fore-elders were dancing in hyperborean

forests, or on Asiatic mountain peaks; so later all that the cultured

man of to-day prizes in plastic art, philosophy and literary art was

brought to a perfection in Greece which no people since has ever

surpassed; and in Rome the arts of war and civil life were perfected

and the colossal buildings and paths which we have never even equalled

were laid down while, naked barbarians, we still hunted and drank.

We know that even in the last thousand years we cannot set our names

higher than our fellows in the regions of art and learning. Beside the

Euclids, the Copernicuses, the Galileos, Theophrastuses, of the old,

and the Herschels and Keplers of the modern, world, we have indeed

the superb name of Newton to set down, but it cannot out-glitter its

compeers; nor can even our prince, Shakespeare, outweigh the names

of Dante, Goethe, Voltaire; nor have we, till Charles Darwin of

this century, ever possessed a man who in the world of thought has

transformed it, as Luther or the French thinkers of the eighteenth

century transformed it, great and beloved as to many of us of to-day

are the names of our J. S. Mill and Spencer. In the lower world of

military art we have produced none of those men of genius before whom

the whole civilized world has trembled, Tamurlane, Alexander, Cæsar,

Napoleon; even Alaric and Attila have had no counterpart among men of

our blood. And perhaps no serene and impartial intellect can look at

the history of the race and say we have ever produced a man who, in

fame and extent of influence on the race, has equalled Moses, Jesus,

Buddha, Confucius, Mohamet, Socrates and Plato, or even Paul. Even

in the arts and mechanical inventions on which we so pride ourselves

to-day, we start back with astonishment when we begin to examine how

and when we came by them. While our fathers in skins or clotheless

wandered in the wilds, the fertile brain of the Chinaman had not only

invented the coarser or thicker woven fabrics, but had made from

the thread of the silk-worm such silk as the most skilled looms in

England can hardly yield to-day, and had formed porcelain of which

our creations are a humble imitation; our savage forefathers, if they

could have penetrated to the villas and cities of the Roman Empire,

would have found them filled with articles of art and luxury, and of

delicate manufacture, which he was slowly to be taught, and which

to-day he often only imitates with difficulty. Our woollen manufactures

were brought us from Flanders and Holland, our silk from France, our

muslins from India, our carpets from Persia, and even to-day there

is scarcely a manufactured article except in iron work which is not

manufactured better in some other country than with us, in spite of the

vast bulk of shoddy work we produce for sale. Even in dress to-day we

are not only unable in many instances to equal the delicacy and finish

of foreign fabrics and ornaments, but we are absolutely dependent on

the brains and taste of a foreign people for the cut and manufacture

of our clothing, and the direction which our manufacture of textiles

and fabrics shall to a large extent assume. Hardly any free savage or

civilized people in the world has not been able to invent and determine

for itself what class or shape of clothing is suited to its needs, but

the great English people hangs with a servility, which would excite

our ridicule were it not a matter of national shame, on the breath

of the Frenchman's lips and the throb of a French man or woman's

brain to determine how it shall clothe itself and what materials

its manufactories shall produce; and one French woman, she may be a

prostitute, or a public dancer, or a woman of fashion, hitches her

dress at one point or wears a protuberant sleeve, and five millions of

English all over the earth, with patient zeal and much labour, cast

aside their old skirt and sleeves and strive to do as she did; and a

few throbs of the brain of a French man milliner will determine that

hundreds of thousands of English hats and bonnets are to be thrown

aside, while with abject servility five millions of English women seek

to cover their heads with what he has invented.

Such abject dependence on the thought and guidance of another people

in a matter of daily concern can only be ascribed to the profound

conviction of the whole people of the Frenchman's superiority to

himself in this direction, and the conviction of the English woman

that she is not, in matters of taste, the equal of the French woman,

a humble conviction which reduces the English folk to a species of

buffoonery, when, in the simple wild suburbs of Cape Town or amid

the dust storms and heat of Johannesburg or Kimberley, they persist

in following the Frenchwoman and donning the garbs she with taste

invented to harmonize with the artificial surroundings of a Paris home

on the Champs Elysées!

Whether we allow it theoretically or only in practice, it is

undoubtable that in the plastic arts we not only do not surpass,

but cannot readily imitate other nations, ancient or modern. We

have not only never produced a Phidias or a Praxiteles, but we have

no Michaelangelo or Raphael or Tintoretto, like the Italian, no

Albrecht Durer with the German, or even, if we except Turner, a man

who can stand as a national representative beside Holbein and Rubens,

and national painters of the Dutch and Flemish schools; and in the

nineteenth century, great as has been our awakening in this respect, it

is still to foreign schools that our artists go for instruction.

If we except our superb old abbeys and Gothic relics, which we share

with the rest of Europe, our architecture is imitative, and, in the

case of such buildings as St. Paul's, shows the grotesque folly of a

people who, in an unsuitable climate and spot, will attempt in their

search of the beautiful and harmonious to imitate the growths of other

climates and conditions. The appalling hideousness of our cities when

compared with those of any country in Europe, their grim indifference

to harmony and beauty, and yet more appalling attempts to gain them,

oppress the new arrival heavily.

In music we have produced no genius and no noble work; the Bachs,

Mozarts, Beethovens, Mendelssohns, Wagners are Germans, and we have

no men who can approach the lesser but great Italians, or even the

Chopins and Meyerbeers. Our music, like the Elgin marbles and the

divine gods in the British Museum, is all imported; and when we would

raise a monument to our own glory, we rob Egypt of one of her obelisks

which, as a ruin among desert sands, was divine, and plant it in damp

ugliness on the oozing bank of our mercantile river to proclaim to all

the world, "Here is a people with money to import anything; but not the

skill to raise their own monuments!"

In the modern arts and manufactures, we have during the last century

taken a place in the front beside other peoples in right of a discovery

hardly, if at all, less important in its practical effects than

the electrical discoveries which in their inception we owe to the

Italians and others; and in the daily and hourly small inventions

and improvements in manufacture and the domain of practical science,

England, if she holds her equal place, does no more than hold it beside

the laboratories and workshops of France, Germany and Italy.[78] In the

world of art, in those arts in which _language_ is the medium, we are

alone able to hold our heads proudly beside the best of modern peoples,

not only because we possess a Shakespeare or a Chaucer, but because our

literature as a whole is a noble accretion of the beautiful and great.

