CHAPTER VII
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE BOER
Before turning to consider the English element in our society, we would linger yet a moment, before we finally leave the Boer, to consider some of the many assertions made with regard to him, and what of truth or falsehood appears to us to lie in them, and, above all, how they have come to be made.
It has been said, though it will probably never be said again by any person who knows what courage is, that the Boer is a coward and cannot fight. How, in view of his history during the last two hundred years, this ever came to be said, even by his bitterest foes, has appeared to us always a matter of some astonishment. We can explain it in any way only when we consider the fact that bravery, like every other virtue, may assume more than one shape, and that men accustomed to recognize it under one aspect do not readily recognize it under another. In the animal world, there is the courage of the bull terrier always eager for a conflict, and seeking a fellow combatant for the pleasure of fighting him, and the courage of the mastiff, whom you may even tread on with impunity as he lies sleeping at your foot, but who, should his master or his master's property be attacked, may be more dangerous than any bull terrier; there is the courage of the tigress robbed of her young, who faces fearlessly fire and death to regain it, yet at other times prefers to slink away from man, and there is the courage of the game-cock who chafes angrily against the bars to reach the game-cocks in other cages; and the courage of the red African mier-kat, who attacked, will try to get to his hole, and, if he cannot, will fight fearlessly to the death.[71]
[71] There are three species of mier-kat generally known in South Africa, two of which are mild and easily tamed, and the red mier-kat, a creature absolutely fearless and which no one has ever succeeded in taming.
In the human world, there is the same diversity of courage; there is the courage of the woman robbed of her infant, who climbs where no other human foot dare tread and recovers it from the eagle's eyrie, while the crowds below look on with breathless astonishment, and the courage of the peasant woman, who, after being broken three times on the wheel, on being asked to give up the names of her confederates, already almost past speech, shook her head in refusal, is again put on the wheel, and dies. This courage is quite consistent with an extreme distaste for conflict and an extreme sensitiveness to pain, and takes its rise only in natures so constituted that impersonal passions or convictions are capable of obliterating the natural bias, and this form of courage is probably the most indomitable. But there is also the courage, very rare in its way, of the prize-fighter, always showing his biceps and challenging his acquaintances, and to whom life would probably not be worth living without the applause and excitement of the ring; but who, on the other hand, if he knew that the odds were fifteen to one against him, and that there was neither money nor applause to be gained if he won, would probably refuse to fight at all.
Now the courage of the old-fashioned Boer tends markedly to resemble the first rather than the last type; and, why this should be so, a study of his history makes clear.
In all societies, whether savage or civilized, in which a distinct military organization exists, and in which military success is the path to emolument and power, much meretricious glory hangs about the occupation of the slayer.
From the Bornean savage, who until he has a certain number of skulls to hang about his waist may not marry or take share in deliberations of state, and the Zulu who must first wet his spear in human blood to be accounted a full man, on to many of our so-called civilized states, where in pageants and pastimes preference always is given to the man who slays or overthrows over the man who creates or produces, war is continually surrounded with a certain meretricious tinsel which ends by making the thing attractive for its own sake. It is to increase this artificial charm and render war attractive, that the savage hangs cats' tails round his waist, sticks cock-feathers in his hair, and beats on his tom-tom, when he is working himself up for battle, and that the so-called civilized man wears red stripes on his trousers, struts with his chin high in the air and his shoulders well held back and padded, and that he wears feathers, tails, or portions of metal, whatever is believed to make his appearance more striking and important. It is this which makes war and the warrior so attractive to the ignorant youth of both sexes. The soldier, dressed and holding himself as other men, would not be so eagerly sought after by the idle woman of the ball-room, nor would her cook be so anxious to walk about with the private if he walked as other human creatures walk and had the same kind of hat; and the peasant boy who enlists does so, in nine cases out of ten, because of the drums and the marches and the flags. It is not generally really the desire to feel the blood and the brain of a fellow-creature, dismembered by your hand, start out, and still less to lie with one slug in the stomach and another in the lungs, while the blood rises in mouthfuls and there is a rattle in the throat, that tempts the majority of men to become soldiers. It is, in nine cases out of ten, not the desire to kill or be killed, but a hunger for the tinsel with which war is surrounded, that influences men who affect a love for it; it is the hope of fame, metal stars, gilt crosses, the glitter and glare of the parade-ground, and the possibility of title and honours, which make the youth to enlist and maiden to say, "How beautiful is war!"
For the African Boer there has never been this meretricious tinsel pasted over the ghastly reality of war. His training for two hundred years has been in a wholly different school. For generation after generation the Boer has gone out with his wife and child into the wilderness, and, whether he wished it or no, the possibility of death for them and for himself, by the violence of beasts or men, has been an ever present reality. Night by night, as he has gone to sleep in his solitary wagon or daub-and-wattle house, he has had his musket within reach of his hand; and his wife hearing a sound in the night has sat up anxiously, whispering, "What is that!" and together they have listened while the children slept. If the Boer went out to hunt lion or buffalo, it was accompanied with no hilarious excitement at the thought of the applause of friends at his success, of pictures in the illustrated magazines, and the newspaper paragraph over the mighty hunter. All it meant was this, that, if he killed the lion, then the cow that gave milk for his children would be safe, and his small son could now go out and herd the lambs without danger. If he brought home a load of springbok or of wildebeest, it meant simply that his wife cut it up into biltong and hung it to dry outside the house for food. If his own right arm failed him, or he kept no sufficient watch and fell by the hands of savages or the jaws of beasts, then it meant that not only he died, but possibly that wife and children died with him; and it might be years before the news of their death travelled down to their kindred if, indeed, it ever reached them. If, single-handed and however bravely, he defended himself and his against odds of the mightiest kind, there was no admiring world before which his success would be blazoned forth. Even were he a commandant, and died at the head of his little body of men ever so heroically, there was no Westminster Abbey and no requiem for him; his comrades buried him where he fell, and a little heap of rough African stones on a wide African plain, with the African wind blowing over him, was all that he had for recompense. If he led his little band to victory, there was no triumphal entry into the city with bunting flying, and bars filled with drunken men, and hoarse mobs shouting incoherently, or delirious women anxious to kiss him, or present him with weapons gilt and jewelled--simply, he went home to his house or wagon, and his old wife kissed him and said she was glad he had come back; and his comrades said, "He is a good fighter," and next time there was war he had to go in front again. If his aim were true and his hand never shook and his courage never failed, then it meant life for himself and all dear to him; if he failed, then it was death; but that was all.
In this stern, silent school for generations the Boer has been trained. Courage has become inherent and hereditary with him; he sucks it in with his mother's milk; and, with it, an equally uncompromising antipathy to war and conflict. For generations, deadly strife and conflict, or the possibility of it, was part of the daily unending discipline of his life. He regards it now as one of life's crowning evils, to be avoided if possible--never to be flinched from when inevitable.
It is this attitude which has led to so much misunderstanding of the Boer's character by those who do not know him, and even by those who think they know him. His view with regard to the chase illustrates exactly his attitude toward human slaughter. If the leopards or wild dogs decimate his flocks, he will spend days in the most unwearied, skilful, and daring hunting; yet when he has killed them he will often return home, and say with a sigh of relief, "Now it will be six months before I need go after them again." If you inform him that in England at great expense men keep and breed up foxes which, with great damage to crops and hedges, they afterwards spend days in hunting, he will look at you as though doubting the truth of your assertion, remarking quietly: "But the Rednecks must then be mad? What do they want with the wild beasts?"[72]
[72] A young Englishman, coming out to Africa some years ago, for the purpose of distinguishing himself by shooting some big game, and hearing there was an old Boer on a farm near by who had the reputation of having been a most noted hunter, endless lions having fallen to his gun, in addition to large game and bucks, determined to visit him. He returned much disappointed. Instead of finding the house filled with trophies of the chase, which he hoped he might perhaps purchase, he found not one skin or pair of horns in the little three-roomed house. After very much difficulty, and as a matter of politeness to the stranger, the old man was at last induced to recount one or two hunting stories. The thing which he appeared to be most proud of was a frame of everlasting flowers which a daughter of his, who had been to school, had made and placed round a cheap print on the wall. He asked the young man whether they had those flowers in his country; and, when told they had not, smiled softly to himself at the manifest superiority of South Africa. It is, of course, not only the true Boer hunter who manifests this simplicity. If the works of the great African hunter, F. C. Selous, with their unvarnished tale of occurrences, be compared with the gilded narratives of some persons who have once shot a tiger from the back of an elephant or a tree-platform, the same unconscious simplicity will be manifest, dividing the man who can do the thing from the man who desires it to be thought that he can do it.
His attitude toward human conflict is exactly the same.
We say advisedly, after a long and intimate knowledge of the old-fashioned Boer, that never, in one instance, have we heard man or woman speak of war with joy, desire, or elation. For this folk there is no more glamour or amusement about war than for a nurse who has attended hundreds of cases of small-pox and cancer there is a glamour and glory about these diseases. It is with extreme difficulty that old men and women can be got to describe the conflicts they have lived through in their youth. After speaking a few minutes they will suddenly break off with: "Ah! but war is an awful thing! God grant that you may never see what we have seen, or go through what we have gone through." Not in any single case have we known the old Boer to vaunt himself on any success or act of courage. (With the young fashionable nineteenth-century descendants in towns, who have seen no fighting, it may be different.)
Having known intimately for five years an elderly man, and having always noticed certain marks on his face, we inquired one day the cause, and were surprised to learn that he had been an actor in some most heroic scenes; having in one instance gone up a mountain alone to fetch down the wounded, and that he bore on his body at least ten scars, gained in different conflicts. Neither by this man nor by any of his family, whom we had known intimately for years, had the fact been mentioned. "Yes," said a close female relative quietly, when we questioned her on the matter, "he is a man who can fight; he is not afraid"; and that was all. She regarded his action in the same light as a ploughman's wife might regard her husband's power to plough twenty acres in a given time and who would show no lofty pride in stating it--it was "all in the day's work." The old-fashioned Boer never speaks of war without becoming solemn and reverential, and, metaphorically speaking, taking off his hat. "Man fights; but victory is of God."[73]
[73] (_Note added in 1899._) This was illustrated when speaking some time back to a young Boer who was present at Doorn Kop, where Jameson surrendered, and who took part in that fight. We asked him what he thought of Jameson's men. He replied, slowly and quietly, that they were "flukse kerels" ("smart men"), adding: "You see, it was not that _we_ were better men than they were, but God was with us!"
It is this solemn, reverent, almost shy, manner of speaking of conflict, which misleads the ignorant stranger. In conversation several years ago with a man newly from Europe, we dwelt on what we believed to be the superb fighting and staying power of the African Boer. "How is that possible," said the newcomer, "when every individual Boer you meet is an arrant coward?" And he proceeded to illustrate his assertion by stating that a short time before in conversation with three young Boers, all greatly his superiors in size, he had offered to fight all of them in succession to show which was the better man, an Englishman or a Dutchman. They declined the contest, and one of them, smiling sheepishly, walked up to him and asked him to take a cup of coffee. "They funked it! They funked!" cried the newcomer. "They dared not stand up to me, and I was the smallest of the four!" It was not easy to explain to the Public School man that while he was regarding the Boer as an arrant coward, the Boer was regarding him, good-naturedly, as a fool! The Boer looked upon the offer, without any cause of quarrel, to break each other's skulls much as a horny-handed ploughman, the son of six generations of ploughmen, would regard an offer to plough six acres of land in which nothing was to be planted, simply in order to see who could plough the fastest. "He talks too much; he cannot fight," was probably the comment of the Boers after he had left them, and possibly each man merely misunderstood the other. The Englishman might have fought well, in spite of all his talk, and the Boer in spite of his silence. It is the difference in mental attitude, doubtless, which has misled the ignorant newcomer, and often the old inhabitant of the country who is not gifted with the power of reading human nature beneath its surface, into holding the view that the Boer is not a fighter. The truth is, the African Boer, devoid as he is of all passion for conflict, regarding war as part of the stern and unavoidable evil of life, to be quietly faced, but never sought, will, if his people, his land, or his freedom, are attacked, go forth to meet war with the same grim unbending resolution with which his forefathers went out to found their homes in the desert. As long as the African Boer remains the African Boer, whenever these things are touched, he will be found among his plains and on his kopjes ready to die, the silent, bravest child of our broad veld.
* * * * *
It has been said of the Boer that he is conservative; that he follows line by line the manners and traditions of his fathers; that that which has been sacred to his forebears is sacred to him; that he is immobile, and does not change. This is in part true; in part, untrue.
It is true that the primitive Boer has preserved in the South African wilds the ideals and manners of his ancestors of two centuries ago; that in him the seventeenth and even remnants of the sixteenth century are found surviving as among few peoples in Europe; but, if this survival of the past be taken to imply an organic incapacity on his part to adapt himself to change, if it be taken to imply the immobility of a weak and therefore unadaptable nature, which has not the vitality and strength to change, it is wholly untrue. Nothing so indicates the dogged, and almost fierce, strength of the South African Boer as this unique conservatism. Placed in a new environment, removed from all the centres of European culture and thought, thrown out into the African deserts, surrounded by the most crudely primitive conditions of life, and often by none but savage human creatures, nothing would have been easier, or would have seemed more inevitable, than that rapid change should at once have set itself up in the African Boer; nothing more difficult, and almost impossible, than that he should maintain that degree of cultivation and civilization which he had brought from Europe and already possessed. Again and again, under like conditions, men of lofty European races have been modified wholly. Thrown amid new and savage surroundings, when, after a few generations of isolation from European life, they again come into contact with us, we find that whatever of culture or knowledge they brought with them has vanished; their religion has atrophied; their habits of life have become modified, and, often inter-blending with the savage races about them, they have lost all, or almost all, the old distinctive European marks. They are a new human modification, but a modification often lower in the scale of life than even the savage peoples by whom they were surrounded, a degenerate and decayed people. On the east and west coast of Africa, in South America and elsewhere, again and again this has happened. Europeans, not having the conserving strength to retain what they possessed, and not being able to emulate the primitive virtues of the savage, have gone back in the scale of being. With the South African Boer this has not been so.
After two hundred years we find him to-day with that little flag of seventeenth-century civilization which he took with him into the wilderness two hundred years ago, still to-day gallantly flying over his head, untorn and hardly faded after its two centuries' sojourn in the African desert. With the instinct of a powerful race the Boer saw or rather felt his danger. The traditions, the faiths, the manners of his fathers, these he would hold fast by. To move, to be modified in any way by the conditions about him, was to go backwards; he would not move; so he planted his foot and stood still.
