Murat Halstead

“ But there is no adequate excuse for his continued hatred of the Englishman, for his tyranny toward inferiors and colored people, for his personal immorality, or for the phenomenal arrogance of his conduct and character. The higher class Boer of the towns in the Free State, and of Pretoria itself, may eliminate some of the more evident barbarisms of his veldt brother, but there remains the same extraordinary ignorance of external conditions, the same monumental conceit, the same absence of truthfulness and honor, the same arrogance and hatred of British power and progress. ”

“ When one thinks on the one-century history of this people, much is seen that 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 Dopper 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 sees the pathos of the picture. ”

“ Within the million and a half square miles of South African territory were room and verge for a vastly greater white population than has yet touched its shores; while every racial peculiarity or pursuit could find a place in its towns and farms and mines and upon its rolling veldt. To the lover of quiet village life and retirement nothing could be more pleasant than parts of Natal and Cape Colony, and of the two Republics. To the keen business man, eager for gain and intent upon quick returns, the rapid and wealth-producing progress of the great mining towns gave all that could be desired. ”

“ The Boer love for liberty or independence became simply a love for isolation from the rest of humanity and a desire to imitate the slave-owners of Old Testament history. The final result has been the creation of a foreign, or Hollander, oligarchy in both the Dutch republics for the purpose of preserving this condition. The British ideal is freedom in government, in trade, in politics, for himself and for others, regardless of race, or creed, or color. The Boer principle of morality has always been a mere matter of color; that of the average Englishman is very different. ”

“ If it had not been for the revelations of the riches of Africa by travelers from foreign lands, the Boer boys would still have had a monopoly of diamonds for toys, and but a dim consciousness of their bucolic magnificence. Boers are very queer people. Their idea of a next-door neighbor is that he must keep his hut and wagon at least three miles away. A closer approach makes a crowd; the air and the soil become impure, and the Boer is stifled in the midst of his own splendors. ”

“ We are at war for the purpose of preventing our brethren in South Africa from being taxed without representation; from being placed under the control of courts whose judges take their orders from a corrupt Executive; from being refused the right to carry arms while their oppressors flourish theirs with insolent brutality; from being compelled to contribute to schools in which English is treated as a foreign tongue; in short, from being denied the elementary rights of self-government in territory undoubtedly British. ”

“ Side by side these two types have lived and struggled in South Africa, and to-day the racial, national, individual and other differences are being thrown into the crucible of a desperate conflict. There can only be one local result—the ultimate organization of a united South Africa in which race and creed and color will be merged in one general principle of perfect equality and the practice of one great policy of liberty to all, within the bounds of rational legislation and honest life. ”

“ The Dutchman in South Africa knew, in earlier days as well as at the present time, absolutely nothing of democracy in the British sense of the word. Republicanism, in the sense of Government by the majority, he does not even now understand—unless the majority be Dutch. To dream of convincing, or trying to convince others, by argument and discussion that some particular policy is better than another has always been far from his point of view. He has been too long accustomed to using the shot-gun or whip upon inferior races to deem such a policy either desirable or possible. ”

“ It was not from the ranks of the Boers that men came who were capable of making the Transvaal an arsenal of military power, a close corporation of clever financial government, the head of the great Afrikander movement of the past decade, a force of organized strength for the destruction of British rule in South Africa, and a diplomatic factor at the capitals of Europe. The Boers were, and are, simply the instruments of clever adventurers from Holland. ”

“ In reality, however, it is the result of a hundred years of racial rivalry, during which the Boer character has been evolved out of intense isolation, deliberate ignorance and cultivated prejudice into the remarkable product of to-day, while the nature of his British neighbor has expanded in the light of liberty and through the gospel of equality, of labor and of world-wide thought, into the great modern representative of progress in all that makes for good government, active intellectual endeavor, material wealth and Imperial expansion. ”

“ To the adventurous spirit, willing to suffer hardships and endure labor in its severest form for a possibly glittering return, the diamond and gold fields offered untold opportunities. To the hunter and tourist and traveller the myriad wild animals of the interior gave a pleasure only second to that felt by the Kaffir and the Boer when hunting the lion to his lair or the elephant in its native jungle. ”

“ Unlike Sir Benjamin D'Urban, Sir Peregrine Maitland, Sir Harry Smith, Sir George Grey and Sir Bartle Frere, he has had the rich and rare privilege in South Africa of being endorsed and supported through all the tangled threads of a complicated situation by the Colonial Office, the Imperial Government, the British Parliament, and, eventually, the people of the Empire. Of this he will always have reason to be proud, whatever may be the arduous labors and responsibilities and perhaps changes of the hidden future. ”

“ The Boers, in fact, did not want firm government or free institutions; they desired liberty to do as they liked with their own living chattels and with the natives of the soil. They deliberately cultivated modes of life and thought diametrically opposed to everything the Englishman holds dear, and carefully fanned the smouldering embers of dislike and distrust in their own breasts until they became a flame of active hatred. ”

“ Taxation in the republics of to-day is as strongly and sincerely disliked as it was in the days of the Great Trek, or of the little republics in the time of Pretorius. Had the Government of the Transvaal depended upon its ordinary revenues, or upon the taxation of its own people for munitions of war and for the great armament of the present day, it would have long since been overthrown by the Boers themselves. Like the Chinaman, the Dutch farmer reveres the practices and precepts of his equally ignorant father or grandfathers. ”