[78] It is remarkable that Edison, the great American, who

has so perfected electrical invention, is, like Whitman and

Bret Harte, largely Dutch in his origin, his forefathers

having come from Holland a hundred years ago.

In that great and beneficent give and take which binds and has ever

bound the children of men together, as the blood which flowing through

the organs of the body blends and identifies it, we have received, like

our fellows, all that humanity has thought or found, from the first and

greatest discovery of fire by our prehistoric and perhaps Bushman-like

ancestors, to the hardly less mighty invention of letters and arts,

and we have also brought our quota to the common stock. But when we

look at the matter impartially, the conviction must be forced upon

every mind that, in arts and sciences, in manufacture and inventions,

in spite of the contributions we have made, we are far more receivers

from the common stock than contributors to it; that the world could

still get on as far as religion, science, art, philosophy and material

inventions are concerned without the Englishman, or were all he has

contributed taken away; but the Englishman, if he lost all that in the

last thousand years he has gained from Europe, and through it from all

the earth, would be again a savage in aboriginal wildness.

And the question then suggests itself to us: Have we really so little

to give to the common stock of our fellows? Are our assertions of our

own greatness and importance brought down to the fact that, while the

majority of other nations owing to their continental position have been

obliged to employ the mass of their folk as soldiers, and suffer in all

ages from the devastations of war upon their own soil, we, guarded by

our island condition, have been able to employ the mass of our working

class and to use our abundant coal and iron to produce a larger bulk of

a less finished quality of saleable articles than any other civilized

people, whom we are therefore able, at the price of the health and joy

of our working classes, to undersell in the nineteenth century? Is

this the fact, that the narrow and fixed limits of our island home did

not admit of our retaining all our population within its limits, and

has compelled us to send out swarms of folk to America and all vacant

or savage-peopled parts of the earth? Are these accidents our only

claim to greatness and to the respect of mankind? When we are called

perfidious and money-wringing from our own poor and the weak of all the

peoples, is our character summed up, and is our function no higher in

the modern world, no higher than that of the Phœnicians in the old, to

be the carriers and traders of the race while the world has need of us

and then to pass away when our work is done, leaving hardly a trace?

We believe that it is not.

When our wild German forefathers, Saxon, Danish or Frisian, landed in

Britain and mingled their blood with the remnant of wild Britons who

inhabited the fastnesses of the land, there was one great treasure

common to all the barbarian peoples of Europe and Central Asia which

they carried with them, the tradition and fact of personal freedom.

The Greeks and the Romans believed themselves free; it was the freedom

of an enfranchized minority reigning despotically over a vast body of

women and slaves, and Athens, in her noblest days, contained thirty

thousand free adult males, while her population numbered hundreds of

thousands.

In Eastern civilization the proportion of free men was generally

smaller, and the absolutely free and independent individual in the

nations was sometimes only the solitary despot who ruled. This is

never the case with a nomadic people who, if they take captives, have

no land for them to labour on, and no dungeons in which to confine

them, and whose women and captives of war are therefore always more or

less independent. Most of all was this so with our German ancestors,

whose women were the most honoured part of the nation, supposed to

possess a knowledge and insight which made their advice necessary on

every great national question, who accompanied their husbands in peace

and war, who gave them as wedding gifts no rose or lock of hair, but

a sword and shield which were the man's most precious possessions

throughout life, whose scorn and reproach were what the coward most

dreaded, and who again and again led the tribes to conflict and

victory, as when Velleda, the white-haired priestess, led the Germanic

troops to Italy; and whose captives, when by rare chance they kept them

alive, were in turn incorporated in the general body.

This absolute freedom and independence of almost a whole society was

not peculiar to those northern races who conquered and peopled England,

but to that profound consciousness of the necessity and importance of

the preservation of individual freedom and the liberty of uncoerced

personal action, so wholly distinct from that sometimes misnamed

freedom in which the individual is bound to sink his individuality

and personal inclination in that of the class or state to which he

belongs and to submit abjectly to _its_ rule--this freedom was not

originally peculiar to the English, nor has it alone been kept by them.

The Swiss in their mountains have preserved the blood and the speech

of personal freedom of the Germanic races more pure than anywhere else

on the surface of the earth, and nowhere, where that free barbarian

blood spread itself, has the instinct and aspiration towards freedom

become absolutely extinct. It has lived on in our brothers, the Dutch

and French, and turns up again in their descendant, the African Boer;

but when the matter is looked fairly in the face, we cannot avoid the

deliberate conviction that, among great and dominant civilized people,

the English race has kept more unsullied and borne highest, though

often half furled or drooping for a time, the flag of individual

freedom, which our barbarian ancestors handed down to their European

descendants. England has not been free from foreign conquest; she bent

beneath the heel of the Conqueror nine centuries ago; but she forced

on her conquerors her speech; she has not been without her serfs, but

early they became freed men; she has not been without her tyrannies of

kings and nobles, but always her people have risen up against it and

in time asserted their liberty of action; the masses of her people may

have seemed to be flat on their bellies under the feet of rulers as

under the early Stuarts, but it was only to rise more resolute than

ever under Cromwell, and to rebel against his form of tyranny, too,

when his dictatorship promised no increase of freedom.

To-day, when the strife is between wealth, which in skilful hands has

usurped a power over men's lives and national destinies which was not

contemplated when the laws of property were framed, the men of England

will amend these laws as they before amended the laws with regard to

kings, so that the power shall be broken and the individual be free;

but if they are true to their tradition of the past they will stop

when the power of a class to diminish freedom has been broken, and, as

the rule of the king or baron was never allowed to become an absolute

tyranny, so the yet more powerful rule of the many will not be allowed

to become the slavish submission of the few, and the right of the

individual to do as he pleases while his act does not hurt his fellow

will be as of old the goal at which we shall aim.

The majority of Englishmen love freedom, but they love it in three

different ways. The majority love it as a possession for themselves

alone; they will not be interfered with, nor will they have their

freedom of action barred by any one or any thing; they are not careful

of the freedom of others, nor are they at all reluctant to sacrifice

and annihilate it entirely if it increases their own; but to their own

they cling with tenacity.

