Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

If the French or Chinese or Russian Government is not obliged to gloss over the fact to the mass of its people that in undertaking a certain war it is thinking nothing of justice or injustice, not the benefit of the conquered, but simply of itself; is it not because there is no large body of the people strong enough to hamper it and perhaps tie its hands altogether if it did not cozen and blind them?

What is the action of the English Government under such conditions, when Pitt drags in the words justice, right, mercy, to shield itself, but a covert assertion that such a feeling does exist, which would not stand by it if it did not believe that the freedom and emancipation of others would be aided by its action?

Nay, in the meanest souled Englishwoman, when she dare not say to herself openly: "I hate that woman and I will wrong her," but is obliged to bring in the blasphemed words duty, right, justice, to soothe her own soul—what is it but a testimony that, even in that poor specimen of the race, there lurks somewhere a feeling that right must be done, that for no gain to yourself can you take an unfair advantage. It is the low, insincere element in the woman striving to justify itself before the profound English conception of the absolute necessity of justice and fair play between all men. She dare not slander her fellow unless she has first silenced this.

An Englishman going to sit on the same jury with Boers to try a white man for killing a Kaffir dares not say frankly and openly to himself before he goes in or has heard the evidence, as the old Boer does frankly and truly: "That man is not guilty; no white man shall be punished for the death of a black"; but he says, when he hears the evidence: "After all, one can never be certain that evidence is true; why should I set myself up to condemn a fellow man, perhaps to lifelong imprisonment, when it may be unjust? And is it not my duty to avoid stirring up ill-feeling between Dutch and English by bringing in a Boer guilty?" And he votes with the rest. But what is this hideous fraud but the cringing of the man's lower nature before the higher element in himself? If he dare once, only once, admit frankly in his own heart: "That man committed murder, but I am going to bring him in not guilty because these Boers buy in my shop," he would not dare to give the verdict, and, if he did, something even in that low groping nature would rise up and say: "You are not worthy to be an Englishman," and he would know the agony of remorse.

The Boer does not need to lie to himself because there is nothing in him that would rise up to reproach him if he did not. This hideous fraud in the nation and individual is evidence that there does exist a part which follows after justice and freedom for all men and which has to be blinded and silenced before wrong can be done; it does testify that. Even in the lowest English-speaking man or woman, somewhere, tucked away in the background of their being, is that awful and almost mysterious instinct of our people: "You can't wrong a fellow human being; a man is a man; and what is right for you is right for another. All men have a claim to fair play." And before this whisper the meanest man or woman of our race squirms when he tries to evade it, and, unable fully to understand it or explain it, it lives in the heart of our people, growing louder and stronger as the ages pass. We can no more tell you how and why we have it than the Greek can tell you why he had to make statues and love them; or the Roman laws and roads; or the German music. It seems it is inborn in us. We may try to annihilate it by argument; we may try to cozen it by lies; but in each one of us stands this instinct pointing with its upraised finger the path we have to walk in. It is the mysterious birthright of every English man and woman. We may call it the love of freedom, of justice, but neither of these quite defines it; it is something more; it is the deep conviction buried somewhere in our nature, not to be eradicated, that man as man is a great and important thing, that the right to himself and his existence is the incontestable property of all men; and above all the conviction that not only we have a right and are bound to preserve it for ourselves, but that where we come into contact with others we are bound to implant it or preserve it in them. It is a profound faith, not in the equal talent, virtues, and abilities of men, but in the equal right of the poorest, most feeble, most ignorant, to his own freedom and to a perfect equality of treatment.

In all or almost all of us it is faintly present, and in the master minds which express our race it becomes a passion which in a thousand directions manifests itself, as the German instinct for music making now a Mozart and then a Beethoven, and the Greeks' artistic power making now a Phidias and then a Praxiteles. It is this which we believe and hold to be the peculiar attribute of the English people, our one gift which we have to contribute to the general sum of humanity's wealth—the desire not only to be free, but to make free—the consciousness of the importance of the individual as individual apart from any attributes of sex, nationality, talent or wealth. To us it has been given first among all peoples to perceive, though still dimly, the unity of all human creatures, and as a nation to endeavour to realize in our legislation and institutions and our relations with weak peoples our perception of the fact.[80]