You say that he still wears the little short jacket of his great-great-grandfather's great-grandfather? Yes, and had he given that up, it would have been to wear none at all! So, line by line, his wife made it, carefully as his father's forefather's had been. You say he stuck generation after generation to the straight-backed elbow chair and the hard-backed sofa of his forefathers? Yes--and had he given them up, it could have been to adopt nothing more æsthetic; it would have been to sit on the floor; so he held solemnly to the old elbow-chair and the straight-backed sofa, almost as a matter of faith.
You say that he had only one book, and clung to that with a passion that was almost idolatry? Yes--but had he given up that one book, it could not have been to fill a library with the world's literature; it would have been to have no literature at all! That one book, which he painfully spelled through and so mightily treasured, was his only link with the world's great stream of thought, morals, and knowledge. That compilation of the history, poetry, and philosophy of the great Semitic people was his one possible inlet to the higher spiritual and intellectual life of the human race. In that he clung to it so passionately, worshipped it so determinedly, he showed his intense hankering after something other than the mere material aspects of life. He was not a man with a thousand avenues open before him toward thought and spiritual and intellectual knowledge, who wilfully shut his eyes to them, saying, "I will see none but this one": he had no other to see. If the Boer had forsaken his Bible we should have found him to-day a savage, lower than the Bantus about him, because decayed. In nothing has he so shown his strength as in clinging to it.
To one who wisely studies the history of the African Boer, nothing is more pathetic than this strange, fierce adherence of his to the past. That cry, which unceasingly for generations has rung out from the Boer woman's elbow-chair, "My children, never forget you are white men! Do always as you have seen your father and mother do!" was no cry of a weak conservatism, fearful of change; it was the embodiment of the passionate determination of a powerful little people, not to lose itself in the barbarism about it, and so sink in the scale of being. To laugh at the conservatism of the Boer is to laugh at a man who, floating above a whirlpool, clings fiercely with one hand to the only outstretching rock he can reach, and who will not relax his hold on it by so much as one finger till he has found something firmer to grasp.
That the conservatism of the Boer has in it nothing of the nature of mental ossification, and that he has preserved his pliability intact, is shown by the peculiar facility with which, when the time comes, the Boer leaps in one generation from the rear of the seventeenth-century thought and action to the forefront of the nineteenth.
The descendant of generations of old seventeenth-century Boers returns from his studies in Europe an enthusiast over all the latest inventions, an advocate of new ideas and an upholder of the newest fashions. In colonial life, it is a matter of common remark, none are more attracted to the new and the modern than the nineteenth-century educated Dutch, whether man or woman. It would almost seem as though that very dogged strength of character, which for ages has made him capable of retaining his hold upon the old, when the necessity for doing so passes, makes him equally resolute to grasp the new.
It has been said of the African Boer that he used his old flintlock gun for a generation after Europe had discarded it. That was true; but had he discarded it, it could only have been to adopt the assegai of the Kaffir. The day he was shown the Mauser, he recognized it and grasped it, and he has used it--not without effect!
In very truth, if one should speak frankly of what one most fears for the African Boer, it is a too rapid renunciation of his past, and an acceptance of the new without a sufficient and close examination. Were it possible that our words should reach him, fain would we apostrophise our old-world Boer and his wife thus:--"_Hou maar vas, Tant' Annie! Hou maar vas, Oom Piet!_"[74] Be not too ready to give up the past, we pray you. All that is new is not true, and that which comes later is not always an improvement on that which went before. We English have an old saying that if you keep your grandmother's wedding-dress sixty years, times will have come round and it will be in the fashion again. For the world goes round, O Oom and Tante!--unwilling as some of you may still be to believe it!--and that which was new becomes old, and that which was old becomes new again! Do not be too anxious to change your old customs, your simple modes of life, your deep faiths, till you know what you are exchanging them for: the world goes round; and the day may come when you, South Africa, and the world will have need of that which you now are so willing to throw away.
[74] "Hold fast, Aunt Annie! Hold fast, Uncle Piet!" practically meaning, "Stand where you are and hold your ground."
"Oom and Tante, I will whisper to you a secret! Here, in the very heart of this great material civilization of ours which swells itself so bravely and makes so much noise--here, in the heart of it, there are some of us men and women who are beginning to have our doubts of it; we are beginning to find it out. We may not be very many now, but we shall be more by and by; and we are beginning to question what all this vast accumulation of material goods in certain hands, this enormous increase in the complexity of the material conditions of life, necessarily leads to?
"We ask ourselves this:--Though we increase endlessly the complexity of our material possessions and our desires, does the human creature who desires and possesses necessarily expand with them? And the answer which comes back to us when we deeply consider this question is: No.
"There are times, when, looking carefully at this nineteenth-century civilization of ours, it appears to us much like that concretion which certain deep-sea creatures build up about themselves out of the sand and rubbish on the deep-sea floor, which after a time becomes hard and solid, and forms their grave. It appears to us that under this vast accumulation of material things, this ceaseless thirst for more and more complex material conditions of life, the human spirit and even the human body are being crushed; that the living creature is building up about itself a tomb, in which it will finally dwindle and die.
"We vary endlessly the nature and shape of the garments we wear; but the bodies for which they exist do not grow more powerful or agile; we multiply endlessly the complexity of our foods; but our digestions grow no stronger to deal with them; we build our houses larger and larger, but the span of life for inhabiting them grows no longer: the Bedouin of the Desert inhabits his tent as long: our cities grow vaster and vaster, but our enjoyment of life in them becomes no more intense: our states expand, but the vitality of their component parts rises no higher: we rush from end to end of the earth with the speed of lightning, but we love it no better than men who lived in their valley and went no further than their feet would carry them: we put the whole world under contribution to supply our physical needs, but the breath of life is no sweeter to us than to our forefathers whom the products of one land could satisfy.
"For the life of the human creature is but a very little cup in relation to the material goods of life; like the bell of a flower which can hold only one drop of dew, all which you pour in after that can only crush and drown it; it cannot contain it.
"You know, O Tante and Oom, that in South Africa your beasts suffer sometimes from a disease, of which the leading feature is that, while the creature eats more and more, it grows thinner and thinner. By and by it dies, and when you cut it open you find fastened upon its vitals a parasite, which consumed all its strength, which was never satisfied.
"Tante and Oom, it is a disease like unto this which eats deep at the heart of our civilization. It is no new disease; nations and persons have died of it before: the plains and riversides on this planet of ours are studded with the mounds beneath which are buried the remains of societies which once suffered from this disease. Some call it degeneration; some decadence; some over-civilization; some excess of luxury; some forgetfulness of God; it matters not what you call it: though the external symptoms may vary, internally it remains always the same.
"The horse-leech of our material civilization, in which endless wealth and material luxury is thrown into the hands of one section of the community at the cost of others, has three daughters which cry ever: 'Give! Give! Give!' They are fastened on to the very vitals of our modern life, and they cry never--'It is enough.'
"Fixed upon us as individuals, we hunger for more houses, more clothes, more furniture, more jewels, more shares, more dividends, whether we can use what we already have or not; and we hunger and strive after these things with as much passionate avidity as the savage after the hare, which if he nets will save him from death by starvation.
"Fixed on us as nations we cry, 'More lands, more trade, more fruits of the labour of other men in other lands, higher dividends drawn from foreign countries; more--though our national skin should crack, and we burst and die of it at last--more!--more expansion!'
"Oom and Tante, we beg of you, if you must partake of our nineteenth-century civilization with us, examine it carefully, and see what it is you are taking in. It is a brightly coloured flower, but at its centre sits a little gilded worm: if you must eat of it, eat the flower, but spew out carefully the worm, which spells death if once it fastens and breeds inside of you.
"There are certain things indeed, good and fair, which have got embedded in this nineteenth-century civilization of ours, O Oom and Tante, like diamonds in a mud stream: which are in it, but necessarily not of it.
"In the two centuries which have passed since you left Europe, certain things became common property which you know little of, and which are wholly good and fair; but we beg of you to understand they are not the outcome of that which comes to you with so much blare and glitter as 'nineteenth-century civilization'--the civilization of the bar, the stock exchange, the gambling saloon, the racecourse, gorgeous furniture, and ceaseless changing fashions; nor even of the railway train and the national debt. Do not think, we pray you, when you have grasped with both hands at the mud of our civilization, that you have therefore grasped the gems that may here and there be imbedded in it.
"There is music which you have not yet heard--Beethoven's; and there is Mozart's, as sweet as the twitter of the birds when you wake up in your wagon in the early dawn and hear them in the bushes round you in the veld, and as gracious as the sound of the raindrops falling on your roof after a long drought; but do not dream that the man who made it had any relation with the speculators whose loud talk overpowers you with its smartness, or the gorgeously dressed women who make you ashamed of your old black skirt. Believe me, it was made by a man leading a life poor and simple as yours, and who lies in a nameless grave; in poverty and loneliness the music came to him, and he made mankind for ever richer by it; and you can hear it as well in fustian and serge, on a wooden seat as from the king's box, with a band of diamonds above your forehead.
"We have also what you have not yet seen, a Moses, cut in stone. When you look at it you are conscious of strength and joy such as you have when you look up at one of our flat-topped African mountains, with the krantzes on its head, casting a deep blue shadow in the early morning;--it is well to look at it; but do not believe that all the millionaires of all the states on earth if they pooled their wealth could ordain that one line of that great figure should have been created: it was shaped by a man who, seeking after beauty and truth, found his God: a man who so lived with his creation that for weeks together he forgot to remove his boots, so that when he did so the skin came off with them: the fine gentlemen of the boulevards and the parks who talk of their superiority to you because they 'possess art' (meaning that they have made money enough out of other men's labour to buy the works of dead great men) would hardly have cared to walk down the street with him; his rough, strong face would have befitted better a Boer laager than a circle of modern fashion.
"There are books, O Oom and Tante, other than the one great book which you took into the wilderness with you; books which so widen the soul of the man who makes them his that he might, when dying, well thank the power behind life that he had been made man, and lived to read them: but, do not believe that they are the products of any trade demand, or have any relation with the wealth and luxury of the modern world. Rich men may buy them and bind them in vellum, and put them in their libraries; but that gives them no hold upon them. In simplicity, and often in solitude and in poverty, the great souls of earth have secreted that immortal honey of thought on which the soul of humanity feeds. And whether it be the wisdom of the great Greek who lay in the Agora in his coarse mantle, instructing without pay the youth of Athens; or the vision of the Puritan Englishman which visited him in poverty, blindness, and old age; or the immortal dream of the Italian exile; or the deathless trill, sweeter than the song of his nightingales, of the young English apothecary who died in Rome; or the philosophy of the great German who lived for thirty years in a little house in the little street of a little German town, desiring no more; or the human cry from the heart of the Scotch ploughman; or the sweet musings of the modern American who communed with his God at Concord for many years--there is no message of beauty or wisdom which it has been given to the soul of men to propound for its fellows, for which luxury or material complexity of life were necessary. There is no message of wisdom which has ever been uttered which you may not as well absorb, seated on the kopje behind your square mud-house, as in the velvet armchair of a duke's palace, with lackeys waiting your commands and the spoils of the universe gathered round you. Two narrow shelves of dingily-bound books will contain more of the world's true intellectual pabulum than a man has time in sixty years to absorb and make his own; and he who at the door of his hut in the veld has spelt out the book of Job and the chants of Isaiah, till he knows them by heart, may have a firmer hold on the world's loftiest literature than if he had hired a librarian to tend his ten thousand costly volumes. Let no man deceive you, O Oom and Tante, nor make you believe that literature is a grand thing, only to be enjoyed by men eating several courses at dinner and dwelling in capacious houses, nor that it can only be produced by men who have consumed thousands of pounds of the world's labour. The world's literature has been produced in simplicity and in poverty, and often in suffering; and that which was good enough for the men who wrote, is good enough for the men who would absorb it. They lie, Tante, they lie, Oom, who tell you that literature is dependant on luxury, or the material complexity of life, for its existence, or is in any way related to it. It is from the barren heath, not from the drawing-room carpet, however many coloured, that the wild bee extracts its honey.
"Even that knowledge of the conditions of existence which governs the relation of matter with matter, and which yields what is called scientific knowledge, and in a manner seems to mark what is called modern civilization, has yet no causative relation with the greater part of its material phenomena. It does not depend in any way upon the enormous amount of material luxury and wealth concentrated in a few hands which marks our material civilization. It was the Chaldean shepherd watching his flocks at night under a sky as clear and white-studded with stars as that which bends over the Karroo, who first noted the times and seasons of the heavenly bodies. It was the chemist labouring amid the painful fumes of his laboratory with hands as stained by contact with matter as are your sons' to-day when they come in from shearing who first discovered those combinations of atom with the atom, and the reactions of substance on substance, which are letting us slowly a little way into the secret of nature's workshop. It is the mathematician, oblivious of all externals, pondering year after year in his dingy study, with his outlandish garb, who masters at last those laws of relation, the knowledge of which gives to man half his mastery over matter. It is not even the man with the padded shoulders and gilt ornaments upon his dress, who boasts so loudly to you of the superiority of his nineteenth-century weapons of death, who ever made one of them, or even understands how they were made: nor does he always know how to use them! It is not the gaudily dressed man or woman who travels in the first-class compartment of an express train, and looks with wondering contempt at the slow-rolling old ox-wagon which your grandfathers made, who ever made or comprehends one crank or one piston in all that wonderful creation of human labour and thought in which they are luxuriously borne along; or who could invent or shape even the round solid wheel of a primitive donkey-cart. These wondrous material objects have been the outcome of the work of the labouring brains of the ages, and of the toil of hard-handed mechanics more roughly clothed and simply fed than you who have toiled beneath the earth, and in the fetid workshops, that those things might be. Our little long-tailed African monkey of the bush, if he should see one of his captured brothers, gorgeously arrayed and dancing on a barrel-organ, might well think what a wonderful brain his brother must have, and how much superior to himself he must be in mechanical skill to have made all these things. But in truth we know he made neither the clothes he wears, nor the organ: nor can he even turn the handle; he only dances to the music another makes. It is the little wild monkey out in the woods who has to find food for himself, to know which nuts to eat and where to find them, and who can choose his own pool to drink and dabble his hands in, who has to exercise brain and arm. It is not the jackdaw with the peacock's feathers tied on to his tail, who flaunts them round so overpoweringly, on whom they ever grew.