This love of freedom the Englishman shares with most savage and nomadic

barbarous peoples; it is found in almost the highest perfection in

the South African Boer. As a first step towards something higher it

is invaluable; in its highest development its mere intensity makes it

almost sublime, as is the attitude of the eagle when, having devoured

all the lambs and rabbits it can find, it sails alone in the blue; it

is an immensely higher quality than a mere servile submission in a

people or an individual, and it is necessary as a foundation to the

higher developing of the same feeling; but in itself it does not raise

the nation or the person feeling it higher than the level of the noble

savage.

There are a large number of us, though small compared to the first

class, who love freedom for ourselves but also do not desire to grasp

our liberty at the cost of others. We love liberty so dearly that we

would not willingly inflict an injustice or a wrong on another, and

we respect the freedom of others while we venerate our own. This love

of freedom we share with all the great and noble souls that have ever

existed, from the Persian prince, called the Lover of Justice or the

Even-Handed, to the wise and just and far-seeing folk of every land

to-day. It is a high and great, a noble, quality, but I do not think it

makes us unique among the peoples of the world.

But there is yet a third way in which some of us love freedom. I do

not know that any large and strong section of any people has ever

loved it so before, though isolated individuals, Chinese, Indian,

Jewish and Greek, have been irradiated by more or less of the glory of

this passion; it is peculiar as a large racial and worldwide acting

phenomenon to the English race and people. We love freedom not only for

ourselves, but we desire with a burning passion to spread it broadcast

over the earth; to see every human being safeguarded by it and raised

to the level at which they may enjoy it; we desire freedom not only

for ourselves but for humanity; and we labour to spread it. _This_ I

hold is the one great gift which England and England alone possesses;

this is the quality which makes us unique among the nations of the

earth; this is the gift which we have to contribute to the great common

offertory of humanity.

The Greek has art and philosophy, the Jew religion, the Roman high

civil organization; each nation and people of the past throws in its

offering to the collection of humanity's common possessions. Even the

Bushman, if we will keep him a little longer, will creep up and drop

in his mite, if it be only by the light with which when, well studied,

he will illumine the past, and the hope he gives us of the future of

the race when we see what it has already risen from--but the Englishman

puts in, I think, the noblest gift of all.

It is a rash hand that dares to lift itself to set the crown on its

own head, yet more on that of its own nation; but I believe that, in

virtue of this one quality and lacking so much else, we stand to-day

the first race on earth, and that we dare to thank the fate that we are

Englishmen.

We are not unaware of the objection that may be raised. All Englishmen

have not this love, nor does our past or present history always

exemplify it. All Greeks were not philosophers; they poisoned Socrates.

All Jews are not religious geniuses; they drove Moses half mad, hanged

Jesus and excommunicated Spinoza. Yet the one is the most philosophic

and the other the most religious people that ever existed. It is not

by the attitude of the lower mass (lower in development, however high

in wealth or authority) that a people can be measured or compared with

others; the most developed and highest growths must be compared as,

when we seek to classify plants, we compare their flowers, not their

roots. We know that the mass of our people allow and have allowed

that love of wealth and luxury, which is the national disease of our

people, to sap all other considerations. We know that for years we,

the great apostles of freedom, were the slave dealers and breeders of

the world, that thousands of folk among us have to-day their wealth,

power, culture and freedom from material cares, because their fathers'

ships were loaded with men and women between the decks, one half to die

there of heat and filth, the others sold at a lordly profit. We too

have had our thumbscrews, our dungeons, our wars for lust of gain and

power. We know that for years our sugar, cotton and coffee were wrung

out of men's hands by the application of Englishmen's whips to their

backs--but this too we know, that a time came when, as in times past,

the leading section of the nation rose and did away with thumbscrews

and dungeons and Star Chambers, so again it rose and declared the trade

at an end; so too we know the world saw what it had never seen before

(but what may be hoped will be seen many times again in different

forms), part of a branch of the English speaking people, dominated by

English ideas arise and pour out its blood like water, not for its own

freedom, not for the freedom of its kind, but for a despised, scorned

and feeble people. Some nations have set their slaves free, but only an

English race speaking the English tongue and imbued with English ideals

has shed its blood for them! This is a new thing under the sun. Many

things have happened, but this never happened before. It is a new era.

We know, none so well, how stained is our African record; we know with

what envious eyes the government of English Ahabs eyes the patrimony of

black Naboths and takes it, if necessary, after bearing false witness

against Naboth; we know how Englishmen have crossed this continent and

left behind them a trail of slime and gore such as few Arabic slave

caravans leave; but we know that, with hearts full of soft concern

for its inhabitants, and all the tenderness of strength and wisdom,

Englishmen have trodden this continent and laboured among its lowest

people; not Livingstone alone but a great corps of lesser unrecorded

Livingstones whose names will be forgotten, but the fruits of whose

lives will abide. And it was in South Africa that the English nation,

when, in 1833, they voted twenty millions for the emancipation of

slaves, expended over one million in buying freedom for the black man

and Half-caste; and at the same time was promulgated in South Africa,

by the will of the English people, the Magna Charta of the black man,

which put, in the eye of the law, every free man, Hottentot or Kaffir,

throughout the country, on the same level as the white.

In India our rule has been largely one of greed and self-seeking; we

know that at Cawnpore, when an army of brave men, in making a last

heroic stand for national freedom, killed a handful of white women and

children, we, to be revenged on them, fell into inhuman and fiendish

barbarities, which, if practised to-day by Boers or Kaffirs or by

Frenchmen attacking Englishmen, would in our eyes brand them for ever

as creatures beneath the human; we are silent about those horrors when

with the fiendish savagery, not of Christians but of wild beasts, we

made man after man, before we shot him, kneel down and lick up blood,

so that to the horror of death might be added the horror of the fear of

eternal damnation. I know no place in human history where barbarities

more hellish are recorded, and when in drawing-rooms delicate-lipped

women sing of Brave Havelock and his Highlanders, we see suddenly the

sheen of the blood of a people fighting on their own soil for the

freedom of their race, and we wish the delicate ladies could find

something else to sing of.

