"As I have already said, I shall never forget the scene in which these and similar speeches were made at my waggon as the sun went down peacefully—the sun which had witnessed the treaty-signing and the rejoicings at Mafeking. Its departing rays now saw the cattle of the Barolong safe in the Transvaal, and the Barolong owners and Her Majesty's Deputy Commissioner looking at one another, at Mafeking."[32]
Mr. Mackenzie then resolved what to do, and announced that he would at once cross the boundary and go himself to the nearest Transvaal town to demand redress. There was a hum of approval, with a sharp enquiry from Montsioa,—did he really mean to go himself? "Having no one to send, I must go myself," Mackenzie replied. The old Chief, in a generous way, half dissuaded him from the attempt. "The Boers cannot be trusted. What shall I say if you do not return?" "All right, Montsioa," replied Mackenzie, "say I went of my own accord. I will leave my wife under your care."
"Poor old fellow," writes Mackenzie, "brave-hearted, though 'only a native,' he went away full of heaviness, promising me his cart and harness, and an athletic herd as a driver, to start early next morning."
Mr. Mackenzie had little success in this expedition. He was listened to with indifference when he represented to certain Landdrosts and Field Cornets that he had not come to talk politics, but to complain of a theft. Those to whom he spoke looked upon the cattle raid not as robbery, but as "annexation" or "commandeering." A man, listening to the palaver, exclaimed: "Well, anyhow, we shall have cheap beef as long as Montsioa's cattle last." At the hotel of the place Mr. Mackenzie met some Europeans, who were farming or in business in the Transvaal. They said to him: "Mr. Mackenzie, we are sorry to have to say it to you, for we have all known you so long, but, honestly speaking, we hope you won't succeed; the English Government does not deserve to succeed after all that they have made us—loyal colonists—suffer in the Transvaal. For a long time scarcely a day has passed without our being insulted by the more ignorant Boers, till we are almost tired of our lives, and yet we cannot go away, having invested our all in the country."
"Many such speeches were made to me," says Mackenzie, "I give only one."
I cannot find it in my heart to criticize the character of the Boers at a time when they have held on so bravely in a desperate war, and have suffered so much. There are Boers and Boers,—good and bad among them,—as among all nations. We have heard of kind and generous actions towards the British wounded and prisoners, and we know that there are among them men who, in times of peace, have been good and merciful to their native servants. But it is not magnanimity nor brutality on the part of individuals which are in dispute. Our controversy is concerning the presence or absence of Justice among the Boers, concerning the purity of their Government and the justice of their Laws, or the reverse.
I turn to their Laws, and in judging these, it is hardly possible to be too severe. Law is a great teacher, a trainer, to a great extent, of the character of the people. The Boers would have been an exceptional people under the sun had they escaped the deterioration which such Laws and such Government as they have had the misfortune to live under inevitably produce.
A pamphlet has lately been published containing a defence of the Boer treatment of Missionaries and Natives, and setting forth the efforts which have been made in recent years to Christianize and civilize the native populations in their midst. This paper is signed by nine clergymen of the Dutch Reformed Church, and includes the name of the Rev. Andrew Murray, a name respected and beloved by many in our own country. It is welcome news that such good work has been undertaken, that the President has himself encouraged it, and that a number of Zulus or Kaffirs have recently been baptized in the Dutch Reformed Church of the Transvaal. But the fact strikes one painfully that in this pleading, (which has a pathetic note in it,) these clergymen appear to have obliterated from their mind and memory the whole past history, of their nation, and to have forgotten that the harvest from seed sown through many generations may spring up and bear its bitter fruit in their own day. They do not seem to have accepted the verdict, or made the confession, "we and our fathers have sinned." They seem rather to argue, "our fathers may have sinned in these respects, but it cannot be laid to our charge that we are continuing in their steps."
No late repentance will avail for the salvation of their country unless Justice is now proclaimed and practised;—Justice in Government and in the Laws.
Their Grondwet, or Constitution, must be removed out of its place for ever; their unequal laws, and the administrative corruption which unequal laws inevitably foster, must be swept away, and be replaced by a very different Constitution and very different Laws. If this had been done during the two last decades of Transvaal history, while untrammelled (as was desired) by British interference, the sincerity of this recent utterance would have deserved full credit, and would have been recognized as the beginning of a radical reformation.