"Let no man deceive you, O Oom and Tante; it is not the men and women revelling in a surfeit of the material products of the labour of others, and scorning you because you have them not, who ever made the very material civilization they boast of. It is not the people scorning your little simple work and life, who could do even that which you can do. It is not the woman lolling back in her double-springed carriage who has the knowledge or invention or perseverance to originate or manufacture one of all those endless materials which cling about her; it was the Hindoo with a cotton cloth about his loins toiling at his loom for twopence a day who made the diaphanous muslin she wears; and the loom on which it was woven and the thread of which it is made were invented by his swarthy-skinned ancestors generations ago. The fairy frill upon her petticoat was sewn on by a needle-girl between snatches of weak tea and bread and butter and fits of coughing. It is not the general, gorgeous in gold lace and trappings, who could make even the jacket he wears; the fine steel dust from the sword at his side cost the life of the man who made it; it is the general's to sport, nothing more. It is out of the labour of hands grimed and hard as yours, and the toils of brains more weary than yours have ever been, that this material civilization is built up. If you accept it for you and yours, know what it is you are accepting. _Do not mistake the cat that laps the milk for the cow that gave it._ When you open a wild bees' nest and find inside a Death's-head moth, you are never fool enough to believe it had anything to do with the making of the honey: you know it is there to feed and--destroy. O Oom, O Tante, do not mistake the Death's-head moths of our civilization for the makers of its honey, or for the honey itself.
"Art, literature, science, the mastery over material conditions, whatsoever there is in this nineteenth-century civilization that strengthens the arm, or widens the heart, and broadens the intellect, and makes fuller the joy of life--extract it and make it yours.
"In our nineteenth-century civilization there is a little kernel of things rare and good and great, that have come down to us through the centuries, and that brave souls of labour have added their little quota of matter to even in our day. If you must crack the nut of our nineteenth-century civilization, we pray of you eat only this little kernel and throw away the great painted shell. For God's sake, do not try to eat the shell and throw away the kernel.
"You know, O my Oom and Tante, that, when the Jew smouses go round the country selling their goods, they sometimes sell to you clocks that glitter like gold; and you give for them your best sheep and oxen. But, when you take them to be tested by the town jeweller, you find they are not gold, but tin, gilt with brass; and they will not go.
"There is much, O Oom and Tante, in our civilization that is like to the Jew smous's clock! We warn you, be careful how you exchange your good old African wares for our modern merchandise. There is much brummagem about.
"For, believe us, Oom and Tante, there are some of us who have travelled the world round; we have seen and handled this thing, called nineteenth-century civilization. We have lived in vast cities, a few unconsidered streets in which contain as many souls as your whole land. We have seen half their population labouring continually without sunlight or fresh air, and, by a labour that knows no end, producing material things they never touch. We have seen white-faced children, who shall be the thinking, labouring, fighting men and women when we shall be in our graves, suck their white crusts dipped in tea, and look up at us with famished eyes: we have seen old men, after a long life of toil with no fireside to sit by, creep into the cold shadow of the workhouse, to die there. And we have seen also other sides of nineteenth-century civilization. We have been in the houses that are palaces, which all the world labours to make full and fair; we have pierced to their centres, and found there fair women surrounded by all earth yields, wearing silks which the Indian made for twopence a day, with which he bought a handful of rice and melted butter to keep him alive, and laces bending over which human eyes grew dim, and beside them in delicate cups stood tea which Tamil women near their hour of labour may have plucked with quivering fingers; and they have sat up on their sofas and looked at us with weary eyes, and asked, 'Is life worth living?' We have watched the fevered faces of men in the world's great stock exchanges, till pity seized us, and we could have cried: 'Is there no antifebrile that will slow this pulse and give these souls rest and peace?' We have stood at Monte Carlo, and seen prince and millionaire throw down coin as though it were not the life-blood of the peoples. We have seen lock-hospitals and the men and women that are in them, and also those who fill it but never come there; we have seen the parade, where human slaughter hides the dirt and ugliness of its trade behind plumes and gilt: we have seen the ballroom and the regal procession. We have seen, on the other hand, what is fair and beautiful in art and wonderful in science; we have seen brave and rare spirits, even amid the rush and dross of our civilization, walking peacefully on their own lofty little path, absorbing little, and imparting much. Yet, believe us, that in the still night we lie awake, and all that we have seen rises up as in a picture before us,--from Ratcliffe Highway with its drunken sailors and hopeless women, to Monte Carlo with its princes and prostitutes; from the Champs Elysées to the Karoo; from Grosvenor Square to Bethnal Green,--there yet rises up no picture of life more healthful and full of promise for the future, more satisfying to the whole nature of man on earth, than yours in the wide plains of South Africa. We know all its deficiencies, its lack of a certain variety, the absence of certain brilliant elements which the human spirit may feed on elsewhere; and, yet, it rises up before us as something wholly strong, and virile, and full of promise. There are even times when we have felt we would rather be the little naked Kaffir children who play, fat and shining, with the kids on your kraal walls in the African sunshine than be most of the modern men and women we have known; for the life is more than meat and the body than raiment.
"Hold fast, Tante! Hold fast, Oom! You have much to lose. Be careful how you exchange it. Cling to your old manners, your old faiths, your free, strong lives, till you know what you are bartering them for.
"Tante, dear Tante, be not too anxious to change your old, straight, black skirt for the never-ceasing vagaries of modern fashion, that sap at the life of the modern woman as an open running tumour saps at the strength of a body. Do not be too anxious to change, for a pile of gauze or straw and textile flowers, that old black kappie of yours, that has shielded you for so many generations from the African sun and the African winds, in peace and in war, on kopje and on plain.
"Believe me, if some great artist should see you as you sit there by your out-spanned wagon, in your old black dress with your infant at your breast, and the African sky above you and the still veld round you, and should paint you as you are, you would hang in the world's great galleries, and generations to come of men and women would say, 'How strong, how harmonious!' For your old black dress, and the veld and the sky, and the baby at your bosom can never go out of fashion, as the hoop, and the patch, and the tilted hat, and fashionable furniture, go; for they have that eternal dew of the morning upon them which rests on all things growing up out of nature and necessity, for use and not for show. And if it should have happened that, in the sterner moments of your life, one should have depicted you truly when, in laager or beside wagon, you stood side by side with the man who was your companion, to defend that you prized, then, believe me, that old black kapje of yours would have become a helm, and men in future generations, looking on, would say 'There were giants in those days.'
"Tante, we, the newest of new women, stretch out our hands to you, the oldest of the old, in the African veld: and we pray of you, stay where you are, and hold fast by what you have, till we come and meet you. We are coming to you in our own way. Stay where you are till we can join hands. In your life of fellow-labour with man, in your social productiveness and activity, you have realized much of that which we are seeking. Do not force your great, free, labouring-woman's foot into the gegawed shoes of the parasite female, from which we are striving to withdraw ours; do not compel yourself to accept those insignia of degeneracy, whether in clothing or bearing, from which we to-day are so passionately striving to free ourselves. Hold by your simple brave life a little longer, produce your many children, guide your household, share man's burden with him, peace or war, till in a new social condition you pass without enervation or degeneration to new labours, and to a companionship with man in new and intellectual fields of toil. Do not, we beg of you, believe that, when you wear a French bonnet and have an eighteen-inch waist or trip to tennis in patent shoes, you have come any nearer to grasping the good, the true, or the beautiful that may be embedded in our nineteenth-century civilization. Feel no shame, we pray you, for that strong capacious form of yours; from that strong untrammelled body of yours shall yet spring a race strong to do or dare, such as grows not beneath the waistband of an enervated parasitic womanhood.
"Tante, wait for us, we are coming; you have something to teach us, we have something to teach you; and it may be that when we have met and joined hands we will work out something fairer and better for our people and the world than has often been. Only do not decay from your ancient simplicity of living and toiling before the time is ripe and you can move forward to new labours. It would have been better that you should have fallen in your early conflicts with savages and beasts, and that nothing were left of you now but a name and a heap of stones on the African plains, than that you should absorb the diseases of an enervated and voluptuous modern womanhood--for then you would only have died and not rotted.
"Oom Piet, we pray of you, be not anxious to adopt the fashions of the nineteenth-century gentlemen of the club and front stalls in the theatre. Be not too ready to discard your velschoens and your moleskin trousers and your short jackets. In these things your fathers did gallant deeds and loved freedom. Any coat that a brave man wears is fashion enough: and the world comes to recognize that in the end. Cling to your independence; and the day will come when your old round felt hat will hang on the walls of the African houses of the future as Oliver Cromwell's ancient hat hangs to-day in an English mansion; and men of the future generations will say, looking at it reverently: 'Such wore our fathers in the days when they did great things!'
"Do not think too lightly of your own knowledge; nor dream that the man who knows well the path to the brothel and the bar, and knows how to bear and bull the share-market, or who gains in one night's play as much as your farm yields you in a year, has any advantage over you. It is better to know how to find your way without a guide over hills and plains of your native land, and to be able to sleep well out under the stars with your head on a saddle, and when necessary to die for freedom on your kopjes, than to know all the paths of the modern city. Hold by your past; and the day will yet come when, instead of following the fashion, you will set it.
"South Africa has still need of her old African lion and lioness. Hold on a while longer; let your past die hard!
"Is it a wholly unrealizable dream, that, if you could but cling for a while longer to your own simple healthful forms of life and gold-untouched ideals, you might make it possible for us in South Africa to attain to a fairer and more healthful form of civilization than has elsewhere been reached? Is it wholly unrealizable that you might help us to escape in their worse forms the diseases of modern life, and attain to its good: while eschewing its evil? That we might arrive at that condition of simple living and high thinking, under which alone the spirit and body of man attain their full development, and continual progress is possible? Or must you, too, fall before the molten calf, and worship it?
"Does it seem strange to you, O Oom and Tante, that we sometimes think of you as an antidote? That in the heart of this nineteenth-century civilization we remember you sometimes, with your simple, free, strong lives, as a man living in some torrid valley, where all around him were fever-smitten, might remember a hardy mountain plant which he had seen growing on the hill-tops in his youth, and cry: 'Ah, could they but eat of it they might yet be saved!'
"Therefore we ask of you, _not_ to accept too readily all that the men of this generation offer you, nor to be dazed by the glitter of our wares; but to select slowly and carefully, if you must select at all.
"For this nineteenth century is not the last century; nor is its civilization the last civilization; nor its ideals the last ideals! The twentieth is coming! And before it ends, it may be that this nineteenth will seem strangely distant! Men may then look over its mental wares as, after twenty years, one might look over a box containing the clothes of a dead elder sister, saying: 'This bit of real lace is still good, and that silk scarf; but the rest is all brummagem and long out of date.'
"For we, to-day, O Oom and Tante, with our new-found mechanical inventions, and our accumulations of material goods, are like little children who have just been given a rattle, and who spring it, till it deafens themselves and every one else besides, and can hear nothing else. We are like little long-tailed monkeys, who having found a bag of sugar think that there is now nothing left in life but to sit round it and eat it till they die.
"We are like to the children of Israel, when they built themselves the golden calf and then danced about it, saying: 'Thou art the Lord our God, and there is none like unto thee! From everlasting to everlasting, thou art God, and thy years shall have no end!'--till a Moses, it may be, shall come, and smite it into powder: and of that powder, mingled with the waters of life, shall all the nations that worshipped drink, and they shall call it Marah. And then it may be that they will seek for a new God.
"We say it, well knowing the soft burst of laughter which will arise now to-day, when the door is not yet closed on the nineteenth century, and its ideals are yet dominating the men and women of the age--that the time may come when even men of the world, those who live in the present, who labour not for the future nor learn from the past, will recognize that man is a complex creature, and that material wealth satisfies only a moiety of his nature, and that material goods possessed in excess by one portion of the community and lacking wholly to the other, mean a condition of disease--that the time will come when men will profess it in order to be called sane; that the railway-train which brings the prostitute, the stock exchange, and the foes to the freedom of a people, into the heart of its land, had better for humanity have been the slowest ox-wagon crawling across the plains; and had it taken two million years to come, so much better for the nation and the world; that the value of a species of conveyance whether for men or goods depends entirely to mankind on the nature of what it brings; that even that Ark of the Covenant of the nineteenth century--a new railway run by a joint stock company--is worthy of adoration, or is not, entirely by the increased strength of body, width of sympathy, clearness of intellect and joy in life it tends to confer on the folks among whom it runs; that a submarine cable used to whisper lies from land to land, and stir up the hearts of people against people, and to urge on the powerful to attack the weak, is the devil's own tube and has a connection direct with Hell; that a daily paper, not based on an earnest determination to disseminate truth, is a cup of poison, sent round fresh every morning to debilitate the life of the people; that the man who from his place in the national assembly rises and states the increase in his nation's imports and exports as though he were describing its entire weal or woe, without consideration of the human suffering and degradation or joy and good it may have cost to produce them, or without calculation of the benefit or disease to be caused by their consumption--is a fool; that it is more disgrace to a land to have in it one hungry, work-crushed soul than to have no millionaire; when it shall be recognized that the greatest nation is not that which numbers most bodies, but most fully-grown free spirits, and fewest crushed and broken; that an empire over human flesh and lands, and not hearts, is an empire of disease; that a central power which cannot propel the blood of sympathy and a common fellowship to the remotest member of its group is on the path to cardiac failure and a sudden death.
"We know that thus to speak is to enter into the Holy of Holies of the nineteenth century, and therein to blaspheme. Nevertheless, O Oom and Tante, it is possible that the day is coming when the stock exchange and the share market, in which the men of this generation worship the Lord their God, may pass away as the gladiatorial shows of the Roman Empire and the rule of the Inquisition, so mighty and overpowering in their days, have passed: it may be that a new Telemachus will yet leap down into the arena where men traffic with the life-blood of the nations, and, torn to pieces by the howling crowd, it will yet be said by future generations, 'From that day there were held no more share markets after the old fashion!'
"For this nineteenth century is not the last century! Nor are its institutions the last institutions! Nor is its God the last God!
"Therefore, seeing that these things are so, O Oom and Tante, and that we know not what part of our nineteenth-century wares shall be consumed up as stubble, be cautious how you traffic with us. Do not barter your old seventeenth-century wares, poor and simple as they may be, for that which you may have to part with again the next day. The twentieth century is coming: and it may be that, before it has reached its close, it may be found nearer the seventeenth than the nineteenth.