All this we recognize, and we are willing to look the facts fully, if

not unblushingly, in the face; but when all has been seen and said,

this also must be allowed: that, though we have set our feet on the

land over a hundred years, there are as many or more people of the

aboriginal races in the land than when we came, and, if we should pass

away from them to-morrow, all we shall have left them as our main

legacy will be a certain knowledge of our language and laws, and they

would not be a less free, rather a more free, people than when we found

them. We have not been to them at least the upas-tree, killing out

the race from beneath us, and if at times we have been conquerors and

oppressors, and if more often we have made blunders, this one thing is

certain, that perhaps not the majority of us, certainly not all of us,

yet still a certain body of us, have meant well by them. We have meant

to aid and raise them, to put them on an equality with ourselves, and

the thought they were being crushed or murdered would be a blow to the

most earnest sensibilities of our natures.

It may be replied: "Yes, that is your English cant; you alone of all

people in the world have always a psalm in your mouth as you crunch the

bones of your enemies, and, while you are putting the bread of the poor

and needy in your own jaws, your eyes are turned upwards."

And this is to a certain extent true. Cant lies across our national

character as a hideous deformity, peculiar to ourselves. As we have

one virtue, so we also have this vice which is ours and ours alone;

but is it not the shadow of that very virtue? The disease which is an

indication of its opposite? There are times when our heart sickens that

we are English, and the meanest and most brutal nation seems great when

we compare its attitude with that greasy whine of affected sanctity and

humanity with which, often as individuals and continuously as a people,

we try to gloss over our acts of greed, injustice and self-seeking.

The Boer, if he wishes to annex a Native territory, says: "The damned

Kaffir; I'll take his land from him and divide it among my children."

The Frenchman says, if he wishes to possess a territory: "I shall take

it for the glory of France and keep it for her honour." And this is

noble, direct and manly, if perhaps cruel and unjust.

But the Englishman speaks not so. When he desires an adjoining Native

territory, he sighs, and folds his hands; he says: "It's a very sad

thing the way these Natives go on! They believe in witches and kill

them. I really can't let this go on! It's my duty to interfere. I can't

let these poor benighted people go on so!" He says nothing about the

coal mines he wants to work in their country or the rich nature of

their lands of which he has already got vast grants; so he turns on

the Maxim guns, and he kills a few thousands to save the ten witches;

and witchcraft is put an end to--but he has the lands and mines, and

dishomed and beaten Natives work them for him. How much nobler is the

Boer's attitude is obvious. When we want a territory on a larger scale

we do not say we are stronger than those people, let us go and kill

them and take command of the land for the glory of the Englishman

and the benefit of his trade.[79] We first send some Englishmen there

till the people, knowing our character and that where one locust comes

there come others, grow a little restive and show some displeasure at

our fore-runners; then we draw ourselves together and say: "It is our

duty to defend innocent men and women trusting to us who have ventured

into a strange land" (how and why they came there we don't inquire),

and so we draw out our guns in the name of a wronged humanity--and

so conquer a new land; or we encourage our citizens to buy shares in

a commercial enterprise, lend money may be, and then say: "It is our

duty to take the management of its finance, and eventually of its

government, because it is our duty not to allow innocent speculators

to suffer." Whether the folk in the land will suffer we leave out of

view for the moment, but we dwell on that great duty--till the land

is ours. In the history of the world there was never a people whose

record of relations with other peoples showed so hideous a record of

falsehood and self-deception; other peoples have lied to each other;

but that immeasurably more hideous lie, the lie told to oneself, has

not been common. And we carry this hideous attitude into the relations

of private life; it is the distinctive mark of the lower type of

Englishwoman (often one of culture and philanthropic and religious

inclinations) that she cannot speak the truth to herself, much less

to others, with regard to her motives and actions. When she envies

another and seeks to win her friend or lover from her, she does not,

with the frank wild truth of the Italian or French woman, say: "I will

undermine their friendship. I hate her. She has done me no harm but I

will triumph over her." She says to herself: "It is my _duty_ to show

that man what that woman is," and so, in the performance of her duty,

she saves her conscience and attains her end. We cannot look fairly

or frankly at our people in their private or public capacity without

allowing that that is our deformed feature, our hideous and unique

characteristic.

[79] He does not add: And so did my fathers two hundred

years ago, and all Europe and the Bible expresses faith in

them; "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live, says God";

for this kind of Englishman is not of a discerning and

analytical disposition. He never goes farther than the

matter in hand; and the matter in his own hands seldom

stretches farther than the length of his own nose.

But what does it mean when we come to analyse it? Is it not simply

that deference which the less developed and more brutalized part of

our nation, aye, and of the separate individual himself, pays to the

higher? Is it not that the English nation and English individual, bent

on an act of injustice at variance with the most deep-lying conviction

of its nature, is obliged to gloss it over or it could not attain its

end?

If the French or Chinese or Russian Government is not obliged to gloss

over the fact to the mass of its people that in undertaking a certain

war it is thinking nothing of justice or injustice, not the benefit

of the conquered, but simply of itself; is it not because there is no

large body of the people strong enough to hamper it and perhaps tie its

hands altogether if it did not cozen and blind them?

What is the action of the English Government under such conditions,

when Pitt drags in the words justice, right, mercy, to shield itself,

but a covert assertion that such a feeling does exist, which would not

stand by it if it did not believe that the freedom and emancipation of

others would be aided by its action?

Nay, in the meanest souled Englishwoman, when she dare not say to

herself openly: "I hate that woman and I will wrong her," but is

obliged to bring in the blasphemed words duty, right, justice, to

soothe her own soul--what is it but a testimony that, even in that

poor specimen of the race, there lurks somewhere a feeling that right

must be done, that for no gain to _yourself_ can you take an unfair

advantage. It is the low, insincere element in the woman striving to

justify itself before the profound English conception of the absolute

necessity of justice and fair play between all men. She _dare_ not

slander her fellow unless she has first silenced this.

