Already, to-day, he who notes keenly may feel faintly and from afar the first suck-in which is ultimately to withdraw that wave and leave the deluged and devastated earth to pursue its own slow complex path of progress.
To anyone holding this view with regard to the ultimate development of humanity at large, one and only one attitude is possible in dealing with the problems and questions concerning our own smaller South African world. For one holding the view, it is impossible to regard with other than sympathy each of our South African states, or to desire anything but their strength and development, while at the same time he desires a growing bond of sympathy and fellowship between all.
For myself, I have never been able to regard other than with deep well-wishing the different political organisms into which South Africa has more or less spontaneously divided itself; and have been compelled to desire to see them each rather strengthened and individualized than dominated and crushed by, or even merged into, another. I have not only desired that the Free State and Transvaal might each grow into strong, highly organized social entities, but one is compelled to desire (though at present without much hope of realization) that such small native states as Basutoland or even Pondoland might be left for fifty or sixty years to pursue their own internal course of evolution, and so enabling some of our native folk to attain to a fuller and more natural development than is possible if they are all forced into the vortex of our so-called modern material civilization. I have regretted the annexation of Bechuanaland to the Cape Colony, and should deeply regret the amalgamation of Mashona and Matabeleland with any other African state, or the merging of Natal and the Cape Colony into one; believing all these territories are quite large enough ultimately to form healthy units: and I have been quite unable to go with the monopolists and speculators in the past, who have desired for their own reasons that English influence should be eliminated. I have no more desired its elimination than I have regretted the existence of the Germans in Damaraland or the Portuguese on the east coast, believing that by the complexity of our elements was produced a healthy friction, preventing that dominance of any one central, overbearing power, which is the death of true freedom. I have never desired for my birthland that all interstatal lines should be broken down and the whole welded into one uniform mass with only a shadow of self-government in its separate parts: an ideal so dear to the heart of the autocrat in all ages, whether capitalist or military despot, who recognizes in each strong interstatal line or conservative institution a kind of embankment resisting his central despotism. Rather, if the truth be told, I have nourished with regard to England's part in South Africa a very lofty ambition. I have desired that my motherland might play a very high part, such as perhaps some great people may in the future play in the world's history at large. I have dreamed that it was possible for the influence of England always to make itself felt as a freeing, co-ordinating element among our varying states and peoples, an element which made for the strengthening and protecting of all weaker and smaller states and peoples; I have dreamed that England, desiring nothing for herself, might be able to hold the balance between all our states and peoples; I have desired for her an Empire, an eternal Empire, not based on force but on the reverence and faith of all peoples struggling for freedom throughout the earth. I have dreamed that when, in forty or sixty years' time, South Africa, its states grown internally strong enough, healthfully and without sacrificing their different systems of internal self-government to federate, federated, took her place beside the world's other large national entities, though the majority of her inhabitants could never be English in descent, and South Africa would be a nation as independent and self-controlling as America or France, that yet a peculiarly close and tender bond might for ever bind her to England.
Among human relationships there is one which, though not common, perhaps few beings have been so fortunate as not once to have seen realized, and which constitutes one of the bravest and fairest in the whole domain of human fellowships. It is the bond which exists between a large and generous woman, who, through marriage having thrown into her hands children not her own by blood, yet through all their infancy and early childhood guards and labours for as her own, asking nothing for herself, giving all: desiring not to use her power for her own ends, not favouring those of her own blood unduly, but seeking to aid those in her power to attain most successfully to the freedom and independence of adult life.
Those who have been so fortunate as at least once to have seen a woman so nobly using her powers will also have seen her rewarded by a love and devotion from the children not her own yet greater than that which is often given to a mother by the children of the blood.
Such is the bond I have dreamed should permanently bind England to South Africa.
One has indeed desired that a bond of good fellowship should bind all nations to our own young nation at the South. We, here, guarded by the vast expanses of our southern seas on every hand, with our wild, tempestuous and rocky coasts and our few and easily guarded harbours, are indeed singularly well situated by nature, when once internally united, for living in peace and freedom, untouched by foreign strife. But I, at least, have deeply desired that, with the men and women in the little Island in the North, a peculiarly tender bond should unite us; rising from the memory of great benefits conferred, without self-seeking, when the people of Great Africa were small and young, and England old and strong.
Even ten years ago it seemed to me not wholly unreasonable to hope that this ambition might yet be realized.
True, there had been in the past even then terrible and grievous mistakes on the part of England; the step-mother of the South African people was, one knew, a step-mother with a not quite certain temper; but when one remembered that England had in the past sent out to South Africa such men as Sir George Grey, that fresh from Ireland came Sir William Porter, and that in spite of astonishing occasional aberrations there had frequently been a tendency on the part of the ruling power in England to make for a course of rectitude in South Africa, I do not think that dream was wholly unjustifiable, or that one who dreamed it need necessarily have been deemed a madman. Even ten years ago it still seemed within the range of possibility that, when the time came for the official separation between England and South Africa (as it must come between all lands and the old peoples on the other side of the globe; as it will come to Australia and New Zealand and Canada), that when that time came, little as was England's share in the blood of South Africa, there might yet be a tough cable of affection stretching across the six thousand miles of sea, and binding the hearts of South Africans, Dutch, English, German, French or African in origin, to the hearts of the people in the little Isles of the North.