"_Remember the Jew smous's clock!_ There be many Jew smouses going up and down in this civilization of ours; and they deal in other things besides clocks. They will traffic with you for your land, your freedom, your independence, your very souls--for they hold that '_every man has his price!_'--and they will give you in exchange that which will not wear--a gilt-lined robe, which, soon as you wear it, will eat the flesh of freedom from off your bones and lick up the blood of liberty within your veins. Therefore, beware how you deal with them! That little which you have, hold fast till you see what shall come to pass.
"The last Belshazzar's feast has not been held! Be careful that, when the finger appears writing on the wall, you be not found also sitting at that table.
"Hold fast a little while longer, we pray of you, by your old ideals, your old manners, your simple old-world life. We--South Africa--the world, have need of you!"
So, were it possible that our words should reach him, we would fain apostrophize our old-world Boer and his wife. For our fear indeed is, not that he will exhibit any incapacity for accepting nineteenth-century ideals, but that he may swallow them too readily; and that South Africa, whose backbone he forms, may also suffer from that curvature of the spine, brought on by an excessive addiction to luxury and an ill-distribution of wealth, from which certain other peoples are dying.
* * * * *
To the other indictments which have been made, by those who have not understood him, against the Boer, it would seem hardly worth now referring, yet before we finally turn from him we may glance at them.
* * * * *
It has been said that he is priest-ridden.
It is undoubtedly true that the clergy of the Dutch Reformed Church held in the past, and still to a limited extent hold to-day, a unique position among their people as compared with the mass of modern clergy.
We in the heart of the nineteenth-century civilization regard, and most rightly, with an almost unqualified scorn the modern man or woman who submits to priestly dictation. Where the priest has no means of gaining information, experience of life, or abstruse knowledge not shared by other members of his society, submission to his dicta or dependence on his advice can spring only from two causes--an intellectual feebleness, which prevents the use of the man's reason, or a moral cowardice, which causes him to shrink facing the responsibility of dealing with the moral and spiritual problems of life, and renders him desirous of having them dealt with vicariously.
But it has not always been so. In the middle ages, when war and the struggle with crude material conditions of life occupied almost the entire bulk of the population, the clergy, as the one class exempt from these labours, and therefore leisured and with facilities for travel or abstraction in study, were of necessity much more than clergy. They absorbed in themselves several now wholly distinct social functions. Their monasteries were the repositories of learning; they themselves were the guardians of national tradition, law, and history; their knowledge of plants and leisure to study disease made them the healers of the folk; experiments and improvements in agriculture were made in their grounds; born of the people, they were naturally their political as well as moral and intellectual guides, and it was to them that the oppressed people turned everywhere for advice and leadership. In such a social condition, every individual born with unusual intellectual aptitudes or inclinations was almost inevitably bound to gravitate towards the Church; and the priesthood therefore were, not merely through training and position, but by a species of natural selection, the intellectual leaders of the folk. Therefore, for some centuries the inclination towards culture and progress in a monarch, a nation, or an individual might be measured, strange as it now seems, by their esteem of and devotion towards the clergy. It was under the influence of the clergy that those Gothic churches rose which are the glory and incarnation of their age; and it was round the monastery and the church that the intellectual and socialized life of the people centred. Incidentally, it happened that those who were the ghostly guides of the people were also at the same time the leaders of the people in learning and the upholders of their human rights.
On a minute scale, and under very different conditions, the clergy of the Dutch churches have for nearly two centuries fulfilled the same complex functions towards their people in South Africa. They have, it is true, been the sacerdotal consolers and guides of their folk; but they have been infinitely more. They have been the representatives of that higher learning and culture which circumstances denied to the mass of their people; the parsonage and the church have been the social points round which the national life centred, and from which have radiated whatever of culture and social organization was attainable.
It has often been scornfully described how when, in some remote Boer farmhouse, one son showed unusual mental alertness, he was predestined for the Church; how often, by rigid economy on the part of other members of the family, the money was accumulated to send him to college in Europe, and how on his return Mynheer was regarded with profound reverence and almost awe, even by his aged parents and the boys with whom he had minded lambs in childhood. This is true; but to suppose the feeling took its rise merely in a superstitious reverence for the black coat and ghostly prerogatives of the preacher would be to err profoundly. The man who returned from his studies differed materially, in the extent of his information and in his grasp on many aspects of life, from his brothers and companions who had remained tending the paternal flocks, or labouring in the family vineyards; and he had therefore necessarily certain social functions to perform, which could be performed by no other members of his community, and this apart entirely from his priestly office. The feelings with which he was regarded combined, with relation to one person, the feeling which the modern man entertains for his skilled lawyer, his family physician, his favourite writer, and his political leader. For years the clergy of the Dutch Church formed of necessity the connecting link between the Boer, widely scattered through remote districts, and the outer world. They were his advisers, often his representatives when he entered into contact with keen social and political elements of the hungry modern world. It was largely through them that such conditions of culture and knowledge as he had brought with him into the desert were maintained and enlarged; and they formed the channels through which were conveyed to him whatever influence of the modern world reached him. And nobly, on the whole, have they performed their task.
We believe that no one who is aware of our attitude towards sacerdotalism generally, to dogmatic theology everywhere, will accuse us of any undue bias in favour of the Dutch Reformed clergy on account of their function or abstract theological views, when we say that not only the Boer but South Africa generally is under debt to them.
Undoubtedly there must have been cases of self-seeking and self-assertion; and a certain narrowness is perhaps inherent in _all_ forms of sacerdotal rule; but, viewed as a whole, their influence must be pronounced as having been beneficial, and this far beyond the ordinary mean. They have striven manfully to introduce both in education and social life much of what was healthiest and most vitalizing in our modern civilization, and to exclude much of that which was lowest and most sordid; and with singleness of purpose, with but few exceptions from the days when Erasmus Smit followed the fortunes of the early fore-trekkers and his aged wife harangued the British Commissioner at Maritzburg, they have stood faithfully by and headed their people in all times of oppression and need.
The time is very rapidly approaching when the unique relation between the Dutch pastor and his flock will finally have ceased. For the last twenty years the intellect of the Boer race has rapidly been finding openings for itself; the bar, the side-bar, the medical profession, the professor's chair, administrative and political life are absorbing the brilliant youths. The time is very rapidly approaching when the minister will differ from his flocks only in the fact that he has gone through a course of dogmatic theology, and when he will be equalled or excelled in general culture and knowledge of life by the large mass of his congregation; and, with this change, he will take his place side by side with other clergy, whose usefulness is confined to the performance of their ghostly functions; and, with this change also, the Church will cease, save in exceptional cases, to draw the best intellects of the people, as it has done in the past. But we believe that in the future no impartial survey will be possible of the history of South Africa during the last two hundred years without it being perceived how large is the debt which, not the Boer alone, but South Africa generally, owes to the clergy of the Dutch Reformed Churches.
Not only does it imply a curious miscomprehension to state that the rule of the clergy has been autocratic and oppressive, but it has been his Church which has formed for the Boer his most valuable exercise ground in Republican Government, and his relations to it and to his clergy exemplify markedly his curious inborn gift for self-government. Not only have his pastors been men of the people, rising up from among them and from no selected class, and imposed on him by no authority from without; but in every case each particular congregation selects its own leader, and frees itself of him when proved undesirable. The submission with which, in a still largely oligarchically governed country like England, a single individual is allowed to select, by his own autocratic will, son, brother, or dependant, and place him in control of a church and parish with all its inhabitants for a lifetime, is a condition unintelligible to the free South Africa Boer, and one he would not tolerate for an hour.
On the other hand, while he would not tolerate, and still less submit to, or respect, or regard as valid, any authority imposed on him from without, having once for himself selected an individual in whom he reposes full confidence, he is peculiarly willing, not merely to support and follow him, but to submit to his administration of the law, provided it is a law which he has at first agreed to recognize; and this is equally true whether the case be that of a pastor, field-cornet, commandant, or the president of a state. It is this inborn peculiarity which yields to the Boer his remarkable aptitude for Republican Government, and prevents him from being amenable to any other form of rule.
It is often objected, when one questions the wisdom of that unwritten law which ordains that, in the English Army, out of an empire of countless millions, all its officers should yet practically be selected from a comparatively small knot of wealthy families known as Society, and that such a process must hopelessly cripple the army; that the English nature is so addicted to oligarchic rule that the bulk of men born in England could never be made to respect, follow, or submit to, one of themselves; that the fact that a man was born in their street, shared the conditions of their daily life, and belonged to their own class, would cause them to look down upon and despise him. Whether this be true of the English or not, with the Boers exactly the reverse is the case. It is precisely the man of the people, growing up among them, sharing their life and social condition, whom, when he has won their confidence and they have selected him to his post, they are willing to follow and support with a whole-heartedness seldom accorded to rulers or leaders of men.[75] They submit to the man because they regard him as the incarnation of their own will.
[75] It is clear how large an advantage this gives the Boer in case of war. A Boer nation containing 30,000 adult males has the entire 30,000 from whom to select its most efficient generals and leaders; while in a vast Empire like that of England the choice is confined to so small a body as to be absolutely minute when compared to the bulk of the people. What Oliver Cromwells, Cronjes and de Wets there may be slumbering among the hard-handed farmers and working-men of England no man knows or ever will know. The strength of the dominating oligarchy is too great.
It is further often said, when one animadverts on the fact that members, connections, or, worse still, dependants of those small circles of families forming the administrative oligarchy in England, are almost always sent out as Governors to the Colonies of Canada and Australia and New Zealand, that the English-speaking people of these countries would not respect men chosen by themselves, and that no successful form of government would be possible were not foreigners sent them. Whether this would be the case in Canada or Australia we have not had personal means of judging, but in South Africa the very reverse is true. Were a prince of the Guelph family or a Duke's son sent out, though loaded with wealth and oligarchic honours, he would never have one half of the influence over or submission from the majority of South Africans that a man born among them, growing up among them, and selected by themselves, would readily obtain. "_He is our man, who knows us and whom we know; we have chosen him, therefore we will follow him!_"
It is the complete failure to understand this ineradicable instinct on the part of the African Boer which has caused so many of those who have attempted to interfere in South African affairs so grievously to fail. With a race in which this instinct is so inborn that it manifests itself in all the relations of life, towards pastor, magistrate, and general; with an individual instinct for not obeying any person to whom it has not first consciously and deliberately delegated its authority; and then an instinct for following and supporting that person,--the South African nation, in which the Boer element predominates, is bound ultimately to become free, self-governing, independent, and republican.
* * * * *
It has been said of the Boer that he is bigoted and intolerant in religious matters. That this accusation should ever have been made has always appeared to us a matter of astonishment. It can only have been made by those who either know little or nothing of the true up-country Boer, or who confuse intolerance with the totally distinct attitude of a peculiar steadfastness to your own forms of faith. When we remember that it is not much over a century since the last execution for abstract opinion took place in Europe; when we recall the fact that within the memory of those still comparatively young, in the most enlightened community (or that which so considers itself), a man cultured, able, and public-spirited, was excluded from the performance of his legislative duties, imprisoned, and befouled by the Press and the nation on account of his view with regard to the nature of a first cause; when we mark that, in the same community, it was only the other day that Christians holding one form of shibboleth were with difficulty, and after fierce struggles, brought to admit brother Christians using another closely-allied shibboleth to any participation in public life or honours; when we consider the fact that to-day a Roman Catholic or a Jew is still in England excluded from the highest offices of State on the ground of his abstract views, and is on that ground regarded with scorn and disgust by the large mass of his fellow-countrymen; when we recall the fact that it is not twenty years since a book speculating on the abstract grounds of religion was refused at the bookstalls of the United Kingdom, and publicly destroyed in several cases; when we note the contemptible and grotesque riots which to-day occur in the heart of our most modern cities over the cut of a cassock or the burning of a pitiful pot of scent; when the gift of a work of art representing a mother and child to a board school is sufficient to rend an Anglo-Saxon community with fierce and brutal passions; when these things are considered, it is surely unintelligible that a charge of religious intolerance should be made against the South African Boer. With every excuse for an exceptional intolerance, a large portion of his ancestors having come to South Africa to escape religious persecution in Europe, he yet compares favourably with other nations in this respect, and the burnings of Quakers and witches which disgraced even New England have never been known in Africa. No man has ever suffered death for his religious views on these shores.
Firmly wedded to his own faith and not readily allowing any interference with his own attitude, he is yet singularly willing to abstain from interference with the abstract views of others. With regard to the up-country Boer of the present day, we are personally exceptionally qualified to pass an impartial judgment, having through life held views on theological matters not shared by the bulk of the societies about us; and we can unqualifiedly assert that it is not in the true primitive Boer farmhouse that an inquisitorial intolerance, or the desire to suppress the right of the individual soul to its own convictions, will ever make itself felt. There is far more bigotry and inquisitorial interference with the right of free thought in the English parsonage and the nineteenth-century drawing-room than in the primitive up-country Boer farmhouse. Wherever bigotry and intolerance make their appearance among the Boers, they will always be found to take their rise among the more cultured nineteenth-century part of the population. Many years ago a Boer woman once inquired of us how it was we never went to any church. We replied that our religion was not at all the same as hers, and that according to our view it was not necessary to go to church. She asked us whether we could explain to her what our religion was like. We replied that we could not, each man's religion was his own concern: and she dropped the matter, nor referred to it again till nearly two years later, when she said: "You told me once that your religion differed from mine; but the more I know you the more I begin to think we must have the same religion. When I sit alone with my sewing I think very far away sometimes; and sometimes it occurs to me like this: If I had many children, and each one spoke a different language, I would try to talk to each child in the language it understood; it would be always me speaking, but in a different language to each child. So, sometimes I think, it is the same God speaking, only He speaks to you and to me in different languages."
When it is remembered that this remark was made by an unlettered Boer woman, who could neither read nor write, I think it will be allowed that the learned, philosophic, modern thinker may sometimes not have much to teach "the ignorant Boer" with regard to the true basis of philosophic religious toleration.
* * * * *
The third indictment which is made against the Boer with regard to religion is that he is superstitious, that he allows his religion to dominate every concern in his life, instead of confining it to that small sphere in which alone in modern life conformably with respectability its influence is allowed.