An Englishman going to sit on the same jury with Boers to try a white

man for killing a Kaffir dares not say frankly and openly to himself

before he goes in or has heard the evidence, as the old Boer does

frankly and truly: "That man is not guilty; no white man shall be

punished for the death of a black"; but he says, when he hears the

evidence: "After all, one can never be certain that evidence is true;

why should I set myself up to condemn a fellow man, perhaps to lifelong

imprisonment, when it may be unjust? And is it not my duty to avoid

stirring up ill-feeling between Dutch and English by bringing in a Boer

guilty?" And he votes with the rest. But what is this hideous fraud but

the cringing of the man's lower nature before the higher element in

himself? If he dare once, only once, admit frankly in his own heart:

"That man committed murder, but I am going to bring him in not guilty

because these Boers buy in my shop," he would not _dare_ to give the

verdict, and, if he did, something even in that low groping nature

would rise up and say: "You are not worthy to be an Englishman," and he

would know the agony of remorse.

The Boer does not need to lie to himself because there is nothing in

him that would rise up to reproach him if he did not. This hideous

fraud in the nation and individual is evidence that there _does_ exist

a part which follows after justice and freedom for all men and which has

to be blinded and silenced before wrong can be done; it _does_ testify

that. Even in the lowest English-speaking man or woman, somewhere,

tucked away in the background of their being, is that awful and almost

mysterious instinct of our people: "You can't wrong a fellow human

being; a man is a man; and what is right for you is right for another.

All men have a claim to fair play." And before this whisper the meanest

man or woman of our race squirms when he tries to evade it, and, unable

fully to understand it or explain it, it lives in the heart of our

people, growing louder and stronger as the ages pass. We can no more

tell you how and why we have it than the Greek can tell you why he had

to make statues and love them; or the Roman laws and roads; or the

German music. It seems it is inborn in us. We may try to annihilate

it by argument; we may try to cozen it by lies; but in each one of us

stands this instinct pointing with its upraised finger the path we have

to walk in. It is the mysterious birthright of every English man and

woman. We may call it the love of freedom, of justice, but neither of

these quite defines it; it is something more; it is the deep conviction

buried somewhere in our nature, not to be eradicated, that man as man

is a great and important thing, that the right to himself and his

existence is the incontestable property of all men; and above all the

conviction that not only _we_ have a right and are bound to preserve

it for ourselves, but that where we come into contact with others _we

are bound to implant it or preserve it in them_. It is a profound

faith, not in the equal talent, virtues, and abilities of men, but in

the equal right of the poorest, most feeble, most ignorant, to his own

freedom and to a perfect equality of treatment.

In all or almost all of us it is faintly present, and in the master

minds which express our race it becomes a passion which in a thousand

directions manifests itself, as the German instinct for music making

now a Mozart and then a Beethoven, and the Greeks' artistic power

making now a Phidias and then a Praxiteles. It is this which we believe

and hold to be the peculiar attribute of the English people, our one

gift which we have to contribute to the general sum of humanity's

wealth--the desire not only to be free, but to make free--the

consciousness of the importance of the individual as individual apart

from any attributes of sex, nationality, talent or wealth. To us it has

been given first among all peoples to perceive, though still dimly, the

unity of all human creatures, and as a nation to endeavour to realize

in our legislation and institutions and our relations with weak peoples

our perception of the fact.[80]

[80] It is perhaps not only by good fortune that among us

should have arisen Charles Darwin. Those who study his

early work, the _Voyage of the Beagle_, when as yet he

was only perceiving faintly the relation of things which

he afterwards so clearly grasped, will see, curiously

manifest in almost every page of that work, those great

English qualities of love and freedom and human equality

in freedom. Neither does it seem anything but fitting and

natural that the man who first brought evidence to convince

the world of the identity of all life, seen and vaguely

indicated by the world's poets, from Lucretius to Goethe

and Shelley, should have been an Englishman. It is not

wonderful that the man who, in his youth, felt so keenly

the pain of seeing the savage ill-treated or the coloured

man slighted, should have been he to whom the mystery and

meanings of the humblest forms of life should have been

made clear and that, from the stripes on the wing of the

bird and the life and motions of the worm, he should have

read the open lessons that others had overlooked. Foreign

peoples often wonder that he should have appeared among

us, but he appeared in our own line of growth; he is an

efflorescence that naturally and rightly belongs to us. He

was our Englishman at his highest.

To those of us who hold this view of the past history of the English

race, of its present position and of the characteristic which

constitutes its peculiarity and strength among the peoples of earth,

the upas-tree theory with regard to its future growth is not only

inconceivable but, could we conceive it as possible, we should hold it

undesirable. And there is nothing from our point of view either in its

past history or present condition to support the theory. The Spaniard

attempted the upas-tree form of colonization and empire, but he has

not succeeded. No nation who has produced any approach to a permanent

organization has followed that line and succeeded by following it. The

Roman, the Great Mogul, attempted, where they conquered, to spread the

benefits and rights of their own organization to the affiliated people;

it was not the number of her slaughters that made the Roman Empire

the greatest the world has yet seen or her rule the most enduring;

the conquests of Rome, when she had attained her widest empire, had

not cost so many lives as many a barbarian conquest which depopulated

whole territories and passed like a smoke or a pestilence leaving no

mark behind; the Roman Empire attained to that endurance and power

it held because Rome was not a upas-tree to the races she came into

contact with, but because, if in a partial and incomplete manner,

yet more than others, where she planted her standard, she sought to

raise and instruct, not to exterminate. No one can study the history

of that great folk in imperial growth without feeling that behind all

lay a dim perception of something higher than mere national expansion;

and in those wise methods, which in the hour of her greatness she

ordained, through which men of all nations and creeds might in time

and by merit become Romans and by her medium spread everywhere the

arts, the knowledge and the advantages peculiar to herself, we see the

germ of the true idea of universal empire fitfully trying to incarnate

itself. Rome fell because she herself became corrupted by wealth and

the inequality of possession, but it took her three centuries to die,

and it must never be forgotten that there were Gauls, Spaniards,

Asiatics and Germans who fought as desperately in her cause at last as

the children of the Seven Hills: so real a fact had been her empire,

so true was her absorption of all peoples into herself. The Gaul, the

Thracian, the Illyrian died generation after generation fighting for

the Roman flag because it had conferred on them something that they

valued, and rather than lose which they would die. It is not because

she slaughtered but because she raised, not because she crushed but

because she protected, that Rome reigned; and she is to some extent

immortal and among us to-day still, not because of the men she

slaughtered, which any savage or wild beast might have accomplished as

well, but because she had something new and large to teach mankind, and

she taught it to the race. There is not upon the earth to-day one pure

blood Roman any more than there is one pure blood Greek, but Rome lives

still in our institutions, in our learning, in our habits of thought;

she has her part in every civilized individual; and, while the race

continues on the planet and continues to grow, she will have her part

in that growth, because, like Greece, she was one of the early forces

which fed and shaped it; and her language, spoken by none, is still

preserved because of the treasure imbedded in it; and in that large

ultimate race of humanity she also will have her share because, while

her blood will be fractionally represented in it, her thought will have

played a large share in its creation.

