Then, When The American Population
Overtook These Western States, They Would Be Face To Face With The
Problem Which This Country Has Had To Solve.
If they found these
new States fiercely anti-American and extremely unprogressive, they
would experience that aggravation of their difficulties with which
our statesmen have had to deal.
At the time of their transference to the British flag the
colonists - Dutch, French, and German - numbered some thirty
thousand. They were slaveholders, and the slaves were about as
numerous as themselves. The prospect of complete amalgamation
between the British and the original settlers would have seemed to
be a good one, since they were of much the same stock, and their
creeds could only be distinguished by their varying degrees of
bigotry and intolerance. Five thousand British emigrants were
landed in 1820, settling on the Eastern borders of the colony, and
from that time onwards there was a slow but steady influx of
English speaking colonists. The Government had the historical
faults and the historical virtues of British rule. It was mild,
clean, honest, tactless, and inconsistent. On the whole, it might
have done very well had it been content to leave things as it found
them. But to change the habits of the most conservative of Teutonic
races was a dangerous venture, and one which has led to a long
series of complications, making up the troubled history of South
Africa. The Imperial Government has always taken an honourable and
philanthropic view of the rights of the native and the claim which
he has to the protection of the law. We hold and rightly, that
British justice, if not blind, should at least be colour-blind. The
view is irreproachable in theory and incontestable in argument, but
it is apt to be irritating when urged by a Boston moralist or a
London philanthropist upon men whose whole society has been built
upon the assumption that the black is the inferior race. Such a
people like to find the higher morality for themselves, not to have
it imposed upon them by those who live under entirely different
conditions. They feel - and with some reason - that it is a cheap
form of virtue which, from the serenity of a well-ordered household
in Beacon Street or Belgrave Square, prescribes what the relation
shall be between a white employer and his half-savage,
half-childish retainers. Both branches of the Anglo-Celtic race
have grappled with the question, and in each it has led to trouble.
The British Government in South Africa has always played the
unpopular part of the friend and protector of the native servants.
It was upon this very point that the first friction appeared
between the old settlers and the new administration. A rising with
bloodshed followed the arrest of a Dutch farmer who had maltreated
his slave. It was suppressed, and five of the participants were
hanged. This punishment was unduly severe and exceedingly
injudicious. A brave race can forget the victims of the field of
battle, but never those of the scaffold. The making of political
martyrs is the last insanity of statesmanship. It is true that both
the man who arrested and the judge who condemned the prisoners were
Dutch, and that the British Governor interfered on the side of
mercy; but all this was forgotten afterwards in the desire to make
racial capital out of the incident. It is typical of the enduring
resentment which was left behind that when, after the Jameson raid,
it seemed that the leaders of that ill-fated venture might be
hanged, the beam was actually brought from a farmhouse at Cookhouse
Drift to Pretoria, that the Englishmen might die as the Dutchmen
had died in 1816. Slagter's Nek marked the dividing of the ways
between the British Government and the Afrikaners.
And the separation soon became more marked. There were injudicious
tamperings with the local government and the local ways, with a
substitution of English for Dutch in the law courts. With vicarious
generosity, the English Government gave very lenient terms to the
Kaffir tribes who in 1834 had raided the border farmers. And then,
finally, in this same year there came the emancipation of the
slaves throughout the British Empire, which fanned all smouldering
discontents into an active flame.
It must be confessed that on this occasion the British
philanthropist was willing to pay for what he thought was right. It
was a noble national action, and one the morality of which was in
advance of its time, that the British Parliament should vote the
enormous sum of twenty million pounds to pay compensation to the
slaveholders, and so to remove an evil with which the mother
country had no immediate connection. It was as well that the thing
should have been done when it was, for had we waited till the
colonies affected had governments of their own it could never have
been done by constitutional methods. With many a grumble the good
British householder drew his purse from his fob, and he paid for
what he thought to be right. If any special grace attends the
virtuous action which brings nothing but tribulation in this world,
then we may hope for it over this emancipation. We spent our money,
we ruined our West Indian colonies, and we started a disaffection
in South Africa, the end of which we have not seen. Yet if it were
to be done again we should doubtless do it. The highest morality
may prove also to be the highest wisdom when the half-told story
comes to be finished.
But the details of the measure were less honourable than the
principle. It was carried out suddenly, so that the country had no
time to adjust itself to the new conditions. Three million pounds
were ear-marked for South Africa, which gives a price per slave of
from sixty to seventy pounds, a sum considerably below the current
local rates. Finally, the compensation was made payable in London,
so that the farmers sold their claims at reduced prices to
middlemen.
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