To those of us who hold this view of the past history of the English race, of its present position and of the characteristic which constitutes its peculiarity and strength among the peoples of earth, the upas-tree theory with regard to its future growth is not only inconceivable but, could we conceive it as possible, we should hold it undesirable. And there is nothing from our point of view either in its past history or present condition to support the theory. The Spaniard attempted the upas-tree form of colonization and empire, but he has not succeeded. No nation who has produced any approach to a permanent organization has followed that line and succeeded by following it. The Roman, the Great Mogul, attempted, where they conquered, to spread the benefits and rights of their own organization to the affiliated people; it was not the number of her slaughters that made the Roman Empire the greatest the world has yet seen or her rule the most enduring; the conquests of Rome, when she had attained her widest empire, had not cost so many lives as many a barbarian conquest which depopulated whole territories and passed like a smoke or a pestilence leaving no mark behind; the Roman Empire attained to that endurance and power it held because Rome was not a upas-tree to the races she came into contact with, but because, if in a partial and incomplete manner, yet more than others, where she planted her standard, she sought to raise and instruct, not to exterminate. No one can study the history of that great folk in imperial growth without feeling that behind all lay a dim perception of something higher than mere national expansion; and in those wise methods, which in the hour of her greatness she ordained, through which men of all nations and creeds might in time and by merit become Romans and by her medium spread everywhere the arts, the knowledge and the advantages peculiar to herself, we see the germ of the true idea of universal empire fitfully trying to incarnate itself. Rome fell because she herself became corrupted by wealth and the inequality of possession, but it took her three centuries to die, and it must never be forgotten that there were Gauls, Spaniards, Asiatics and Germans who fought as desperately in her cause at last as the children of the Seven Hills: so real a fact had been her empire, so true was her absorption of all peoples into herself. The Gaul, the Thracian, the Illyrian died generation after generation fighting for the Roman flag because it had conferred on them something that they valued, and rather than lose which they would die. It is not because she slaughtered but because she raised, not because she crushed but because she protected, that Rome reigned; and she is to some extent immortal and among us to-day still, not because of the men she slaughtered, which any savage or wild beast might have accomplished as well, but because she had something new and large to teach mankind, and she taught it to the race. There is not upon the earth to-day one pure blood Roman any more than there is one pure blood Greek, but Rome lives still in our institutions, in our learning, in our habits of thought; she has her part in every civilized individual; and, while the race continues on the planet and continues to grow, she will have her part in that growth, because, like Greece, she was one of the early forces which fed and shaped it; and her language, spoken by none, is still preserved because of the treasure imbedded in it; and in that large ultimate race of humanity she also will have her share because, while her blood will be fractionally represented in it, her thought will have played a large share in its creation.

Such empire and such immortality, only infinitely wider, deeper, and more indestructible, is that which we desire and hope for the English race, and language. We believe that we also have our contribution to make to the growth of humanity. We believe that our sense of the importance of individual liberty, irrespective of individual conditions, is a larger contribution to the wealth of the race on earth than any folk has yet made; and we believe that our desire to impart it is a more potent means of extending our true empire, and with it our speech over the surface of the globe, than any mere strength of arm or valour in slaughtering. We believe that it is not impossible that the day will come when from north to south, from east to west, over the globe, our English spirit will have spread; when, as the art of reading and writing which was once the discovery and possession of some prehistoric race but which is to-day becoming the property of the globe, so that in a hundred years' time no child on the globe will be without it, so our English freedom will spread and the day will come when in that large united people of the future every man will say: "In that I am free I am English," and the language, when even possible freedom has been preached all the world over, may form the foundation of the world's speech.

We look forward to no time when our brilliant little Japanese brother with his love of flowers and beauty and simplicity and his keen intellectual insight, when our Russian mate with his idealism and grim intensity of emotion, and even the Kaffir with his high sense of honour and justice and his almost abnormally developed sense of social unity and obligation, shall have passed away for ever from among the things of earth and when we shall reign in his stead. Our dream of the future of our race is of no John Bull seated astride of the earth, his huge belly distended with the people he has devoured and his teeth growing out yet more than ever with all the meat he has bitten and looking around on a depeopled earth and laughing till all his teeth show and the peoples' bones rattle in his belly: "Ha! I reign alone now. I have killed them all out!"

If such a consummation were within the remotest grasp of possibility, the best thing the peoples of earth could do would be to combine and kill the ogre while there was yet time. But no such consummation of his fate is conceivable. The North American has indeed died out before us as the Bushman almost died out before the Dutch and will utterly die out, unless with great care and at much expense we have the taste and the wisdom artificially to preserve him for future ages and to complete as far as possible the links in the chain of life; but we have not really killed them, they had not the power unless they were artificially preserved to grasp the conditions of a more complex existence. Negro, Indian, and even Irishman, they all tend to increase, not to die out, under our rule. Our dream of the future empire of our race is not of an empire over graves but in and through living nations. The future of our race is never prefigured in our minds by the upas but as a huge tree, among whose shelving roots and under whose protecting shadow, endless forms of life may spring up and flourish that might otherwise be destroyed, and in whose wide umbrageous branches every form of bird and creature shall find resting place and nourishment, a tree of life and not of death. We do not dream of our language that it shall forcibly destroy the world's speeches and all they contain, reigning in solitary grandeur, but, as gold in a ring binds into one circle rare gems of every kind and some of infinitely greater beauty than itself, so we dream that our speech being common may bind together and bring into one those treasures of thought and knowledge which the peoples of earth have produced, its highest function being that of making the treasures of all accessible to all.