Such empire and such immortality, only infinitely wider, deeper, and

more indestructible, is that which we desire and hope for the English

race, and language. We believe that we also have our contribution

to make to the growth of humanity. We believe that our sense of

the importance of individual liberty, irrespective of individual

conditions, is a larger contribution to the wealth of the race on earth

than any folk has yet made; and we believe that our desire to impart

it is a more potent means of extending our true empire, and with it

our speech over the surface of the globe, than any mere strength of

arm or valour in slaughtering. We believe that it is not impossible

that the day will come when from north to south, from east to west,

over the globe, our English spirit will have spread; when, as the art

of reading and writing which was once the discovery and possession of

some prehistoric race but which is to-day becoming the property of the

globe, so that in a hundred years' time no child on the globe will be

without it, so our English freedom will spread and the day will come

when in that large united people of the future every man will say: "In

that I am free I am English," and the language, when even possible

freedom has been preached all the world over, may form the foundation

of the world's speech.

We look forward to no time when our brilliant little Japanese brother

with his love of flowers and beauty and simplicity and his keen

intellectual insight, when our Russian mate with his idealism and grim

intensity of emotion, and even the Kaffir with his high sense of honour

and justice and his almost abnormally developed sense of social unity

and obligation, shall have passed away for ever from among the things

of earth and when we shall reign in his stead. Our dream of the future

of our race is of no John Bull seated astride of the earth, his huge

belly distended with the people he has devoured and his teeth growing

out yet more than ever with all the meat he has bitten and looking

around on a depeopled earth and laughing till all his teeth show and

the peoples' bones rattle in his belly: "Ha! I reign alone now. I have

killed them all out!"

If such a consummation were within the remotest grasp of possibility,

the best thing the peoples of earth could do would be to combine

and kill the ogre while there was yet time. But no such consummation

of his fate is conceivable. The North American has indeed died out

before us as the Bushman almost died out before the Dutch and will

utterly die out, unless with great care and at much expense we have

the taste and the wisdom artificially to preserve him for future ages

and to complete as far as possible the links in the chain of life; but

we have not really killed them, they had not the power unless they

were artificially preserved to grasp the conditions of a more complex

existence. Negro, Indian, and even Irishman, they all tend to increase,

not to die out, under our rule. Our dream of the future empire of our

race is not of an empire over graves but in and through living nations.

The future of our race is never prefigured in our minds by the upas but

as a huge tree, among whose shelving roots and under whose protecting

shadow, endless forms of life may spring up and flourish that might

otherwise be destroyed, and in whose wide umbrageous branches every

form of bird and creature shall find resting place and nourishment, a

tree of life and not of death. We do not dream of our language that

it shall forcibly destroy the world's speeches and all they contain,

reigning in solitary grandeur, but, as gold in a ring binds into one

circle rare gems of every kind and some of infinitely greater beauty

than itself, so we dream that our speech being common may bind together

and bring into one those treasures of thought and knowledge which the

peoples of earth have produced, its highest function being that of

making the treasures of all accessible to all.

We think of the great race of earth, which shall be in the future,

not as composed of English blood with all the beauty and strength of

other races and peoples excluded; but rather we figure it as a great

temple reared up of material of every size and colour, from marble and

alabaster to ebony and starred porphyry, but in which every stone and

doorpost shall be cemented with the freedom that is the gift of our

people. We look for the future growth of England not as the result of

the merciless slaughter of mankind or the use of force, but because,

as time passes and we become freer ourselves, we shall spread our

freedom wherever our foot touches, and whoever is trampled, oppressed

or feeble on earth will gather to us and grow up under our shelter to

strength; we look for the spread of our language, not because it is

of necessity the finest and most complex and expressive instrument of

thought, though, after our instinct for freedom, it is the noblest

outgrowth of our race, having perchance not the music of the Italian,

the exact brilliance of the French, the ready power of expressing

deep and powerful emotion of the German, or the multiple advantages

of other forms of speech, yet, like some great and complex organ with

understops and pipes which skilfully managed may produce almost any

effect, being fitted to equal and perhaps surpass any language in its

breadth of power,[81] but because in this tongue will be preached the

most valuable lesson humanity has yet to learn; because, wherever a

people has come into contact with it, it has meant for them freedom and

advance.

[81] How far does the passion of a workman for the tool he

works with speak in us here?

There is an old saying that a slave cannot breathe in the air of

England because the moment his foot touches the shore he is freed. We

look for an enlargement of this old parable in the future. We look for

the time when it shall be said: "Slavery, injustice, the oppression of

the weak by the strong, cannot exist in any land where an Englishman

breathes; the moment his foot touches a shore, they pass away before

him." And in this will lie the Englishman's power to dominate and his

claim to immortality.

In the great nation that shall govern and cover the whole earth there

may be found not one pure-blooded Englishman, any more than there is

to-day one Greek or Roman on earth. He will as little be found in three

hundred years' time in London or New York, as in Pekin or Yokohama.

But what was great in him we believe will have encircled the globe;

and English freedom will extend from Greenland to Borneo when the

Englishman shall have melted into something larger.

We know that this consummation is not inevitable or certain; dreams as

large as this have been dreamed by races before and come to nought.

