A Magnificent Project
There is one people, and one only on earth, that has the ability and the purpose, the will and the force, the experience and the energy to make this gift to mankind, and that power is the British Empire. Whatever the resources or the ambition or the faculties of other great nations, none with the exception of Great Britain is so situated as to make it possible to do this. British influence and territory, from the Cape of Good Hope to the mouth of the Nile, are interrupted by a space less than 600 miles, and 480 miles of that are navigable water! The British have thousands of miles of railroad there now, and the work to pierce Africa with lines of steel, on the lines of longitude, is under way. Less than the cost of the war caused by the obstruction of English enterprise in Africa by the boorishness of the Boers would have completed a safe and magnificent highway from Cape Town to Alexandria. After all, war will not stop, but will promote that project. The study of the war history will so advertise the marvels of Africa that the money will be found to build the road and its branches from the Mediterranean to the South Sea, and that speedily; and this will be recorded as one of the mightiest works of man—one that profoundly interests all nations and all races.
England cannot Give up Africa
England cannot afford to give up Egypt or South Africa, and, of course, will not do it, for there she fights for India, and for every form and feature of her imperialism. The world could not afford to have her give up Africa. If she was weak enough to be willing to do it, that weakness would mark her decline and declare her fall. The British Empire is the chosen instrument of Providence that rough-hews the ends of the earth, and that includes the conquest of Africa, for the sake of mankind. That Empire is the only one that has the enabling equipment to do the work, and the advancement will be the achievement of one of the proudest and most beneficent of all victories of men for man.
A great deal of the journalism of the world is wickedly and wretchedly wrong and extremely misleading in its treatment of this superb and lofty theme. The Boers have been cruelly deceived by interludes of feebleness displayed in the government of England, permitting a halting interference with the perpetuation of the policy that has made the British Empire what it is. It was this unfaithfulness that sacrificed Gordon at Khartoum. It is the same sort of moral malady, a choice of that which is inadequate, that would have surrendered the Philippines to an impostor and prevented the expansion of American commerce in Asia.
The Boers are men of strength and generously sustained with many virtues, but they have had the misfortune to be trained in narrow ways and are forced by deplorable circumstances of environment to fight for a cause without hope, for it is one that is against the courses of the stars and the irresistible currents of the forward movements of our generation—against the mastery of the world by man for man's own sake. This awful war is the bitter fruit of a want of candor among the nations and the races that have enlightenment, and of the incapacity of the obstructionists in South Africa to resist the blandishments of the crude vanity and the criminality of the tyranny that is based upon the ignorance whose violent presumption sheds the blood of heroes, but may not change the majestic progress of the twentieth century, in which all the living nations and vital people, the Boers and the British, shall participate—for it is duty and destiny.
Opinions of the Canadians
The substantial unanimity of the Colonial people in the support of the British Empire in asserting the rights of British civilization in South Africa as imperative, is an impressive circumstance and shows the solidity of the people of English speech—when the intense advocacy of the independent nationality of Ireland is eliminated—in support of the African policy of the British government. In the Dominion the contention between the party of the Administration and that of the Opposition is whether the one or the other has been the more zealous and practical friends of the Empire. There is not as much diversity of opinion and heat of political friction in British Africa over the continuance of the colonial system, supplemented by conquest, if needful, in the African crisis of the Empire, as there is in the United States in applying to the Philippine Archipelago, the great principles of the fathers that the Republic shall grow continuously as the generations come and go. The people of the United States, however, can better afford to refrain from accepting the goods the gods have provided for them in Asiatic waters and for the expansion and cultivation of our commerce with Asia and the increase of our puissance on the Pacific—than England can to be balked, beaten and discredited in Africa, which is the land of the great hereafter of Europeans, next to Europe itself.
The people of the United States can put aside their sublime opportunity of gaining at a stroke advantages on the greater ocean of the globe, that any other people would consider it irrational and suicidal to abandon, and yet go on, though it would be a collapse of ambition for Americans to acquiesce in conservative stagnation instead of moving on ever westward. They have possessions on and in the Pacific, including the states of California, Oregon and Washington, the territory of Alaska and the Aleutian, Hawaiian and Philippine Islands, greater than any other people. Why should they be bounded in enterprise in the way all the stars have led, any more than eastward whence comes the light of day? England can no more consent to give up Africa than yield India, Egypt, Malta, Gibraltar, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and the Isle of Wight. Indeed the greater growth of England's hereafter is in Africa, or the end of her greatness and the grave of her glory is there.
MURAT HALSTEAD.