It may be at once stated that, in a certain sense, the statement that the African Boer is dominated by his religion is true, but in how far this indictment is one from which he suffers will vary with the standpoint of the individual considering it. We, in this latest phase of the nineteenth-century civilization, are so habituated to seeing men and women walking about, carrying with them wholly dead or more or less moribund religions which, like decaying flesh, corrupt the atmosphere, and render putrid the whole environment of those who bear it, that large numbers of us have reached a point at which we are unable to conceive of religion as anything but dead, a thing to be restricted within the narrowest possible limits, if life is to remain livable.
But the difference between a dead and a living religion is vital; the first weighs down the man who carries it; the living religion up-bears him. There is perhaps no life quite worth living without a living religion, under whatever name or form it may be concealed, vivifying and strengthening it. The Boer's religion is alive, it is in harmony with his knowledge, his ideals, and his aims. Therefore it is his strength.
Theoretically, so far as its dogmatic clothing is concerned, his religion is a form of Christian Protestant Calvinism, and differs in no way from that still professed by the majority of Scotchmen, from the Aberdeen grocer to the Edinburgh professor. Actually, it differs very materially from that held by the large bulk of any truly modern population.
It is often said of the lives of men congregated in vast cities, under more or less completely artificial conditions, that they suffer from these or those disadvantages--that the de-oxygenated air of cities retards muscular development, that it renders persons continually exposed to it anæmic; that the continual noise, vibration, and lack of direct sunlight have an injurious effect upon the nervous system and that a debilitated physical condition is bound to arise. But the most serious loss entailed by life in vast cities under artificial conditions, whether in the modern or the ancient world, is seldom directly referred to.
The story of the small modern child, born and brought up in a modern town, where her father, an electrical engineer, had installed all the lights in the street and houses, and who, when at four years old was taken to the country for the first time and allowed to see the stars, said: "Did my father set them up too?" may or may not be true; but it illustrates with force the terrible vacuum in knowledge and experience of the most profound aspects of existence which a life walled in amid artificial conditions tends to produce. That which the Buddha left his kingly palace and sat beneath his Boh-tree to seek; that which Zoroaster found in his solitary sojourn on the mountain top, and Mohamed in his secret cave, which the Hebrew leader discovered in the deserts of Sinai, and the teacher of Galilee in the wilderness and on the mountain tops; that which, having perceived, they strove to give voice to in the world's bibles, and which has become symbolized in the world's temples, from the rock-hewn cave temples of India to the Holy of Holies of the Jew; from the Greeks' Parthenon on the hill-top bathed in light and air, to the Gothic cathedral with its forest of shafts--that of which all the religions and all the dogmas are but the tentative attempts of the struggling human spirit to give voice to--this reality is not easily perceived as present and always over-arching when the individual is swathed in by conditions of life, the result of man's small labours, and seemingly having no root beyond his own will; and when the tumultuous sounds and minute details forced on it at every moment almost blind and deafen the individual to the consciousness of anything beyond the fragmentary and present.
This is the serious danger and almost certain loss to which the spirit of man exposes itself, when he severs himself from all contact with the living and self-expanding forms of nature beyond himself, and surrounds himself purely by those which have a relation to himself, and have been modified by his action. It is an inverted view of the universe, with accompanying narrowness and blindness, which, far more than any danger of physical asphyxiation and nervous muscular deterioration, constitutes the evil attendant on the ordinary life of men in great cities, or wherever immersed in purely artificial conditions.
Undoubtedly there are lofty and powerful spirits who have reached a deep and calm clear-sightedness which no aspect in the world immediately about them can obscure, to whom the city and the petty sights and sounds of our little human creation are seen abidingly to be as much the outcome and mere passing development of the powers beyond and behind them as the silent plain and the mountain top--
"And what if trade sow cities, Like shells along the shore; And thatch with towns the prairies wide With railways ironed o'er?
They are but sailing foam-bells Along thought's causal stream, And take their shape and sun-colour From that which sends the dream."
No doubt the Jew of Amsterdam in his small room grinding his lenses, living on milk-soup and a few raisins, found his piercing mental vision no more shut in by the city-roof above him than had he slept with Jacob's desert-stone for a pillow; and no doubt there are as rare souls, immersed externally in the very noisiest civilization about us, who yet see serenely over and above it. But, with the mass, this is not so; we cannot see past the little material conditions that press on us.
When one bends over an ant-heap on a vast plain, that ant-heap with its little millions of existences toiling there are to the one bending over it but an infinitesimal part of the vast landscape, where a hundred other ant-heaps, broken and new, lie around, and over which the sun shines and about which the mighty mountains rise; but to the ant, down in the ant-heap, it is the universe; he does not even know that his ant-heap was heaped out of the red sand and will return to it to-morrow; he knows nothing of the fallen ant-heaps or of the great human eyes looking down at him; were it possible for him to climb to the top of his ant-heap and raise himself up on his tiny legs, and once to look round, he might know something of what the ant-heap was.
Most of us in our human ant-heaps are unable to lift ourselves out of them; we mistake the handful of dust we have accumulated round us, and which we call our cities and civilization, for the universe; and the noise we make in gathering it we think is the sound of eternity. Were it not for two things which we cannot obliterate in our civilization--the wail of the newborn child, and the long straight, quiet figure, knowing nothing and seeing nothing, which the hearse carries away--it might well be that we should sink into a state of ignorance and superstition so profound that we should believe, not merely every day but in our sanest moments, that the will of man was the ruling power of life, his work the end, and we ourselves the universe, and beyond us, nothing!
From this form of ignorance and superstition our primitive Boer is saved, assuredly not because of any superior wisdom and insight inherent in him, but by the conditions of his life. For the average human creature reads life as it is continually presented to him. The Boer has not willed to go into the wilderness and the desert to seek for wisdom with the teacher of Galilee or the sage of India; but for the two hundred years of his South African wandering that which prophet, seer, and poet have in all ages turned to for wisdom has been laid open as a book before him, whether he willed it or not; so that he too, however slow or dull his individual intelligence, has been compelled by the daily conditions of his life, with more or less clearness, to decipher it. Dark and blinded beyond the average of human souls must have been the old fore-trekker, who, as at sundown his wagon crept for the first time into some vast plain where no white man's foot had ever trod, and as the blue shades of evening fell across the countless herds of antelope, and the far-off flat-topped mountains stood sharp against the sky, could cry "I, _I_ am the centre of this life! The earth is mine, and the fulness thereof!" And the solitary African youth who has been out in the veld looking for his father's sheep all day, over kopjes and through dried-up watercourses, and who walks home in the starlight, and hears the jackals call, and pauses, listening silently to hear if it be not the young lions crying for their food, has been exposed to educative influences totally distinct from those which he would have been subjected to had he spent the day in a factory amid pulleys and wheels and a crowd of labourers, and had walked home at night through a gas-lit crowded street, past bars, music-halls, and policemen, to his garret. The last music-hall air, the picture of light streaming through the public-house doors, the whirr of the machinery, and a thousand minute complex sense-impressions springing immediately from the action of man, the one, of necessity, carries home with him. The other has none of these complex man-related sense-impressions; he loses much which the other wins, but he also has something of his own. Whether he will or no, however dull his ear and dim his eye and torpid his intellect, he carries home with him pictures of the colossal things which he has seen, things which the son of Jesse beheld when in his youth he tended his father's flocks at night, to guard them from the wolf and the bear, and which, when King of Israel, he reproduced in that chant which has gone down the ages: "When I behold the heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained--what is man that Thou art mindful of him!"
The African woman on her solitary farm may have no inherent power for grasping large wholes, or seeing behind small externals to the moving cause beyond; yet when she sits all the morning sewing in her still front-room, while the children play out in the sunshine by the kraal wall and the flies buzz round, and she sees wherever she raises her head, through the open door, twenty miles of unbroken silent veld with the line of the blue mountains meeting the sky, she is exposed to eight hours of an educative influence entirely distinct from that she would have undergone had she sat in a tenement-room in a city court, and heard her neighbours tramp to and fro on the stairs, and the omnibuses crash in the street, and seen only from her window, when she looked out, the red-brick wall opposite. No man, be he hunter, traveller, or trader, or who or what he may, who has ever been exposed to both orders of influences, will say that their educative effect is the same, or that a man can remain long exposed to either set of influences, the artificial life of cities or the solitude of the desert, without being profoundly modified by it, above all, as to his view of existence as a whole, which is religion.
The Boer, however blind by nature he may individually be, has always open before him the book from which the bibles were transcribed--and it has been impossible for him to fail wholly to decipher something from it. Therefore, even his dogmatic theology (and it is wonderful how very little real dogmatic theology the true primitive up-country Boer has!) lives, animated by a great, direct perception of certain facts in life.
That which the Essenes sought in their rocky caves, which the Buddhist thinker to-day immures himself on his solitary mountain peak to find, which the Christian monks built their monasteries and cloisters to acquire; to supply men artificially with the means of partially attaining to which dim-aisled churches and pillared temples have been reared in the midst of dense populations; which the old Dissenting divine was feeling after when he said: "Spend two hours a day alone in your room with the window open if possible, in quiet and thought; your day will be the stronger and the fuller for it"; and which the Protestant hymn aims at when in its quaint doggerel it says--
"Night is the time to pray; The Saviour oft withdrew To desert mountains far away; So will his followers do. Steal from the world to haunts untrod, To hold communion there with God."
--that which religious minds in all centuries and of all races have sought after, has been strangely forced on the African Boer by his silent solitary life amid vast man-unmodified aspects of nature. And with all that he may lack in other directions of knowledge and wisdom, of keenness and versatility, that which the conditions of his life had to teach him, he has learnt. Therefore, though his dogmatic theology is in no sense higher or different from that of others, his religion oftentimes lives when theirs is dead.
We are aware, it may be said, that all this is purely a misconception; that the man of unusual intellect seeks nature and solitude merely that his own large mental powers may unfold themselves unhindered; that what the saint, the philosopher, the poet, and the prophet find, they take with them; that to the mere bucolic mind the midnight sky studded with stars is but the covering of the plain where sheep feed; and that the most infinite sky over him when he off-saddles alone at midday in a vast plain is but that to which he looks up in order to find the time. But this is not so. The great analytical reasoner may find, labouring in his laboratory, the great thinker in his study, watching the processes of his own mind, may discover, that which the vast man-untouched processes of nature testify of; it is exactly on the simple purely receptive mind that the silence and solitude of vast unmodified natural surroundings have the most educative effect.
Driving on a hot summer's day in a cart across a great African plain, with the light pouring down on the brak bushes and karroo, till it seemed to shimmer out of them, the Boer who drove us was, as usual, silent. He was a man six feet in height, large-boned and powerful, with a still blue eye, an iron will, and indomitable persistency. Living in a remote part of the country, he seldom went to church more than once in the year, and could with great difficulty read a chapter in the Bible. During the years we had known him we had never heard him refer to anything more profound than his sheep and cattle, and the habits of tiger-leopards, upon which he was an authority. After driving about two hours, the horses' feet sinking into the sand and coming out again with a sucking sound, but no movement breaking the hot stillness, he looked round at us, with that peculiar shy glance which marks men who live much alone, and do not often try mentally to approach their fellow-men, and said slowly in the Taal: "There is something I have long wanted to ask you. You are learned. When you are alone in the veld like this, and the sun shines so on the bushes, does it ever seem to you that something speaks? It is not anything you hear with the ear, but it is as though you grew so small, so _small_, and the other so great. Then the little things at the house seem all nothing. Do you hear it, too--you who are so learned?"
We are aware of the guffaw of laughter which would greet such a statement from souls on the stock exchange, in drinking-bars and fashionable clubs, and perhaps the national assemblies where the representatives of civilized nations meet. This man, it would be said, had lived so much alone with nature that he had become a fool. If he had been fifteen years in the share market or the diplomatic service, and had lunched at his club and spent his evening at the theatre or the café chantant, he would never have felt himself or his affairs small, nor would he have perceived anything greater than himself. It will be said it was all ignorance and superstition.
We reply: "This may be so; but if it is, then burn your world's bibles, and destroy your world's temples, for that which the world's bibles were written to express and its temples built to symbolize is an 'ignorance and superstition.' Yet, before we accept your verdict finally, answer us these two things: Where were you and I eighty years ago? Where shall we be eighty years hence, when this throbbing hand that writes to-night is a handful of dust, and your mouth that smiles is quiet beneath six feet of earth? Answer these questions without 'ignorance and superstition,' and we, too, will allow that the man--who, in the presence of the vast life of nature which existed for ages before he was and will continue for millions after he has ceased to see, which waxes and wanes without regard of him or his ends--is a fool, when he feels himself less than a fine grain of sand in the mighty circle of that life in which we live and move and have our being and are continually sustained."
The day may come when, with changing conditions of life, the Boer will no more live in the presence of these large realities, and then his religion will be dead; whatever external form it may take.
It may be, that then he will have much of the learning of the schools, and his own material life will have become infinitely complex, and his knowledge how to govern the powers of nature for the gratification of his own instincts almost unlimited; he may have luxuries, comforts, amusements he knows not now--but it may not be so well with him.
It may be, the day will come when he shall rear for himself vast cities, and walk, with the kings that have been, upon their walls, crying, "Behold this is Babylon, my great city, which _I_ have built"--and know not that the sands of the desert shall cover it, and the little shrew-mouse build her nest there.
And, if that day come, when the desert shall hold no more for him any burning bush, and no spot on earth be longer sacred to him; when, with increased external knowledge and material wealth, the little _I_ grows always greater and greater for him, and the universe beyond less and less, then he will no longer fight so bravely on his kopjes or live so peacefully on his plains or fall asleep so quietly when the time comes to lie beneath the sand and bushes--and it will not be so well with him.
When the day comes, when he exchanges the voice of the desert for the ignorance and superstition of the city, then, however vast his expansion in certain directions, the secret fountain of strength of this strange little people will have dried up, and they will be even as others.
* * * * *
Finally, it has been said of the African Boer that he does not regard the African native as his brother, nor treat him with that consideration with which man should treat his brother man.
