and the Englishmen who fled were not poltroons. There ran in them blood as brave as any in England, and if to-morrow a hostile force attacked their birth-land, those very Cornish miners and English working men would die in the last ditch defending their land. Those men were strangers here; they came to earn the bread they could with difficulty win in their own land; they were friendly treated by South Africa and made money here; but were they bound to die in a foreign land for causes which they neither knew nor cared for?
One thing only can possibly justify war and the destruction of our fellows to the enlightened and humane denizen of the nineteenth century; the unavoidable conviction that by no other means can we preserve our own life and freedom from a stronger power, or defend a weaker state or individual from a stronger. Nothing can even palliate it but so intense a conviction of a right so great to be maintained that we are willing, not merely to hire other men to fight and die for us, but to risk our own lives,
A LIFE FOR A LIFE.
This the Englishmen in Johannesburg and foreigners of all nations could not possibly feel. They were not more[59] bound to die to obtain control of the gold mines of Johannesburg for a man already wealthy or his confederates, than to assist South Africans in defending them; or than we who visit the south of France or Italy for health should feel ourselves bound to remain and die if war breaks out between the Bonapartists and the Republicans, or the Pope and the King. If by a process of abstract thought we have arrived at a strong conviction of a right or human justice to be maintained by a cause with which we have no practical concern, we may feel morally compelled to take a part in it; but no man can throw it in our teeth if we refuse to die in a strange land for
A CAUSE THAT IS NOT OURS.
The Englishmen and others who refused[60] to fight in Johannesburg, or fled rather than run the risk of remaining, pursued the only course open to wise and honorable men. Had they resolved to remain permanently in South Africa, and to become citizens of the Transvaal Republic, the case might have been otherwise. As it was, they could not run a knife into the heart of a people which had hospitably received them, and attempt to destroy a land in which they had found nothing but greater wealth and material comfort than in their own; and they could also not enter upon a deadly raid for a man whom personally the workers of Johannesburg cared nothing for, and with whom they had not a sympathy or interest in common. In leaving Johannesburg and refusing to fight, they pursued the only[61] course left open to them by justice and honor.
Rightly to understand the problem before the little Transvaal Republic to-day, it is necessary for Englishmen to imagine not merely that, within the space of ten or twelve years, forty millions of Russians, Frenchmen and Germans should enter England, not in driblets and in time extending over half a century, so that they might, in a measure, be absorbed and digested into the original population, but instantaneously and at once; not merely, that the large bulk of them did not intend to remain in England, and were there merely to extract wealth; not merely, that the bulk of this wealth was exported at once to other countries enriching Russia, France and Germany out of the products of English soil; that would be[62] comparatively a small matter—but, that the bulk of the wealth extracted was in the hands of a few persons, and that these persons were opposed to the continued freedom and independence of England, and were attempting by the use of the wealth they extracted from England to stir up Russia and France against her, that through the loss of her freedom they might the better obtain the command of her wealth and lands. When the Englishman has vividly drawn this future for himself, he will hold, as nearly as is possible, in a nutshell an image of the problem which the people and government of the Transvaal Republic are called on to face to-day; and we put it straightly to him whether this problem is not one of
INFINITE COMPLEXITY AND DIFFICULTY?
Much unfortunate misunderstanding has arisen from the simple use of the terms “capitalist” and “monopolist” in the discussion of South African matters. Without the appending of explanation, they convey a false impression. These terms, so familiar to the students of social phenomena in Europe and America, are generally used in connection with a larger, but a quite distinct body of problems. The terms “capitalism,” “monopolist,” and “millionaire” are now generally associated with the question of the forming of “trusts,” “corners,” etc., and the question whether it is desirable that society should so organize itself that one man may easily obtain possession of twenty millions, while the bulk of[64] equally intelligent and equally laborious men obtain little or nothing from the labor of humanity. This question is a world-wide question; it is not one in any sense peculiarly South African; it is a world-wide problem, which, as the result of much thought, careful consideration and many experiments, the nations of the civilized world will be called to adjudicate upon during the twentieth century; but it is not the question with which South Africa stands face to face at this moment. The question before us is not: Shall one South African possess twenty millions, live in his palace, live on champagne, have his yacht in Table Bay, and deck women with a hundred thousand pounds’ worth of jewels, while the South African next door has nothing? This is not our question. Our problem[65] is not the problem of America. In America there are many individuals possessing wealth amounting to many millions, but when the United States in their entirety is taken the £40,000,000 of the richest individual sink to nothing; and, were it the desire of the richest millionaire in the States