Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

And the question then suggests itself to us: Have we really so little to give to the common stock of our fellows? Are our assertions of our own greatness and importance brought down to the fact that, while the majority of other nations owing to their continental position have been obliged to employ the mass of their folk as soldiers, and suffer in all ages from the devastations of war upon their own soil, we, guarded by our island condition, have been able to employ the mass of our working class and to use our abundant coal and iron to produce a larger bulk of a less finished quality of saleable articles than any other civilized people, whom we are therefore able, at the price of the health and joy of our working classes, to undersell in the nineteenth century? Is this the fact, that the narrow and fixed limits of our island home did not admit of our retaining all our population within its limits, and has compelled us to send out swarms of folk to America and all vacant or savage-peopled parts of the earth? Are these accidents our only claim to greatness and to the respect of mankind? When we are called perfidious and money-wringing from our own poor and the weak of all the peoples, is our character summed up, and is our function no higher in the modern world, no higher than that of the Phœnicians in the old, to be the carriers and traders of the race while the world has need of us and then to pass away when our work is done, leaving hardly a trace?

We believe that it is not.

When our wild German forefathers, Saxon, Danish or Frisian, landed in Britain and mingled their blood with the remnant of wild Britons who inhabited the fastnesses of the land, there was one great treasure common to all the barbarian peoples of Europe and Central Asia which they carried with them, the tradition and fact of personal freedom. The Greeks and the Romans believed themselves free; it was the freedom of an enfranchized minority reigning despotically over a vast body of women and slaves, and Athens, in her noblest days, contained thirty thousand free adult males, while her population numbered hundreds of thousands.

In Eastern civilization the proportion of free men was generally smaller, and the absolutely free and independent individual in the nations was sometimes only the solitary despot who ruled. This is never the case with a nomadic people who, if they take captives, have no land for them to labour on, and no dungeons in which to confine them, and whose women and captives of war are therefore always more or less independent. Most of all was this so with our German ancestors, whose women were the most honoured part of the nation, supposed to possess a knowledge and insight which made their advice necessary on every great national question, who accompanied their husbands in peace and war, who gave them as wedding gifts no rose or lock of hair, but a sword and shield which were the man's most precious possessions throughout life, whose scorn and reproach were what the coward most dreaded, and who again and again led the tribes to conflict and victory, as when Velleda, the white-haired priestess, led the Germanic troops to Italy; and whose captives, when by rare chance they kept them alive, were in turn incorporated in the general body.

This absolute freedom and independence of almost a whole society was not peculiar to those northern races who conquered and peopled England, but to that profound consciousness of the necessity and importance of the preservation of individual freedom and the liberty of uncoerced personal action, so wholly distinct from that sometimes misnamed freedom in which the individual is bound to sink his individuality and personal inclination in that of the class or state to which he belongs and to submit abjectly to its rule—this freedom was not originally peculiar to the English, nor has it alone been kept by them. The Swiss in their mountains have preserved the blood and the speech of personal freedom of the Germanic races more pure than anywhere else on the surface of the earth, and nowhere, where that free barbarian blood spread itself, has the instinct and aspiration towards freedom become absolutely extinct. It has lived on in our brothers, the Dutch and French, and turns up again in their descendant, the African Boer; but when the matter is looked fairly in the face, we cannot avoid the deliberate conviction that, among great and dominant civilized people, the English race has kept more unsullied and borne highest, though often half furled or drooping for a time, the flag of individual freedom, which our barbarian ancestors handed down to their European descendants. England has not been free from foreign conquest; she bent beneath the heel of the Conqueror nine centuries ago; but she forced on her conquerors her speech; she has not been without her serfs, but early they became freed men; she has not been without her tyrannies of kings and nobles, but always her people have risen up against it and in time asserted their liberty of action; the masses of her people may have seemed to be flat on their bellies under the feet of rulers as under the early Stuarts, but it was only to rise more resolute than ever under Cromwell, and to rebel against his form of tyranny, too, when his dictatorship promised no increase of freedom.

To-day, when the strife is between wealth, which in skilful hands has usurped a power over men's lives and national destinies which was not contemplated when the laws of property were framed, the men of England will amend these laws as they before amended the laws with regard to kings, so that the power shall be broken and the individual be free; but if they are true to their tradition of the past they will stop when the power of a class to diminish freedom has been broken, and, as the rule of the king or baron was never allowed to become an absolute tyranny, so the yet more powerful rule of the many will not be allowed to become the slavish submission of the few, and the right of the individual to do as he pleases while his act does not hurt his fellow will be as of old the goal at which we shall aim.

The majority of Englishmen love freedom, but they love it in three different ways. The majority love it as a possession for themselves alone; they will not be interfered with, nor will they have their freedom of action barred by any one or any thing; they are not careful of the freedom of others, nor are they at all reluctant to sacrifice and annihilate it entirely if it increases their own; but to their own they cling with tenacity.

This love of freedom the Englishman shares with most savage and nomadic barbarous peoples; it is found in almost the highest perfection in the South African Boer. As a first step towards something higher it is invaluable; in its highest development its mere intensity makes it almost sublime, as is the attitude of the eagle when, having devoured all the lambs and rabbits it can find, it sails alone in the blue; it is an immensely higher quality than a mere servile submission in a people or an individual, and it is necessary as a foundation to the higher developing of the same feeling; but in itself it does not raise the nation or the person feeling it higher than the level of the noble savage.

There are a large number of us, though small compared to the first class, who love freedom for ourselves but also do not desire to grasp our liberty at the cost of others. We love liberty so dearly that we would not willingly inflict an injustice or a wrong on another, and we respect the freedom of others while we venerate our own. This love of freedom we share with all the great and noble souls that have ever existed, from the Persian prince, called the Lover of Justice or the Even-Handed, to the wise and just and far-seeing folk of every land to-day. It is a high and great, a noble, quality, but I do not think it makes us unique among the peoples of the world.

But there is yet a third way in which some of us love freedom. I do not know that any large and strong section of any people has ever loved it so before, though isolated individuals, Chinese, Indian, Jewish and Greek, have been irradiated by more or less of the glory of this passion; it is peculiar as a large racial and worldwide acting phenomenon to the English race and people. We love freedom not only for ourselves, but we desire with a burning passion to spread it broadcast over the earth; to see every human being safeguarded by it and raised to the level at which they may enjoy it; we desire freedom not only for ourselves but for humanity; and we labour to spread it. This I hold is the one great gift which England and England alone possesses; this is the quality which makes us unique among the nations of the earth; this is the gift which we have to contribute to the great common offertory of humanity.