The consciousness of human solidarity, with its resulting sense of social obligation, has in all ages developed itself in proportion to the nearness of man to man. Initiated in the relation of mother to child, where the union is visible, physical and as complete as is compatible with distinct existence, it has spread itself out successively, as the sentient creature developed, through the relations of family and the tribe to that of nation, and has extended, even though in a partial and undeveloped condition, to the limits of race; but here, almost always, in the average human creature as up to the present time evolved, the growth has stopped. Even the most ordinary man or woman, in the bulk of the societies existing on the earth to-day, is conscious of a certain union with, and more or less strong social obligation towards, the members of his own family; most men are conscious of some sense of solidarity with, and of some social obligation towards, the members of their own national organization; and probably few are wholly unconscious of a certain dim sense of identity with, and a vague (though it may be very vague) sense of obligation towards, men of their own colour and racial development. But only the few, and they the very few, most fully evolved and exceptionally endowed humans have been in the past or are even at the present day capable of carrying the sense of solidarity and social obligation across the limit of race. Nor, when we consider how intermittent and often feebly active is the social instinct even within the domain of the family, the nation, and the race, is it to be wondered at that its action should cease almost entirely when the vast chasm of racial distinction is reached. While humanity as a whole is still in so primitive a condition that even the bonds of family kinship, the close interactions of a common nationality with common language, common tradition, and common institutions, the similitude which binds nations of a common race, are yet continually inoperative in insuring any approach to truly socialized action; when nations as closely knit by ties of physical resemblance, common racial habits of thought and ideals, as are all the European nations, are yet continually animated by the bitterest antagonism; while Frenchman hates Englishman and Englishman German and German Italian, it is assuredly in no way to be wondered at, that, when humans are brought into contact with those as widely dissevered from themselves, not merely in colour and external configuration, but in the much more important matters of anatomical structure and the racial ideals and habits of life, the results of countless ages of growth, as are Mongolian and Aryan, European and African, that social instinct should become in the main entirely inoperative.
Ignorant persons may suppose, when they hear to-day of Americans who belong to what is probably, on the whole, the most enlightened and humane state on the globe, first mutilating and partially dismembering the Negro, and then applying the fire gradually to parts of his body that he may roast the more slowly, that the men performing such deed must of necessity be cut off from the rest of their race by a fiendish ferocity peculiar to themselves and an anti-social structure of mind. Such ignorant persons also undoubtedly picture to themselves the owners of the English slave-ships (who have perhaps inflicted a larger amount of suffering on the human race than any other body of men of equal number in the history of the race) as persons wholly devoid of human sympathies, who could not be trusted to deal justly or generously with their own wives or children, and possessed of no sense of social obligation. But we, who have obtained a sorrowful knowledge through personal experience of racial problems, we know that this is not so. We know well that a man may bristle with all the ordinary domestic and private virtues, may be a loyal husband, a devoted son, a thoughtful father, a citizen who abides within the law and would give his life for his nation, and may even be a man who would not easily inflict an uncalled-for wrong or wanton cruelty on any man of his own race and colour, though divided from him by national and lingual differences; and yet, when the limit of racial continuity is reached in this same man, there may be a sudden, complete and abysmal hiatus in the action of the moral sense and the socialized instincts. (Strangely enough, in our own personal experience, several cases of the most painful cruelty and injustice, on the part of white men towards black, have been cases in which the white men concerned were exceptionally good-hearted, generous and open-handed men. In one instance of particular cruelty, where two white men were concerned, upon seeing our manifest discomfort at their action, they were sincerely distressed. "If I had any idea you would take on like that about a miserable nigger, I would never have touched the wretched beggar!" remarked one. Persons ignorant of the racial problem may regard it as improbable, if not impossible, that men who could perform acts of ruffianly brutality towards an African should yet be so sensitive as to be deeply concerned that they had momentarily distressed a looker-on, whom they hardly knew and had no personal friendship for, but who was of their own race. Yet, persons who have practically no knowledge of inter-racial relations know that not merely is this psychologic attitude possible, but that it is a matter of universal occurrence.)
Social instinct has never in the past, and does not to-day, except in a few and exceptional instances, spontaneously tend to cross the limits of race.
The sooner this truth is recognized as axiomatic by all who attempt to deal with problems of race, the greater will be the possibility of dealing with them in a spirit of wisdom.
To blind our eyes to this fact, and then attempt to comprehend or deal rationally with race-problems, is to act as would a schoolboy who sets himself to solve an arithmetical puzzle in which he had failed to set down the leading term. The sooner it is recognized as axiomatic that the distinctions of race are not imaginary and artificial, but real and operative; that they form a barrier so potent that the social instincts and the consciousness of moral obligation continually fail to surmount them; that the men or the nations which may safely be trusted to act with justice and humanity within the limits of their own race are yet, in the majority of cases, wholly incapable of so acting beyond those limits; that only in the case of exceptional individuals gifted with those rare powers of sympathetic insight which enable them, beneath the multitudinous and real differences, mental and physical, which divide wholly distinct races, to see clearly those far more important elements of a common humanity which underlie and unite them, is the instinctive and unconscious extension of social feeling beyond the limits of race possible; that, for all others, wholly just and humane action beyond the limits of their own race, can be only attained as the result of a stern, conscious, unending, mental discipline; and that perhaps no individual man or woman is at the present day so highly developed as regards social instinct as to be certain that they can at all times depend on themselves to act with perfect equity where inter-racial relations are concerned; that no individual is so highly developed morally as to be able wholly to dispense with a most careful intellectual self-examination when dealings with persons of alien race and colour are entered on; and, finally, that the great moral and intellectual expansion which humanity has during the ensuing centuries to undergo, if harmonized human life on the globe is ever to be, is in the direction of extending the social instincts beyond those limits of the family, the nation, and the race, to the humanity beyond those limits:--the sooner we recognize as axiomatic these truths, the quicker will be our progress towards the comprehension and satisfactory solution of racial problems; and, failing to recognize these truths, it is perhaps wholly useless for anyone to attempt to deal with the moral and social aspects of inter-racial questions.
With perfect uniformity throughout the whole history of the human race in the past, we find strong anti-sociality appearing at the point where the light Aryan race comes into contact with darker races; and it appears to make little difference which nations are concerned.
We Anglo-Saxons have the unhappy priority of having caused to the natives of Africa, in our functions as slave-traders, slave-owners, and explorers, probably more than fifty times as much suffering as any other European nation. It appears, indeed, to have been our unhappy prerogative to have been born to be the perpetual scourge and torture of this vast, wonderful, attractive continent and its interesting children. Probably at least fifty Africans have perished under the lash, have borne the manacles, or been shot by the guns of Anglo-Saxons, for every one that has been lashed, manacled, or shot by a Frenchman, German, Spaniard, or European of any other variety; but this has arisen, not at all because other nations were more socially inclined towards the African, but because the love of material wealth being dominant in us and trade our speciality, the African, whom all white nations have regarded as mainly a means of producing or procuring wealth, has naturally fallen most into our hands. Where Spaniard has dealt with Indian, German, Frenchman or Dutchman with African or Asiatic, exactly the same lack of lofty social feeling, and the same mental attitude regarding them merely as means for production of increased benefits for themselves, and not as individuals who are ends within themselves, has prevailed.
Irrespective of nationality or time, the line at which light race meets dark is the line at which human sociality is found at the lowest ebb; and, wherever that line comes into existence, there are found the darkest shadows which we humans have cast by our injustice and egoism across life on earth.
* * * * *
If then, when the statement is made that the South African Boer has not treated the South African native as it is desirable man should treat man, it be meant to imply that in his treatment of the dark races his conduct has been at one with that of all other European races, and that he has not entered on that loftier and more socialized course of action toward subject and dark races, to which it is our hope that the humanity of the future will attain, then the statement is wholly and unmitigatedly true. But if, on the other hand, it be intended by the assertion to imply that the South African Boer, in his treatment of the dark races with whom he has been thrown into contact, has been less governed by just and humane instincts than men of other races under like conditions, that the English slave-trader or speculator, the Portuguese adventurer, the Spanish conqueror, the Jamaica planter have treated the African native better, then the statement is wholly and unmitigatedly false.
As the student of racial problems has continually occasion to repeat, there has been no wide difference between the attitude of different white races when brought into contact with dark, whether in Asia, Africa, or America; but on the whole the relation of the African Boer with the African native, sorrowful as are all inter-racial relations, has yet probably tended to be rather slightly more and not less pacific than those of other races. This results in no way from the higher humanitarian standpoint of the Boer, but from his circumstances.
Firstly, from the fact that his numbers have always been small and insignificant as compared with those of the Bantus, the African people with which he has mainly had to deal, and that the Bantus, being one of the most virile and powerful of all dark races, it has not been possible for him to dominate them as he might have done a feebler people. (Were the natives of India of the same independent and resolute spirit as the Bantus of South Africa, England could never have subjected and held them down, as she has done at the point of the bayonet, for sixty years.)
Secondly, the African Boers are a peculiarly pacific and even-tempered people, not quickly roused to anger or any other emotion, though when roused yet difficult to appease; and, as acts of violence towards subject people are most often the results of sudden outburst of passion, the native has probably fared somewhat better at their hands than in those of a more quick-blooded race.
The strange, gentle, slow and somewhat dreamy element, which forms so important a charm in the character of the Boer, is by no means peculiar to the Dutch South African. It is a quality which is found almost quite as markedly in the grandsons of the British settlers of 1820 and other South African born men of English descent, and is especially marked in many of the young English farmers in the Eastern and Frontier districts, who form the flower of our English population, and who are often South Africans of the third generation. It is by this peculiar mental attitude more even than by their muscular build and prominent bony structure, that one tells almost invariably and without fail the South African born man of whatever descent from the foreigners and newcomers who fill our seaports and mining centres. It has in it something slightly reminiscent of the Italian _dolce far niente_, and partly finds expression in the Dutch motto of the Free State: "_Wacht een bietje: alles zal recht kom_" (Wait a little: all will come right); but it differs wholly from the Italian quality, in that this gentleness and slowness covers almost invariably a power of stern, persistent, concentrated emotion which we have not found equally common in the Italian. It takes on the average five times as long to rouse the African-born man into action and powerful emotion as the average foreigner of English or any other nationality; and it takes ten times as much to pacify him again!
Speaking once to a noted American traveller and military man, who had journeyed all over the world and noted keenly, we asked him, after spending two years in South Africa, what had most struck him in the country. He replied: "The strange gentleness of the African men. I hardly knew whether to be most surprised or touched by it when I first came. I have seen nothing like it in the world."
When we ourselves returned to South Africa after ten years' absence in Europe, and were therefore able to view our birth-fellows almost impartially, the true born South African man, whether Dutch or English, reminded us of nothing so much as those huge shaggy watch-dogs, which lie before their masters' houses placid and kindly, whom you may stumble over and kick, almost with impunity; but when once you have gone too far and he rises and shakes himself, you had best flee. There is little doubt that, in the great blended South African nation that is coming to its birth, this mental attitude will be a leading characteristic; exactly as quickness and alertness is a distinguishing mark of the Americans of the Northern and Western States. It appears probable that exactly as we shall be marked by our large, powerful bony structure and heavy muscular strength, we shall be marked by a certain gentle passivity, covering immense emotional intensity and dogged persistency; that the great men we shall produce will not be so often keen financiers and speculators as artists and thinkers; that our national existence will culminate, not in producing versatility and skill, but persistency and depth, in our most typical individuals. We shall probably always be a people more easily guided through our affections and sympathies than almost any other, and more impossible to subdue by force.
Whether the cause lie mainly in the nature of the Boer or the Bantu, this is certain, that the African native has not tended to melt away with anything of the rapidity with which the Indian was exterminated by the English American in the north, and by the Spaniard in the south of the American continent; nor in the two hundred years the Dutch have been in South Africa is any incident so painful recorded as that which is universally accepted, and has not, we believe, been authentically denied, with regard to the treatment of the natives of India, when men who, however brutally, had been fighting in defence of their native land, were, before being blown from the gun's mouth, compelled to lick up the blood of the persons they had killed, in order that the fear of eternal damnation might be added to the other horrors of death. No analogous incident, sinking civilized man so far below the level of the wild beast and the primitive savage, has we believe ever been recorded of the African Boer, even when his women and children have been killed and mutilated by scores.
The same equality in the treatment of the dark races, whichever may be the white race concerned, is illustrated when we consider the condition of the African native in the different States into which South Africa is divided.
In the Cape Colony, where the majority of the white inhabitants are Dutch, though at present a British Colony, the position of the native is more favourable than in most other states. Theoretically the aboriginal native has in the Cape Colony almost the same rights as a white man; he is allowed to vote at elections, and theoretically he is allowed to sit on juries; though practically were he to attempt to substantiate his right to try cases in which white and black men were concerned by sitting on a jury he would probably be lynched; and in no case has a native ever been returned for Parliament. Yet his position, in spite of past laws and recently introduced laws--that he may not walk on the pavement, etc.--is far more satisfactory than in any other state.
In Natal, another British Colony, where the majority of the white inhabitants are English, the position of the aboriginal native is far less satisfactory, and that of the Asiatic as intolerable as it well can be. Large numbers of Indians from India have been deliberately imported on the plantations; but they are both hated and feared, and vigorous endeavours are made to prevent their trading or acquiring property in a land into which they have been deliberately introduced.
In the two Republics of the Free State and the Transvaal, the native has not the same theoretic rights as in the Cape Colony. He has neither the theoretic right to sit on juries or become a member of Parliament, which in theory, though not in fact, he has in the Cape Colony, nor is he recognized by the law as the equal of the white man. Practically, in the Transvaal he increases and multiplies as fast as elsewhere, if not faster, but his condition is in many ways far less desirable than in the Cape Colony.
On the other hand, it is in the purely British possessions of Matabele and Mashonaland that his condition is worst. Probably a larger number of natives have been exterminated in these territories during the last eight years than throughout the whole of the rest of South Africa by Dutch and English together in any like period. And it is here that, during the last few years, a determined and practical attempt has been made to introduce a modified form of slavery under the name of compulsory labour. The unhappy condition of the natives in these territories rises, however, not at all from the fact that the men dominating them are English, nor at all from the fact that the few genuine white settlers in the country are of a lower stamp than those elsewhere in South Africa, for this is emphatically not the case; but to the form of government.
