Josephine Elizabeth Grey Butler

“ Prejudice is slowly dying out, but indifference remains. Educated men who can help, who would help if they knew the need, have not yet learnt that need. I do not blame them with any bitterness. There has been enough already of bitterness on the one side and of levity on the other. But an acknowledgment of past error lies at the base of every true reform. Let that be acknowledged here, which every thoughtful observer must see, that through all ages of the world's history the more powerful sex have been liable to use their power carelessly, not for protection only, but for pain. ”

“ The Nazarene is a great conqueror. The heart of the most scornful of the rebels against God’s holy laws may be broken, softened and laid bare to the healing dews of heaven; and his eyes may be opened to see, like Hagar, close at hand a well of water which he knew not of.
In speaking of life and love to some of the most fallen and wrecked of men and women, it has sometimes appeared as if I were speaking into the ears of a corpse, of one in whom there remains no longer any conscience or will to respond to the call of God. ”

“ When one thinks of the one century history of that people, much is seen which accounts for their extraordinary love of isolation, and their ingrained and passionate aversion to control; much, too, that draws to them a world of sympathy; and when one realizes the old President hemmed in once more by the hurrying tide of civilization, from which his people have fled for generations—trying to fight both fate and Nature—standing up to stem a tide as resistless as the eternal sea—one realizes the pathos of the picture. ”

“ I have heard and known too much of thoughtful women not to be sure of this. Confessions of this kind, the simplest and frankest confessions of ignorance, and of why that ignorance is painful, have been made to me many a time by women whom the world pleases to think clever, but who are too true-hearted to believe the world.
"It is not as luxury that we crave knowledge, but as bread of life for ourselves and others. We want it that we may distribute it to others, with helpful hands and words of blessing. We want it as the lever by which we may help to raise the world. ”

“ At the meeting of our Abolitionist Federation about to be held in Paris will that voice be heard, or will it be lost amidst the excitement of those days, amidst the pressure of a thousand interests and the voices of appeal from many workers in innumerable good causes? And yet a few streets distant there are and will be abodes filled with human beings—our sisters, driven outside the pale of all law, hemmed round and crushed down by a cordon and by weights of arbitrary police rules, slaves and prisoners to whom no light comes, to whom no word of hope penetrates. ”

“ They are ignorant, and read no books or papers—only the Old Testament; but Kruger knew he could rouse these people by waving before them the spectre of England, and crying in their ears the word 'Independence.' And this is what disgusts us, that under cover of principles so dear to us all, independence and national honour, these brave men are sent to the battlefield to preserve for a tyrannical and venal oligarchy the right to share amongst themselves, and distribute as they please, the gold which is levied on the work of foreigners. ”

“ Everywhere—east, west, north, and south—those whose eyes are open see in this our day manifestations of a spiritual power, of a loving, divine pressure on the souls of men, of a holy compulsion bringing them to a new consciousness, and drawing them irresistibly to the source of Light and Life. I believe that every effort, however humble, which is being made for the triumph of good over evil will be found to be a contribution towards the final victory, and towards the fulfilment of the Divine promise that the “knowledge of the Lord shall cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.” ”

“ Any evils which may at first attend a social reform ought not to alarm us: they are transient; they are but the breakers on the bar which must be crossed before we launch into deep waters, but the "noise and dust of the wagon which brings the harvest home."
There is a near future and there is a far future; there are plans for the near future and plans for the far future. The world is full of plans for the near future; not so of plans for the far future. ”

“ The horror of slavery in every form, and under whatever name, which I have probably partly inherited, has been intensified as life went on. It is my deep conviction that Great Britain will in future be judged, condemned or justified, according to her treatment of those innumerable coloured races, heathen or partly Christianized, over whom her rule extends, or who, beyond the sphere of her rule, claim her sympathy and help as a Christian and civilizing power to whom a great trust has been committed. ”

“ Give the women a vote, and see what will be the result. In all my work my one strength has been the strength of the Almighty, sought and won by constant prayer; and the prayer which I now offer in my secret chamber is that the veil may be taken away, and the selfishness—the perhaps unconscious selfishness—may be removed from the hearts of men who deny women equality, and keep them outside the Constitution. Think what we could do in the cause of morality, think of the pain and trouble and martyrdom that we might be saved in the future, if we had that little piece of justice. ”

