But it's had no effect on the Cow!'" (Exit.)
"Yer know, them Boers 'as been storin' guns and hambition for years!"
The Boer War
A very different reading of the situation is given in the letter to Sir Alfred Milner published a week later. Here the High Commissioner is heavily censured not for the failure of the conference, but for the "ridiculous" and "frothy" tone of his dispatch about "helots," and for his rash, impetuous and overbearing temper. In July Punch was still inclined to make light of the whole business, apparently expecting an amicable settlement, and in a burlesque "Story of a Crisis" in "Nabothsland" reflected adversely if obliquely on the pretensions of the Uitlanders. Yet early in September sympathy with the Uitlanders underlies the verses condemning the inconsistency of Little Englanders, who in theory espouse the cause of all oppressed nationalities but their own. The damning blot on the Uitlanders' cause was that they were English. If they had been Finns, for instance, the Little Englander would have shed his last drop of ink in their defence. This was at the lowest a good debating point, and at all points preferable to the unfortunate picture ridiculing the unmilitary appearance of the Boers, President Krüger being shown in the act of reviewing his veterans, a number of fat, unwieldy farmers. The declaration of war came early in October, and Punch unhesitatingly declared his support of the decision in the cartoon "Plain English," where John Bull says to the Boers: "As you will fight, you shall have it. This time it is a fight to a finish." So it was; but few, except Lord Wolseley, expected that the finish would only be reached after a long, obstinate and costly struggle. Lord Wolseley's warning in September, 1899, foreshadows the more famous anticipation of the duration of the Great War made by Lord Kitchener fifteen years later. Many other parallels and contrasts are suggested in Punch's pages as he reflects the varying moods of England during the chequered progress of the campaign. The divisions of opinion at home were more acute than in 1914. Moreover, we entered on the Boer war in a spirit of confidence and complacency which rendered the initial reverses more surprising and depressing. Otherwise the alternations of despondency and elation; the criticisms of mismanagement, laxity and indifference, want of intelligence and imagination; and the charges against the enemy of disregarding the rules of the game have a curiously familiar ring. Punch reflected popular opinion in resenting the "detachment" of Mr. Balfour in describing our reverses as "inevitable," and in rebuking the optimism of other Ministers; in his demand for the "facts"; in attributing to President Krüger gratitude to the Opposition for their assistance; in his cheering message to Baden-Powell for "keeping his end up" in Mafeking. Yet he commented severely on the diamond speculators for their "operations" during the war; he had a good word for Lord Morley when he was attacked as a Little Englander; and a strong rebuke for the agencies which announced tours to the South African battlefields as early as April, 1900. Punch had shown John Bull as Mark Tapley—when Kimberley had been relieved and Lord Roberts was advancing—but his comments on the publication of the Spion Kop dispatches reveal grave dissatisfaction with the conduct of the Natal campaign:—
SOME ONE HAD BLUNDERED
Sir Redvers devised an impossible plan
Which he trusted to Warren, an obstinate man;
Lord Roberts sent home some dispatches, and there
He freely expressed what he thought of the pair.