We are not unaware that to carry this conquest out the English race

must first free itself before it can consciously or unconsciously

accomplish its missionary enterprise. During the last years there seems

a pause in the generous outflow of English inspiration, and, where we

appear to be bent on suppressing a slave trade, it will be manifest

to the least observant looker-on that our Government is merely making

that project a shield for financial and national aggressions. The

truth is that all English-speaking countries are in the throes of a

great effort demanding not less of the vital energies of our people

in England, America and the Colonies than the old internal struggles

which resulted in the freedom of Barons as opposed to the Monarchy, the

freedom of the men of the middle class as opposed to the hereditary

powers. What the future of the English race will be depends on the

result of that conflict. If it results as we who share in its struggles

believe, it will show the world when the strife is over, for the first

time, a perfectly free land in which the superficial differences of

sex and class shall be sunk in the greater personality of the human

creature, in which every creature from its birth shall stand free and

untrammelled and the inequalities between men shall not be those of

artificial construction but of inherent deficiencies or powers; in

which a new aristocracy shall be formed out of the great labour of the

head or hand and not of those of great possessions, of those who give

much to their fellows and not those who receive; when the child will be

told to take off his hat and bow to the labourer who for sixty years

has worked in the field for the community, or has thought for it in his

chamber, and not to the woman who lies back in her carriage, consuming

and having consumed without return the labour of hundreds, or the man

who, in the gambling of the roulette table, the stock exchange or the

share market, has made his millions. It may be that the arrest in our

outward efforts to extend our freedom and humanity's may be the result

of this internal trouble and that when, before the race is exhibited

for the first time in the history of the globe an absolutely free

civilized people in which the individuality of the male and female, the

powerful and the weak, are respected, we shall take up our work with

renewed ardour, and, almost whether we will or no, the freedom we have

attained for ourselves will infect all the race and constitute us its

leaders. This may be; this is what there is some promise of ultimately

being--but it may also not be. We may have become so much degraded by

the ideal of existence which has been held before us, that the strife

of our women and masses, which now seems an ennobling strife for more

and nobler fields of labour, shall degenerate into a demoralizing

strife after universal inaction and that our ideal as a race will be

what is now merely the ideal of a class, existence on the labour of

others without exertion--and then the English race will be degraded, as

many have been before it, and the Russian, the Japanese and even the

Kaffir must lead the world's people in their march; we cannot. We do

not pretend there are not certain signs which suggest the possibility

of ultimate failure, and make us fear for it. In a country like South

Africa we see that, where the English and in truth any branch of the

white race comes into contact with a more primitive dark, there is a

hideous tendency at once to degenerate. We will not work. The most

feeble and unrichly brained man or woman who could be worth their

keep to humanity and perhaps as richly productive as a hand worker,

but never as anything else, refuses the one order of labour he is fit

for, and prefers a hideous dependency on society, which in Africa is

ultimately a dependence on the dark races, rather than to undertake the

one form of labour for which nature has fitted him. We see a hideous

tendency to leave all the work of life to the dark races; for the

moment this seems to leave us free for higher efforts, but as time

passes surely it will enervate; like a rotten aristocracy we shall die

out, and the hands which for generations have made our roads, planted

and reaped our fields, built our houses and tended our children, will

at last be united to the brains that make the laws and govern the land,

and we shall fade away. That the day may be far distant does not make

less clear and painful the first symptoms of the disease of which all

great conquering nations of the past have ultimately died. Again our

hope, that the English working man and the woman when freed will impart

their gain to all the world and so rule over life, is belied at least

by two symptoms--that the man who is trying to free himself from the

tyranny of class still does in certain instances strive fiercely to

maintain that of sex, and that, as he gains or thinks he is gaining

his own freedom, he strives jealously to exclude men who are not of

his blood from sharing it. These are perhaps the two ugliest symptoms

in the modern movement; and if it means anything but the action of a

man who, nearly drowned, wrings the hands of his fellow off him and

throws him back into the water, only that he may be able to gain the

shore and return with a rope for his fellow--it is the most hopeless

symptom that has appeared in our social growth for many years. In

South Africa, where our national English greed for speedy wealth

without exertion has made us, not satisfied with the dark labour of

the country, introduce yet more from Asia, then when they have served

us and filled our pockets, we attempt to refuse them the rights of

citizens and labourers, the English love of freedom and fair play does

not seem growing. There are countless other symptoms which give us

cause for consideration and most anxious doubt. We are going to spread

freedom and justice over the earth, but in Africa at present our doom

seems to be to drag its natural wealth from its bowels, and to expend

it in intensifying the luxury of the old world. We prefer, as a great

South African millionaire once said, "the land to the Natives," and for

a time that part of us which seeks to rule over nations and permeate

the peoples seems silenced by that part of us which desires to fill its

hands with the fruits of the land and the labour of its people--and

then desires nothing more.

All this we see and see clearly. That a tree is full of buds does

not prove that there will ever be fruit; that a child moves beneath

its mother's heart is no certain promise that there will ever be a

man; and, seeing clearly many conditions which may check its progress

and even symptoms of conditions which may ultimately terminate its

existence, nevertheless, while the buds are on the tree, we do not fail

to dig and water, and, while the child is in the womb, we do not cease

to prepare for its coming because of the possibility of its abortion.

To those of us who take this view of conditions, functions,

difficulties and possible future of the English race, it is not very

difficult to determine what in the little South African world our

relations and course of conduct towards the black man and the alien

races should be. The man who holds to the upas-tree function of the

English race and the possibility and desirability of our exterminating

and using entirely for our own advantage all the peoples of earth is

not more confident as to what his line of action should be than we.

Nay, we believe we are a little more confident, because we believe

there lies in every Englishman, behind his philistinism and jingoism,

something that makes the upas-tree line of action a little difficult to

him.

We are not unaware of the difficulties and complexities of our position

in this country, but upon all matters small and large we know our

course. We are asked sometimes: "Well, but what do you intend this

country to be, a black man's country or a white?" We reply we intend

nothing. If the black man cannot labour or bear the strain and stress

of complex civilized life, he will pass away. We need not degrade and

injure ourself by killing him; if _we_ cannot work here, then in time,

wholly or in part, the white man will pass away; and the one best

fitted to the land will likely survive--but this we are determined to

do: we will make it a free man's country. Whether the ultimate race

of this country be black, white or brown, we intend it to be a race

permeated with the English doctrine of the equal right of each human to

himself, and the duty of all to defend the freedom of it.

If it be suggested to us that the Natives of the land are ignorant, we

have the reply to make that we are here to teach them all we know if

they will learn--if they will not, they must fall.

If it be asked whether we think them our equals, we would reply:

Certainly in love of happiness and their own lives--perhaps not in some

other directions; but we are here to endeavour to raise them as far as

it is possible; we are determined to make them a seed-ground in which

to sow all that is greatest and best in ourselves.