A body of speculators, mainly non-resident in the land, chartered for commercial purposes and given despotic rule over a vast country and its people, must always be the form of rule most productive of evil to the subject people, whether the speculators so incorporated be French, Jewish, English, Belgian, or German. The rule of such a speculative and commercial body must necessarily be devoid of those personal sympathies with the ruled which may soften even the government of an individual tyrant; the conscience of such a body, if in its collective capacity it may be said to have one, must of necessity exercise itself merely in a conscientious striving to extract the largest possible percentage of interest for the corporate shareholders from the land and labour of the subject people. Under no possible circumstances can it exhibit those virtues of consideration and self-abnegation for the subject peoples which even a purely military conqueror might exhibit; and the rule of such a body must always remain the most oppressive for the ruled and the most demoralizing for the ruling people. To blame, primarily, the men who are the mere instruments in carrying out such a form of government would be unjust in the highest degree; and even these speculators and adventurers who form the ruling chartered body can only be blamed in a secondary degree, having but obeyed the instincts of their kind, which compels individuals of a certain class to employ their lives on earth in seeking to attain the largest amount of profit with the smallest amount of outlay to themselves. The primary blame must rest with that people which at the end of the nineteenth century can allow so hoary an anachronism as a commercial chartered company to usurp its place in the government of primitive peoples, and, from under the ægis of its flag, to stretch forth in safety the long, grasping fingers and the grotesque, greedy face of a Financial Chartered Company, which should long since have been relegated to the past among the extinct evils of the human race.
The native is best off and happiest in South Africa where, as amid the mountains of Basutoland, he still maintains a semi-independence. Both Dutchmen and Englishmen have carried on bloody wars against this people, but neither the Boers nor the English have been able wholly as yet to break up their tribal organization; and, guarded by their mountains and their courage, they are slowly absorbing modern civilization, in a manner more healthful than would be possible under a sudden dislocation of their social and moral system. How long this interesting phenomenon in national African development will be allowed by circumstances to continue, it is difficult to say. Should gold or precious stones be found in their territory, it would then be worth while expending many millions in destroying the people and taking complete possession of the land.
Thus, viewing the South African states as a whole, we find that the question of the condition of the native does not depend on the nationality of the governing power, or of the majority of the white inhabitants, but on other and more intricate causes.
The question is frequently asked one when visiting in Europe: "Which treats the African native the best, the Dutchman or the Englishman?" It is a question which awakens a certain silent amusement. It is as though, after spending ten years in Europe in the study of labour problems, one had been asked on one's return to South Africa: "Who treats his employees best, a Scotchman or an Englishman?" The true answer is, that the relation of white man to black, as of employer to employed, depends on far deeper and more complex conditions than any racial variety of the white man or the employer will explain.
The individual equation always tells for much; but, roughly speaking (one can but deal roughly with the delicate, complex, organic intricacies of social life), there are in South Africa, as a whole, four attitudes among white men as regards the native, which attitudes have no causative relation with the matter of race.
Firstly:--There is the attitude of the farming population who, more especially in frontier districts and to the north and east, are, and have been for generations, thrown into close contact with the aboriginal native in his most crude and primitive form, and who are compelled by the conditions of their life to live in close relations with him, and to act upon and to be re-acted on by him. These men and women, whether Boer fore-trekkers and their descendants, or British settlers of 1820 and their children and grand-children, have borne, and to a certain extent still bear, the crude brunt of the first impact between light and dark races, with their widely opposing ideals, manners of life, and physical differences. These people and their ancestors, whether Dutch-Huguenots who landed in Africa two hundred years ago, or British settlers who came eighty years ago, have in almost all cases passed through a life-and-death struggle with the natives for the possession of the land, a struggle which, even in the case of the British settlers who were backed by the soldiers and the power of the British nation, was bitter enough; and this struggle has left behind it in many cases that intense, curious bitterness which is engendered by a race feud. Further, it is these folk who to-day are brought directly face to face with the difficulties which must arise at the point where the divergent ideals, social, ethical and racial of the Aryan and the African, are first brought into contact.
Generally speaking (and allowing for the many exceptions which will always occur where men are spoken of in large masses), there is, in this class of the population, a strong tendency, not so much towards scorn and indifference towards the native, as of keen, bitter resentment, which can sometimes not be described otherwise than as hatred: a feeling which is not generally found in any other large class of the community. Nor is this in any way to be wondered at, when we recall the century-long bitterness between folk so closely allied as are Highland Scots and Lowland English, and the deathless feuds of the border, and, above all, when we recall the fact that in modern times a whole civilized nation has howled frantically for the blood of a brother nation, to avenge defeat sustained by superior numbers of its own men, fighting against inferior numbers, inferiorly placed, of the fellow nation.
With the wild-beast cry of "Avenge Amajuba" still ringing in our ears, it appears rather wonderful than otherwise that so much of pacific human feeling should prevail between frontier farmer and fore-trekker and the aboriginal races as still does exist.
There are few old frontier families in Dutch or English in the Cape Colony, Transvaal, Free State, or Natal, who, if their past family history were written, would not have to record hair-breadth escapes of women and children who have fled for miles at night to avoid sudden attacks, of farm-houses destroyed, of men coming home to find the women and children killed and mutilated; this in addition to the record of countless open battles in which their ancestors or they themselves took part. And, on the native side, are even bitterer memories, and the consciousness, in many cases, that the land on which the white man now lives, and where he dominates, was once his father's. Alike among Dutch and English, these memories have left their bitter mark. We have never heard the natives so bitterly and fiercely denounced as by descendants of English settlers whose ancestors had suffered racially from them. "I almost hate you," has cried a friend belonging to one of the most cultured and intelligent of our English Cape families, "when you talk of raising and educating the natives. Hewers of wood and drawers of water they shall be to us to the end, in spite of you." "I feel a shudder of hatred go up my spine when I look at a Kaffir," said another refined and, in many respects, noble frontier English woman to us once; "I feel as if I could just put out my foot and crush them."
On the other hand, it would be very easy to exaggerate the universality and intensity of this antipathy. We have known, not isolated instances, but scores of cases, where both English and Dutch farmers have entertained the kindliest feelings towards natives generally, and their own servants in particular. We have known intimately an unlettered Boer, so innately gifted with the power of ruling wisely that for fifteen years, during which time he had always from fifteen to thirty natives on his farm, he had never found it necessary to punish, or even to threaten, one, and who was so beloved by his servants that, during a long illness, when he was obliged to leave his farm for months in the care of his Kaffir servants, he found on his return not one head of stock missing, and the farm managed as though he had been there himself. We have known both English and Dutch farmers who have kept their servants twenty years, cared for them in old age, and aided them in illness. We have known a Boer woman, herself an invalid, who would go evening by evening to the hut of her sick servant to comfort and help her; we have seen a whole Boer family gathered weeping round the grave of a black Bantu; we have known both English and Dutch farmers who have treated their native servants with far more consideration and kindness than the average English landowner shows towards the labourers on his estates; and, on the other hand, we have known both English and Dutch farmers with whom no native would willingly remain in service; who were as cordially hated as they hated; and whose whole relation with the native was a series of petty oppressions, with occasional acts of gross injustice or cruelty. But we believe that every one who has attentively and impartially studied this matter on the spot will allow that it is a question into which the Dutch or English extraction of the farmer does not materially enter.
In the notorious Hart case of a few years back when, in the Cape Colony, an English farmer of that name flogged a Bantu to death in cold blood, they were English and not Dutch farmers who offered to subscribe to pay the small fine inflicted on him, and who resented his being punished at all. The most hopeful sign with regard to this feeling of "race feud" is that, on the whole, it is a decaying feeling. To find it in its full intensity among Dutch or English one must always go to the older men and women of forty, fifty, seventy, or older, who in their youth went through bitter experiences of conflict with the native, or remember the experiences of their parents. It is far less intense among the younger men and women of from twenty-five and under, now growing up, and in another generation it will probably be all but extinct in the form of a true race feud.
We would not, however, for a moment have it understood that an anti-social attitude towards the native is peculiar to the African-born farmer. So far is this from being the case, that, where men newly arrived from Europe are thrown into the same close contact and come into conflict with aboriginal natives, their attitude is generally far less human, _and has in it an element of complete callousness and cold contempt_, seldom or never found among men born in South Africa, who have grown up among the native races. This may appear strange, but an analogous phenomenon has often been noted in America, where it has been observed that the slave-owners in the Southern States, in spite of their dominance over the slaves and occasional acts of brutality and oppression, really regarded them more as fellow humans and were emotionally nearer to them, than were, in many cases, the Northerners who came to live in the South, and who, on first meeting them, were often filled with shrinking and disgust.
The African-born farmer, Dutch or English, who has grown up among the natives, has been nursed by them in childhood, often speaks their language, and knows something of their manners and ideas, may hate them; but always, in his heart of hearts, he recognizes them as men; and his very hatred and bitterness is a kind of tribute to the common humanity that he feels binds them. Man only hates man.
To the newcomer from Europe, on the other hand, who becomes a farmer, or is otherwise thrown into contact with the aboriginal native, he is often an object, not merely of hatred, but of contempt and sport; there is no mere assumption of cynicism when he speaks of the native merely as an object of the chase; he has often no other view with regard to him. We have heard a brilliant young English officer, who had only been a few years in the country, but had been employed in what is called a "Native War," dwell with manifest and almost boyish delight on the pleasures of Bantu-hunting. He described the curious delight you feel in finding the mark of a naked foot and tracing it down. "It is," he said, "like the pleasure of the hunting field--with something added!" We have also known a skilful English doctor, a man of singular tenderness and generosity towards persons of his own nationality, who had been only eight years in the country, but had served in two native campaigns, remark that the only two purposes for which natives were of any use were to serve as targets for rifle-shooting and as good subjects for vivisection; while his inhumanity towards wounded and other natives was a matter of common remark among the South African burghers. And a fine young English trooper who had been two years in the country, after hearing our view on the native question, remarked thoughtfully: "Well, you know, all this is quite new to me; I have never regarded the nigger as anything but something to shoot." To the South African-born man this light-hearted, callous, sporting attitude is quite foreign. He may take the life of a native, but he takes it sternly, bitterly; it is something much more than hunting down the indigenous black game of the country; he knows in his heart of hearts that the thing he hunts is a _man_, and a strong man; and in his hatred of him there is even an element of fear as well as revenge. This attitude forms a far more promising field for the growth of possible socialized feeling, than any attitude of callous contempt can even do. Hate is nearer to love than scorn can ever be; and, paradoxical as it may seem, we hold strongly that if, in South Africa to-day, sincere personal affections and sympathies are to be found crossing the line of race, they will be found most often between the African-born farming population, Dutch and English, and their domestic servants. The warmest expressions of affection towards individual natives which we have ever heard have been expressed by English and Dutch farmers towards their old servants.
Secondly:--There is the attitude of the townsman, Dutch, South-African-English, or Newcomer, who most often never comes into any contact with the aboriginal natives at all, and whose employees or domestics are all more or less civilized natives or half-castes. Here, as a rule, the element of intense racial bitterness is wholly lacking. The townsman treats his civilized servant very much, in the main, as men of all European nationalities treat their domestics and dependants. As far as wages, food, and the amount of labour expected is concerned, the civilized domestic servant and town labourer is rather better off than in most European countries. On the other hand, there is always a hard-and-fast line, dividing the white man from the dark, which is never overstepped. The only real drawback to the condition of the civilized native in towns lies in the fact that, the moment he attempts to transcend the limits of domestic servitude, he is met by a stern barrier, socially obstructing him; _a barrier raised quite as much by the instinct of the descendant of the Anglo-Saxon as the Dutch-Huguenot_. At present this matters little, as the attempt is seldom made; but in fifty years' time this harmonizing of black and white men in the higher walks of life will probably form a great part of the South African problem. It is not, however, a problem which the question of the descent of the white South African from Dutch or English ancestors will in any way affect. Every one who has any knowledge of South African life will allow that at the present day it makes not the slightest difference in the condition of the civilized servant in towns whether the doctor, lawyer, or merchant who employs him be of Dutch or English descent. We have, indeed, sometimes been inclined to fancy that there was a tendency, as between women, for a slightly more friendly and harmonious condition to be common between the mistress of Dutch descent in towns and her domestic, than between the English woman and hers. The Dutch descended woman is often more easy going and has less of that curious reserve which marks the attitude of the Anglo-Saxon towards his dependants, and even his equals, but there is probably no material difference along racial lines in the treatment of civilized domestics and employees in town and their employers.
Thirdly:--There is what, for want of a better name, we may define as the financial and speculative attitude towards the native. This is the attitude of the great labour employers. These in South Africa are practically never individuals but great syndicates, companies, and chartered bodies, the individual members of which are seldom or never brought into any personal contact with the natives whose lives they control. In the majority of cases they are non-resident in South Africa, wholly or for the larger part of their lives. For them the native is not a person hated or beloved, but a commercial asset. To these persons the native question sums itself in two words "cheap labour." Their view of the native question is as clear-cut and simple as the outline of a gallows. There is no intricacy or sentiment about it. The native is the machine through the action of which companies and speculators have to extract the wealth of the South African continent; and the more the machinery costs to keep at work, the smaller the percentage of South African wealth which reaches the hands of the speculator.
For them the native problem is in a nutshell: "In how far, and by what means, can the rate of native wages be diminished, so raising profits?"
It must be remembered that the natives form almost the entire body of the true wage-earning labouring class of South Africa. The European, working in mines or elsewhere, becomes almost at once in the majority of cases simply the overseer or guider of the native labourer; and in mining and other fields of labour natives are rapidly fitting themselves for even the more skilled forms of manual labour.
The question of the relation between the great foreign syndicates and companies and the native races of this country is thus the great labour-question of Europe and America, but complicated enormously by two facts.
Firstly, by the fact that the mass of speculators, company-controllers, and their shareholders are Jews, Englishmen, Americans, or Continentals, wholly non-resident in South Africa, or residing here merely while they make sufficient wealth to ensure their retirement to a life of ease and luxury in Europe, or, in the case of ambitious Englishmen, till they are enabled, by means of their wealth, to enter the English Parliament or obtain titles. From this fact it follows that a decrease in the wages of our native labouring-class and an increase in dividends, while it makes larger the number of yachts on the Mediterranean, the palaces of Jewish and other parvenus in London and on the Continent, and while it increases the gains of the tables at Monte Carlo and of the racing grounds of England, and replenishes the purse of debilitated and degenerate English aristocrats, yet not only adds _nothing_ to the material wealth of South Africa, but positively diminishes those very small returns which, under existing legislation, is all she receives from her mines. European skilled miners and overseers, as a rule, take their extensive earnings back to Europe with them; and, with the exception of what the Government railways may earn, it is mainly through the wages of the native labourer, expended in buying the necessaries of life, and to no inconsiderable extent in supporting his schools and churches, that the legitimate commerce of the country and its general population are benefited by its mineral wealth. Thus, on this all-important point, our native problem, which is also our labour problem, differs materially and most essentially from the labour problem of Europe, in that it is not merely a question of dividing the wealth of the country between one class or another (as is generally the case in Europe and America), but of retaining the products of the land in the land of all.
