BOERS HELIOGRAPHING ON THE NATAL FRONTIER
INTRODUCTION
The Origin of the Recent War
The origin of the war breaking out in the later months of the last year of the nineteenth century between the Boers and the British may be traced to the famous defeat of the latter at Majuba Hill in 1881, the influence of which was intensified by the failure of the Jameson Raid, that had a good cause, but was irresponsible and disorderly. The Boers were entirely persuaded by these incidental successes of their army that they could always get the better of those they called intruders into their own country, which they had made a long journey to find and shed a great deal of blood of the natives to conquer. Their preference in the two pilgrimages away from the Cape country was to become herdsmen, raising cattle, shooting game, farming in a rude way, and enjoying the right to which they attached great importance to hold property in man. The first chief objection they had to the English, who superseded the Dutch at the Cape, was that they had prejudices against human servitude, and the slaveholders were sensitive as to interference with their high privileges and thought themselves greatly aggrieved that their scriptural institution was disapproved. It is true the Boers established a civilization immensely superior to barbarism of the natives, but they indulged all the passions of slaveholders, and were but little advanced in civilization. Something akin to semi-barbarism seemed the normal condition of Africa for countless centuries, and the light dawned gradually in South Africa from the occupancy of territory by the Dutch, the Portuguese and the English successively, and it may be fairly said that broad daylight came with the English, who in the lower regions of the Dark Continent were the stronger and the more persevering antagonists of barbarous peoples and made the greatest advancements to civilization. It was the nerveless policy of dealing with South Africans following the British defeat at Majuba Hill that produced in the Boers contempt for English military capacity and the personal courage of English speaking people, and led them to enter upon the policy of restriction of English speaking immigrants that appeared in great numbers after the discoveries of diamond mines and gold mines, assuming indeed that new comers had no rights, civil or military, as citizens or squatters, that the Boers were bound to respect. Boers' Policy Against Immigrants So distinct was the impression the Boers made of their exclusive policy to govern the immense territory upon which they had settled for the purpose of raising cattle and ruling the natives, that the circulars sent abroad in the United States by the enemies of England to form public opinion favorable to the presumption of the Boers, presented the specific complaint urged on behalf of the Transvaal people and government that the British would not cease to be subjects of their "Empire," and must not be allowed a share in local government, because in the gold country they were three times as numerous as the Boers themselves. It seems reasonable to say the English had as good a right to improve upon the Transvaal methods of aiding the good works of progressive humanity beyond the Boer limitations as the Boers had to take grazing land and game and forests from the original savages. The Boers made war upon the savagry and therefore upon the natives and were intolerant in the extreme in their exactions. There were between the original African tribes and their earliest invaders many wars and constant rumors of wars, and bloodshed frequently and profusely. When the diamond and gold mines that interested the whole world were discovered, it was as righteous to work them as it was for the Boers to open farms where there had been only hunting grounds. The great cause of South African advancement demanded British organization then just as it had required Boer enterprise in the beginning.
The Centre of the Diamond Mine Country
It should be well understood for the location of influential events that the city of Kimberley is the center of the diamond mine country. The Boers do not seem to have had the spirit of adventure, the breadth of understanding and the executive faculty to interest themselves largely in the development of the unparalleled riches found under their feet. They parted with the farms containing gold in such quantity that they are believed to be the Ophir Land of Solomon, of which the Bible contains a specific and most interesting account, and they, disgusted with the discovery of this wealth, that they had the shrewdness to see threatened their supremacy, were resentful toward the immigrants—the gold and diamond seekers that poured into the Transvaal impetuously, as the Americans crossed the deserts and the mountains to possess California fifty years before.
Characteristics of the Boers
The Boers are people whose hardihood, bravery, manliness, high spirit, marksmanship with the rifle, attachment to the soil, and content as farmers, fortified with solemn appreciation of religious duty, compel respect, but they are at fault in their attitude of determined obstruction of progress in the Dark Continent that is chiefly committed to the English. They interfere not merely with the people who have found and worked the most productive mines of diamonds and gold ever known, they have held those who have done in Africa what the Americans did in their acquisitiveness in Mexico in contempt, and in the name of a "free republic" have been apostles of class and personal tyranny and ruthless in regard to the rights of those who have enriched their country and the world with their adventurous industry—with their organization of prospecting, engineering machinery, chemistry, transportation and mastery of the elements and forces that have in great and good works in Europe and America crowded a millennium into the nineteenth century.
It is easy to assert that as people cannot eat precious stones and metals, the things that are most beautiful and costly are less useful than corn and potatoes, and yet the human race for several thousand years has attached importance to the sands and rocks that have yielded diamonds in Golconda and Brazil and gold in California and Australia; and it is a record and tradition that the gold of California gave the nations of the earth "Californian good times," a phrase that was historical and an inspiration, and significant of the prosperity of the people of the generation that had its enjoyment. The diamond cannot be converted into food save by exchange, for the dust of the ground stone is rather imperishable than palatable and nourishing, but it is "a thing of beauty" that is "a joy forever;" and even if the prejudices of the Boers were inflamed against the most beautiful and enduring forms of value, that should not commend them as heroes of civilization; and it does not prove their Republicanism to refuse the rights of self-government to a people certainly among the most enlightened on the earth because they are in the majority in the great and flourishing communities, where they founded splendid cities, opened railroads and established a commerce additional to the world's wealth of more than one hundred millions of dollars a year. Whatever may be said to the contrary, these achievements should command the respect of all nations and peoples.
Antagonism to English Rule