“ The Boers had selected their time for beginning the war, and judiciously placed it when the open country was green with grass for their ponies, and their forces were wafted about almost as swiftly as the winds,—while the British were fettered to lines of rails readily obstructed, and repeated misfortunes taught the limits of usefulness of armored trains, perils from the mad panic of green drivers with greener mules ”

“ There is one people, and one only on earth, that has the ability and the purpose, the will and the force, the experience and the energy to make this gift to mankind, and that power is the British Empire. Whatever the resources or the ambition or the faculties of other great nations, none with the exception of Great Britain is so situated as to make it possible to do this. ”

“ There is no more admirable quality in the world than love of liberty; no greater inspiration to gallant deeds, to high ideals, to noble practices. But there are different kinds of liberty. The Iroquois of North American history stalked through his noble forests in all the pride of physical power and the freedom to torture and slaughter his red enemy or white foe whenever and wherever he could. ”

“ Immediately afterwards ten thousand Zulus left the kraal, and after a march of eleven days fell upon the nearest Boer encampment at a place since called Weenen, and destroyed men, women, children and slaves. The horrors of that massacre have never been forgotten or forgiven by the Dutch. Had not one young man, sleeping at a distance from the camp, awakened in time to save himself on a swift horse, every Dutch emigrant in Natal must have suffered the same fate. ”

“ Never until now has mankind had the labor and capital, the courage, the machinery, the intelligence, or the tools provided by marvelous inventions—the conquering capacity to give the gigantic continent of Africa—nearly 12,000,000 square miles—into the hands of the people who need room for industry, thus making an addition to the good land available for the lucrative employment of countless millions through the coming ages. ”

“ When the Republic of South Africa and the Orange Free State, after a conspiracy of the two Presidents, rushed their armies into what they believed a campaign of conquests, the surprise of the Boers and their allies that they gained so few and small advantages after elaborate preparations and careful openings of their opportunities in striking first, was as at as that of the British that they, indifferently provided and hastily thrust into hot places, could not march headlong in solid columns, storming fortifications, to easy victories. ”

“ It is the semi-barbarous theory that gold and diamond hunters are offenders against liberty, that it is the holy duty of the Boers as cattle drivers and stalkers of game, to reduce intrusive English speaking people to a subordination down to the level of the native tribes, so that they may not become masters over the aristocracy of the African cowboys. What better title is there anywhere for self-government than a people in the majority? ”

“ The war that ended in the magnanimous policy after the defeat at Majuba Hill began with the Boer's resistance to taxation. They are as determined not to be taxed by others without representation as they are to tax others and refuse representation, because they have the power to do it or make war. Having subjugated and in a great measure enslaved the natives, it seems to be the temper and the passion of their lives to treat the English as inferiors and forbid them to exercise local authority, or assert that they have rights beyond those of paying for being on the ground. ”

“ That Empire is the only one that has the enabling equipment to do the work, and the advancement will be the achievement of one of the proudest and most beneficent of all victories of men for man.
A great deal of the journalism of the world is wickedly and wretchedly wrong and extremely misleading in its treatment of this superb and lofty theme. The Boers have been cruelly deceived by interludes of feebleness displayed in the government of England, permitting a halting interference with the perpetuation of the policy that has made the British Empire what it is. ”

“ The English have possessed a great quantity of land in Africa, and they are justified by the establishment of comparative peace under stable form of government, by the increase of prosperity of the people, irrespective of race or previous condition of servitude or of shades of color. The ancient despotism at the Cape which was a prohibition of progress, for it was the tyranny of an absolute monopoly, has been swept away; and there has been growth in human liberty as well as augmentation of wealth and comfort, and there is white light on the dismal shores of the Dark Continent. ”

“ He believed that, with utterly inadequate military resources at the Cape and with absolute indifference at home, it was useless to try to control a vast region where the majority of the white settlers were opposed to Great Britain and the masses of the natives strongly hostile. But he overlooked the impossibility of maintaining a stable frontier amid the shifting sands of a savage population, and he forgot that justice had to be done, as between native and native and often as between white man and native, if Great Britain was to fulfill her mission and do her duty. ”

“ I do not suppose there are any people in the world so well represented by a single prominent man as the Boers of South Africa are by Mr. Kruger. He is pre-eminently the Boer of Boers in character, in intellect, and in disposition, and that is one reason why he has such absolute control over his people. His obstinacy—and no man with a face like his could be otherwise—his people call strength. Age and its infirmities have intensified it. ”

“ If we had an equal number of British subjects and equally large interests in any part of the world, even in a country which is not under any conventional obligations to Her Majesty's Government, we should be bound to make representations to the Government in the interests of Her Majesty's subjects, and to point out that the intense discontent of those subjects stood in the way of the cordial relations which we desire to exist between us. I know that the citizens of the South African Republic are intensely jealous of British interference in their internal affairs. ”

“ To the seeker after new industries, ostrich farming, mohair, the feather industry and diamond mining have from time to time proved the greatest attraction. To the farmer or planter parts of the region were eminently fitted for the raising of wheat and other cereals, and the cultivation of tobacco, cotton, sugar and rice. To the restless and wandering Boer, South Africa seems to have given for a time everything that his spirit desired—isolation, land, wild animals to hunt, independence of control, freedom from the trammels of education and taxation and civilization. ”