Cecil Rhodes, Man and Empire-Maker

by Princess Catherine Radziwill

The only means of existence the country Boers had was the produce of their farms. This taken away from them, they were left in the presence of starvation, and starvation only. This population, deprived of every means of subsistence, would have invaded Cape Colony, which already was overrun with white refugees from Johannesburg and the Rand, who had proved a prolific source of the greatest annoyance to the British Government. To allow this mass of miserable humanity to wander all over the Colony would have been inhuman, and I would like to know what those who, in England and upon the Continent, were so indignant over the Concentration Camps would have said had it turned out that some sixty thousand human creatures had been allowed to starve.

The British Government, owing to the local conditions under which the South African War came to be fought, found itself in a dilemma, out of which the only escape was to try to relieve wholesale misery in the most practical manner possible. There was no time to plan out with deliberation what ought to be done; some means had to be devised to keep a whole population alive whom an administration would have been accused of murdering had there been delay in feeding it.

There was also another danger to be faced had the veldt been allowed to become the scene of a long-continued migration of nations—that of allowing the movements of the British troops to become known, thereby lengthening a war of already intolerable length, to say nothing of exposing uselessly the lives of English detachments, which, in this guerrilla kind of warfare, would inevitably have occurred had the Boer leaders remained in constant communication with their wandering compatriots.

Altogether the institution of the Concentration Camps was not such a bad one originally. Unfortunately, they were not organised with the seriousness which ought to have been brought to bear on such a delicate matter, and their care was entrusted to people who succeeded, unwittingly perhaps, in making life there less tolerable than it need have been.

I visited some of the Concentration Camps, and looked into their interior arrangements with great attention. The result of my personal observations was invariably the same—that where English officials were in charge of these Camps everything possible was done to lighten the lot of their inmates. But where others were entrusted with surveillance, every kind of annoyance, indignity and insult was offered to poor people obliged to submit to their authority.

In this question, as in many others connected with the Boer War, it was the local Jingoes who harmed the British Government more than anything else, and the Johannesburg Uitlanders, together with the various Volunteer Corps and Scouts, brought into the conduct of the enterprises with which they were entrusted an intolerance and a smallness of spirit which destroyed British prestige far more than would have done a dozen unfortunate wars. The very fact that one heard these unwise people openly say that every Boer ought to be killed, and that even women and children ought to be suppressed if one wanted to win the war, gave abroad the idea that England was a nation thirsting for the blood of the unfortunate Afrikanders. This mistaken licence furnished the Bond with the pretext to persuade the Dutch Colonists to rebel, and the Boer leaders with that of going on with their resistance until their last penny had been exhausted and their last gun had been captured.

Without these detestable Jingoes, who would have done so much harm not only to South Africa, but also to their Mother Country, England, it is certain that an arrangement, which would have brought about an honourable peace for everybody, could have come much sooner than it did. A significant fact worth remembering—that the Boers did not attempt to destroy the mines on the Rand—goes far to prove that they were not at all so determined to hurt British property, or to ruin British residents, or to destroy the large shareholder concerns to which the Transvaal owed its celebrity, as was credited to them.

When the first rumours that terrible things were going on in the Concentration Camps reached England there were found at once amateurs willing to start for South Africa to investigate the truth of the accusations. A great fuss was made over an appeal by Lady Maxwell, the wife of the Military Governor of Pretoria, in which she entreated America to assist her in raising a fund to provide warm clothing for the Boer women and children. Conclusions were immediately drawn, saddling the military authorities with responsibility for the destitution in which these women and children found themselves. But in the name of common sense, how could one expect that people who had run away before what they believed to be an invasion of barbarians determined to burn down and destroy all their belongings—how could one expect that these people in their flight would have thought about taking with them their winter clothes, which, in the hurry of a departure in a torrid summer, would only have proved a source of embarrassment to them? More recently we have seen in Belgium, France, Poland and the Balkans what occurred to the refugees who fled before foreign invasion. The very fact of Lady Maxwell's appeal proved the solicitude of the official English classes for the unfortunate Boers and their desire to do something to provide them with the necessaries of life.

Everybody knows the amount of money which is required in cases of this kind, and—in addition to America's unstinting response—public and private charity in Britain flowed as generously as it always does upon every occasion when an appeal is made to it in cases of real misfortune. But when it comes to relieve the wants of about sixty-three thousand people, of all ages and conditions, this is not so easy to do as persons fond of criticising things which they do not understand are apt sweepingly to declare. Very soon the question of the Concentration Camps became a Party matter, and was made capital of for Party purposes without discrimination or restraint. Sham philanthropists filled the newspapers with their indignation, and a report was published in the form of a pamphlet by Miss Hobhouse, which, it is to be feared, contained some percentage of tales poured into her ears by people who were nurtured in the general contempt for truth which at that time existed in South Africa.

If the question of Concentration Camps had been examined seriously, it would have been at once perceived what a tremendous burden the responsibility of having to find food and shelter for thousands of enemy people imposed on English officials. No one in Government circles attempted or wished to deny, sorrowful as it was to have to recognise it, that the condition of the Camps was not, and indeed could not be, nearly what one would have wished or desired. On the other hand, the British authorities were unremitting in their efforts to do everything which was compatible with prudence to improve the condition of these Camps. Notwithstanding, people were so excited in regard to the question, and it was so entirely a case of "Give a dog a bad name," that even the appointment of an Imperial Commission to report on the matter failed to bring them to anything approaching an impartial survey. Miss Hobhouse's report had excited an emotion only comparable to the publication of Mrs. Beecher Stowe's famous novel, "Uncle Tom's Cabin."