If it be asked whether we are negrophiles, we reply: "No--we are trying

to be but we are not yet. The white man in us yet loves the white as

the black man loves the black. It would be a lie to say that we love

the black man, if by that is meant that we love him as we love the

white. But we are resolved to deal with justice and mercy towards him.

_We will treat him as if we loved him_: and in time the love may come.

When you pick up a lost child in the streets covered only with rags

and black with dust, you have first to take it home and wash and dress

it and then you want to kiss it. When we have dealt with the dark man

for long years with justice and mercy and taught him all we know, we

shall perhaps be able to look deep into each other's eyes and smile: as

parent and child."

If it is said to us that our idea of the function of the English

race is all very well, but in reality all that races seek is

self-aggrandisement, we reply that we are fully aware of this tendency

to the most blatant self aggrandisement in our people, but we know

also other tendencies; and Washington, Lincoln, John Brown, Florence

Nightingale, Josephine Butler, John Stuart Mill, Howe, Livingstone,

Moffat, and the multitudes who harmonize with and follow them, are not

less truly English. In every land where the English race is growing, in

Australia, New Zealand, America, England and even South Africa, side by

side with its less specialized elements we have this broad humanitarian

element, as surely and unfailingly developed in every land, and on this

we build our hope. This element, which we believe to be ultimately

the dominant and vital element in our people, is animated entirely by

one instinct and works to one end. We do not follow ultimately either

the Union Jack or the Stars and Stripes. Over our heads waves always a

larger and wider flag, inscribed with that one word, "Freedom," which

being fully interpreted means justice and liberty for all, or, being

yet more simplified: Do unto all men as you would they should do unto

you. Under that standard we range ourselves to conquer. We regard it

as the true flag of our race, beneath which we are willing to die,

but which, British, American, Australian, New Zealander or even South

African, we are never willing to see fall. It is this English standard

which alone we would see planted in every country of the earth. It

is this unseen flag, waving over our heads, which stimulates us to

persevere in our course; it is this which we believe constitutes the

ultimate glory of the English people.

If we are asked how we can expect any folk ever to dominate in the

world as a power everywhere spreading freedom and imparting its

benefits to all, when in all the history of the past such a thing is

not recorded of any people, we reply that it is useless to talk to us

in Africa of what has been, as though it of necessity limited what

shall be in the world of human growth. Outside our doors, even as we

write and think, sits cowering the little human ape Bushman, and, when

we turn from him to the Kaffir working in our kitchen and the bust

of Shakespeare on the mantleshelf, we do not only hope and believe

but we see physically before our material eyes the infinite growth of

humanity, the unmeasurable power of change and the arrival of entirely

new traits which is possible in the human creature. You may as well

try to stop a great people on its line of growth by telling it that

no people has ever done before what they are attempting to do, as you

could stop the creative mind of a genius in its labour by telling it

that work had never been done before. "Exactly so," replies the artist,

"I know man has never seen the face I see and am trying to paint or

the fact I see and am trying to record; that is my joy, I am doing

an entirely new thing and through me humanity grows a little in a new

direction."

It is exactly because we believe no nation on the earth has ever

manifested just this desire, not only to be free, but to make free,

that we are filled with an almost infinite hope as to our function and

future. This is why we value it more highly than all the qualities

we share with other peoples. It is our stroke of genius, our new

contribution to human growth.

If we are asked how, looking round on the little world of South Africa

to-day, we dare to entertain such lofty conceptions of the function

and future of our race, we reply: "Yes, we dare." We are not blind

to the self-seeking and injustice which surround us on every hand.

We are not for a moment blind to the fact that sometimes, where we

seem to be defending the Native, we are merely using him as a rod

with which to strike our white brothers of another speech; we do not

forget that English hands have in this country flogged men to death

and that, because the man killed was of a dark race, we as an English

community have not dared to do more than inflict a fine. We are aware

how devoid of any consciousness of large racial function are a mass of

our English-speaking folk and how completely devoid of any aim but that

of self-betterment are numbers of our units; but, looking these facts

directly in the face and allowing all they mean, we yet do not give up

hope.

Is it absolutely nothing that in this country there are to be found

men who, whether as judges or when serving on juries, are not only

incorruptible before the forces of gold or personal interest but before

the much more terrible corruption of racial prejudice and passion?

Is it nothing that there are men among us in whose hands the most

miserable feeble Bushman or Hottentot is as sure of rigid justice as

though he were a royal prince or millionaire? Is it not something

that there is throughout the length and breadth of the land hardly an

Englishman who dares to use the power of a dominant people without

making for himself a screen of lies, behind which to hide from his

conscience when she comes to seek for him, that there is hardly a

man or woman among us who dares to act to one of the subject races as

they could not be acted to without first shielding themselves behind

an excuse? Is it nothing that, poor as our rule is, at least while the

people of England have still held rule in the land, the Native races

have drawn to our standard, and at least, comparing us with others,

have recognized that our flag meant justice and freedom for those

who stood under it? Is it nothing that in the space of fifty years

England has sent out to us at least once a man who in his capacity

as ruler bent with an unfeigned solicitude over every element in our

complex people and endeavoured to tighten the reins of sympathy between

Englishman, Boer and Native, and to see, unblinded by that intense

passion for their own people which all deep natures feel but which high

natures control, the needs and the failings and the sufferings of each

section and sought to remedy them? Is it nothing that, at least once,

we have had an English ruler who possessed all passion for impartiality

and humanity which characterizes a race fitted to rule over empires

of varied peoples, and that among men more closely South African we

have one who, though a Jew by name and descent, was an Englishman by

language and education, through a long life consistently and without

intermission sought to enforce practically the ideal of English rule

as a great freeing impartial force? Is it nothing that, in addition

to the names of such men as Sir George Grey and Saul Solomon upon our

South African record, and with the story of such lives as Livingstone

and Moffat mingled with that of our English occupancy of the country we

have also the names of at least a few hundred individuals less known

but following in their steps and animated by the same principle?

Have we not heard it said again and again by the Boer: "You Englishmen

know no difference between one man and another; you treat a black man

as if he was yourself"; and in that one saying have we not ground for

hope?