It has been said by a leading speculator and millionaire in South Africa that, if the States of South Africa could be broken down and crushed into one, a united and uniform labour system might then be adopted, and the wages of natives brought down; and he has held up as an ideal for imitation the condition in India where natives are supposed to labour for twopence a day, living therefore so closely upon the border of starvation that the slightest rise in the price of foodstuffs renders them liable to widespread famine and destruction, and therefore also eager to accept the smallest amount of remuneration which will maintain life.
To this end the Speculator and Capitalist, among others, have sought to enter political life in South Africa, and in order that, by the passing of laws dispossessing the native by indirect means of his hold on the land, and breaking up his tribal tenure, and by the making of direct wars upon him, the native, at last being absolutely landless, may be unable to resist any attempt to lower wages, and may then sink into the purely proletariat condition of a working class always on the border of starvation, and therefore always glad to sell his toil for the lowest sum that will maintain life.
Were this plan entirely successful, South Africa as a whole would lose all the native now gains, the increased profit going to enlarge the wealth of the foreign Speculator and often aristocratic shareholder; and South Africa would then be saddled with a proletariat class of the very lowest type. For, the only hope of the African native's rising, and becoming a valuable and intelligent labouring class, lies in his receiving such remuneration for his labour as shall enable him to grasp at least some of the subordinate advantages of civilization, along with those of its evils which are necessarily forced on him. If the South African native is not in the position to obtain primary education and in some measure to grasp such advantages and privileges as there are in our modern civilization, then, as his old tribal ideals and institutions are destroyed, he must inevitably sink into a condition lower and more terrible than that of the lowest proletariat in Europe; and, as he forms (and must do for generations, in a land where white men refuse to perform the bulk of physical labours) the major part of the population, South Africa will permanently be weighted and degraded by the degradation and degeneracy of the great bulk of the inhabitants.
To the Company Director, Capitalist, or Speculator who never visits South Africa, or remains here only while financial reasons make it desirable, it can matter nothing what becomes in the present or in future generations, morally or intellectually, of the native. But to those of us, to whom South Africa is a home, to whom not only the present but the future of this land is our most intense human concern, and who with our descendants have got to sail with the African native permanently in the same ship across the sea of time, it matters everything.
The second, and even more important point, which differentiates our labour problem from that common in Europe, is that our labouring class is divided sharply from the employing class by the line of colour. Even in European countries, where employers and employed are of one race and physically identical, divided merely as being for the moment the haves and have-nots, the adjustment of the labour problem presents sufficient difficulty. But in South Africa, where racial and physical differences divide employer from employed, the difficulties are immeasurably and almost inconceivably increased. Any attempt on the part of our labouring class to better its position or resist oppressive exactions, being undertaken mainly by men of one colour against men of another, will always immediately awaken, over and above financial opposition, racial prejudice; so that even those white men, whose economic interests are identical with those of the black labourer, may be driven by race antagonism to act with the exactors.
The complete failure to grasp this aspect of our South African problem leads to much of the inability in other lands to comprehend the South African situation as a whole.
Thus, it is often said, "Why should the speculator, monopolist, and millionaire loom so large in South African life? Why should he be so much more of a bugbear and threaten all free political and social institutions in South Africa in so much greater a degree than in other lands where he also exists?"
Our answer is, that, wherever in Europe or America the great millionaire and monopolist, Jewish or Christian, is found, with the pluto-aristocratic speculators and shareholders who draw their wealth through him, there also is found a great equipoise to their powers of exaction or aggression in the great more or less organized masses of the working classes. The limits are very sharply set, beyond which the greatest Jew or Christian speculators backed by the most powerful princes or plutocracy cannot go. We have no such counterpoise in South Africa. Owing to the difference of colour and race, our great labouring class dare not organize itself and use its strength; and we dare not organize and use it, for fear of awakening the baneful flames of racial antagonism. South Africa is the heaven of the Speculator, the Capitalist and Monopolist. Here, alone, the opposing forces which meet him in every European and civilized country do not exist.
The labour of resisting his endeavours to gain possession of the whole mineral and landed wealth of the country and its public works, and with them the exclusive control of the political machinery, lies with the necessarily small middle class section of the community, mainly farmers and small landed proprietors with a handful of skilled workmen. These have not only to act for themselves, but for the entire labouring class, which, on account of its difference in race and colour from the rest of the community, cannot act for itself.
Any one who has given thought to the study of modern social phenomena will understand at once how enormously our labour and racial problem, being interlaced in this way, complicates our whole social condition, and how almost helpless it throws South Africa into the hands of the Jew or Christian foreign speculator. Let us give a concrete example. In a town called Kimberley there is the richest diamond mine in the earth, once the property of South Africans and belonging to multitudes of them, but now fallen into the hands of a powerful syndicate of Jews, Englishmen, and others, who, with the exception of a couple of South Africans, all reside wholly or mainly out of South Africa, and whose power is so enormous that they are able, by a mere expression of their will, to return eight or ten men to the Cape Parliament, irrespective of the wishes of the community. The action of this powerful syndicate has long formed a source of disease and corruption in South African public and social life, and the question is often asked, why the working men and other inhabitants of Kimberley and such places as the company dominates submit to this dictation? It is not so, as is sometimes supposed, because the skilled workmen and overseers in the great company are inferior to their compatriots in Europe in their love of freedom or independence; for they are, on the whole, picked men, and many of them are strongly democratic and freedom-loving; it is certainly not because the inhabitants of Kimberley are more indifferent to their manhood, or more willing to deliver up their right to exercise the franchise into the hands of a small knot of Jews and Speculators than other men; but because the forces opposed to them are so overpowering compared to their own that they feel crushed.
Were the thousands of working men labouring in the mines white and not black, and could they freely combine with the skilled European overseers and the townsmen, the monopoly of the power would be snapped in twenty-four hours. They would refuse to go into compounds, they would demand higher wages and the right to spend them where they pleased, and to vote for their own representatives, and the power for evil of the great company would be broken.
But the bulk of the workmen being black, and any attempt to organize or combine them being at once met with the cry "Black-men combining," the handful of skilled English workmen and townsmen are powerless.
Our situation is very grave, and differs radically for the worse from that of all other lands where kindred problems have to be faced. We have nothing to fall back upon but the fierce and indomitable love of freedom in a certain section of our farming population.
If it should be possible for the international Speculator and Capitalist to carry out his dream, to break down the autonomy of the different African States, each one of which is a kind of redoubt behind which our African freedom is ensconsed, and, crushing us into one structureless whole, to introduce "a uniform native policy," dispossessing the natives wholly everywhere of their lands by means of labour, taxes and other devices, and bringing them down to the lowest wages on which life can be sustained; then, when we shall have inured the Bantu to the evils of our civilization, its drinking bars and its brothels, but have left him no means of attaining to the higher forms of knowledge or the fields of skilled labour, then we shall be left with a great, blind, stupefied Sampson in our midst who will assuredly some day stretch out his mighty much-wronged arms, and bring down upon our descendants the social structure which we are to-day with so much labour attempting to rear. Our gold and diamond mines may by that time be exhausted, and Jew and Speculator, and foreign Shareholder will long have carried off their gains and be here no more to feel the shock. Upon us whose portion of earth to inhabit this land is, and upon our descendants, will fall the blow.
This question of the relation between the foreign Speculator, Capitalist, and Shareholding class, and the black labouring class, is the very core within the core, and the kernel within the kernel, of the South African problem.
The old race-feud attitude of the farming population, whether Dutch or English, toward the native, embittered by the memory and tradition of old wars and early struggles, will tend to die out, and even now is softened by personal relations; the attitude of the employer towards his civilized native domestic has in it little that is detrimental to either, and suggests in itself no great coming evil. But the financial attitude is one which will increase in its importance and in the virulence of its evil effects with every year that passes. The small cloud upon the horizon, to-day no bigger than a man's hand, will in forty years have overspread the whole of our African sky, unless some great and at present unforeseen revolution should occur. It is upon the skill with which white man and black man combine to avert the threatened evil, that the fate of Africa in the middle of next century will depend. It may be easy to break down and demoralize our great, and at present noble, Bantu races; but it may be very hard ever to build them up again.
For the moment the men holding the purely financial attitude towards the native happen mainly to be English or Jewish foreigners; but there is really nothing racial in this attitude. Were the Hollander or the Italian head of a great gold-mining, railway-building, or diamond syndicate, there is not the very slightest reason to suppose that he would regard the native South African less purely as a "commercial asset" than his brother, the English financier, does.
The more profoundly one studies the question of the relations of the white man to the black in South Africa, the more clear it becomes that the determining factor in that relation is something far other and deeper than the mere fact that the white man belongs to this or that European variety.
Fourthly, and finally:--There is the attitude of a body of persons, small in number, of no invariable occupation, sex, nationality or creed, but gathered from every part of the white community. So small in number is this body of persons holding this attitude, that again and again have men and women belonging to it felt inclined to draw aside, and in bitterness of spirit to cry with the ancient Hebrew at the door of his cave: "I, only I, am left." Yet this body has never been wholly extinct in South Africa, and, we believe, never will be. As we hope later to deal exhaustively with the aims and attitude of this section, it is not now necessary to do more than passingly to glance at them.
This attitude cannot be better summed up than by saying that it is the extreme antithesis to the financial attitude. The man compelled by his mental organization to take this view is of necessity obliged to regard the native not merely as a means to an end, but as an end in himself. Consistently with his whole view of life, he cannot regard the native merely as a "commercial asset"; he is compelled to apply to him the categorical imperative: "Deal with thy fellow man as, wert thou in his place, thou wouldst have him deal with thee." He does not write up as the motto which is to govern all the relations of black men with white: "Cheap labour," but rather: "Noblesse oblige." He is compelled always to see before him the moral fact that, if the native be his equal in mental power and moral vigour, his place is beside him; but, if the African native be _not_ his equal in mental power and moral vigour, then there rests upon him the mighty obligation of all strength towards weakness, of all wisdom towards ignorance, of the God towards the man: "Rank confers obligation."
To the man holding this view the African native always presents himself as the little dark brother of the great family-human, who stands looking wistfully through the open door into the great hall of the nineteenth-century civilization in which we fair-skinned Aryans disport ourselves; and we are compelled to go to the door and say: "Come in, little brother, come in; there are many better things out there in the open where you have been than we have here; yet, if you must enter, give us your hand, and we will try to show you what in this great carnival of ours is best, and what most to fear. Walk in, little brother, this hall was built for the sons of the children of man."
It is manifest that men holding such a view must ever be in deadly conflict with men holding the financial view. The future of South Africa depends largely on the result of this struggle. If the financial attitude predominate absolutely, and the native be dispossessed of his land by wars and the skilfully devised legislation, which, breaking up his tribal tenure everywhere, throws him and his lands entirely into the hands of the financial speculator, and if low wages at the same time deprive him of the means of education, he must become a helot, having no stake in the general welfare of the land of his birth--always its menace, and at length its downfall.
If the other attitude prevail to any large extent, and the men holding it are strong enough to set their mark on legislation and institutions, the native may morally and intellectually survive the shock (as he certainly will physically) of sudden transplantation from his moral and social atmosphere into ours. He may grasp what is great in our civilization along with its evils and may yet become the most valuable element and the ablest defender of a social organization in which he has much at stake. But even were this not so, the stern demands of human obligation towards human would yet compel an uncompromising justice towards him.
It will be obvious, to any person skilled in the study of human nature, that persons, compelled by their mental organization to assume this attitude towards the African native races, are not of necessity of any particular European race, sex, or social condition. In the past some of the men who have the most courageously and persistently upheld this attitude have been Englishmen. More notable than all was Sir George Grey, most gifted and most farseeing of all the Colonial Governors whom England has ever sent out, a man of whose type it would appear a country can only produce once in a century. There has also been Sir William Porter, a great Irishman, whose name still recalls noble ideals and generous performance to South African hearts, and who during his stay exemplified the fact that the greatest gift which the old European lands can send the new is one of their great sons, a man with a heart large enough to be able to wrap itself about the people and institutions and things in a new world, and, through loving, to comprehend them. Another man who in the past has been noted for this attitude was Saul Solomon, a man of brilliant gifts, said to be of Jewish extraction, who through a long life amid endless difficulties fought an heroic battle and never fell from the side of justice and generosity towards the African native, and who has left a permanent mark on the legislation of South Africa.
On the other hand, were we called upon at the present day to mention the names of two public men who might be counted always to make their stand and raise their voice where any action of injustice or repression towards the native was concerned, we should give the names of two men of purely Boer extraction, with no drop of English blood in their veins. If during the coming century South Africa is to be preserved from that doom which we sometimes see hovering in the dim future before her; if her native races are to be transformed from dumb brooding enemies, borne within her bosom, to citizens who shall be the joy and strength of her commonwealth, it will not be through the action of Dutchmen or Englishmen alone; but of brave souls irrespective of all descent--"God's-Dutchman" and "God's-Englishman"--hand in hand.
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The Boer will pass away. In fifty years the plains of South Africa will know him no more. A mist gathers in the eye and a thickness in the throat when one realizes that the day will come when that figure which made for us so much of the charm and beauty of our African land will have passed away for ever! When no more will the great ox-wagon be drawn out to crawl slowly along the boundless plains, and Oom Piet sit on its front-box with his great felt-hat drawn low over his forehead, watching with keen still eye the wide veld, while Tante Annie looks out from behind him as they move forward on their long march in search of the Promised Land.
The little brown house on the plain, where the stranger met so stately and so kindly a welcome, and the young South African grew up between his parents' knees, loving South African plains and kopjes dearer than life--will have passed away for ever. It will have gone with the springbok and the koodoo and the eland and the lion, with all that made the charm and poetry of this South Africa of ours, that we have loved so. The old krantzes will still look down from the flat mountain-tops, and the blue sky stretch above all; but the Africa we have known will have gone for ever. Men will not know, then, what it was we loved so.
The Boer will pass away! He will pass away, not supplanted by the stranger and the alien, but by his own cultured, complex, many-sided, twentieth-century descendants.
If the men of that generation, bearing his blood in their veins, love freedom as he loved it and hold resolutely by the best attainable by them as he held by it, then the future of the great South African Nation, as far as its strain of Dutch blood is concerned, is assured.