“ To anyone who has studied the Boers and their ways and policy ... it must be clear that President Kruger does more than represent the opinion of the people and execute their policy: he moulds them in the form he wills. By the force of his own strong convictions and prejudices, and of his indomitable will, he has made the Boers a people whom he regards as the germ of the Afrikander nation; a people chastened, selected, welded, and strong enough to attract and assimilate all their kindred in South Africa, and thus to realize the dream of a Dutch Republic from the Zambesi to Cape Town. ”

“ It is now many weeks since I knew that Parliament had sanctioned this great wickedness, and I have not yet put on my armour, nor am I yet ready. Nothing so wears me out, body and soul, as anger, fruitless anger; and this thing fills me with such an anger, and even hatred, that I fear to face it. The thought of this atrocity kills charity and hinders my prayers. But there is surely a way of being angry without sin. I pray Thee, O God, to give me a deep, well-governed, and lifelong hatred of all such injustice, tyranny and cruelty ”

“ No native is allowed to hold land in the Transvaal with such a fundamental law. It is nothing more than a necessary transition to the conclusion that the coloured people should be contemned as being of an inferior order, and only fit for slavery. That is a necessary transition, and it is for Englishmen to protest against it, and to say that all men, of whatever creed, or race, or colour, are equal in Church and State, and in the sight of God, and to assert the principle of Civil and Religious Liberty whenever they have the opportunity. ”

“ Among the first who came to us to our own house, to die, was a certain Marion, who seemed to us a kind of first-fruits of the harvest, in the gathering in of which we were to be allowed in after years to participate. The first time I saw her was in a crowded room. Her face attracted me: not beautiful in the common acceptation of the word, but having a power greater than beauty; eyes full of intelligence and penetration; a countenance at once thoughtful and frank, with at times a wildly seeking look, as if her whole being cried out, “Who will show us any good?” ”

“ But I will say, in advance, that what I desire to make plain for some sincere persons who are perplexed, is this,—that where a Government has established by Law the principle of the complete and final abolition of Slavery, and made its practice illegal for all time,—as our British Government has done,—there is hope for the native races;—there is always hope that, by an appeal to the law and to British authority, any and every wrong done to the natives, which approaches to or threatens the reintroduction of slavery, shall be redressed. ”

“ The doubt, the dark misery growing out of the contemplation of the sorrows of earth and the apparent waste of souls are no longer able to drive me into sullenness and despair, for I have found the door of hope. I do not say—for I speak neither more nor less than I have learned of God—that the perplexity is solved, that the sorrow is gone. Sorrow is with me still, the enduring companion of my life. I do not pretend to be able to explain the secrets of God and the great problems of life with any clearness of speech to satisfy another. ”

“ It will rouse some consciences, no matter how imperfect men may find it. On the eve of a war it may be said that the sound of the trumpet is imperfect because it only calls to the battle, and that we want to see the troops, their arms, and the strength of muscle on either side. Yet the call to battle is needed; the close grappling with the foe will follow. It is only when the slave begins to move, to complain, to give signs of life and resistance, either by his own voice, or by the voice of one like himself speaking for him, that the struggle for freedom truly begins. ”

“ There is among the Chiefs and Indunas of my people an almost universal hope that the Imperial arms will be victorious, and that a Government which, by its inhumanity and relentless injustice, and apparent inability to see that the native has any rights a white man should respect, has forfeited its place among the civilised Governments of the earth, and should therefore be deprived of powers so scandalously abused—formerly by slavery, and in later years by disallowing the native to buy land, and utterly neglecting his intellectual and spiritual needs. ”

“ It has brought hope to many, showing how the truth is marching on, how the winged seed has taken root, not only in obscure ground, and in humble minds, but in the mind of a great genius, whose voice has sounded aloud and afar the justice of the movement, for which so many of us have prayed and laboured, and the injustice under which so many have suffered and died—their sorrows and their death taken no account of because they were the helpless victims of the tyranny appealed against. ”