Reviewing the course of Cape politics during the thirty years of responsible government, that course appears smooth when compared with the parallel current of events in the Australian Colonies. There have been few constitutional crises, and no exciting struggles over purely domestic issues. This is due not merely to the absence of certain causes of strife, but also to the temper of the people, and their thin dispersion over a vast territory. In large town populations excitement grows by the sympathy of numbers, but South Africa has only five or six towns in which a public meeting of even three hundred citizens could be gathered. The Dutch are tardy, cautious and reserved. The doggedness of their ancestors who resisted Philip II. of Spain lives in them still. They have a slow tenacious intensity, like that of a forest fire, which smoulders long among the prostrate trunks before it bursts into flame. But they are, except when deeply stirred, conservative and slow to move. They dislike change so much as to be unwilling to change their representatives or their ministers. A Cape statesman told me that the Dutch members of the Assembly would often say to him: "We think you wrong in this instance, and we are going to vote against you, but we don't want to turn you out; stay on in office as before." So President Kruger observed to me, in commenting on the frequent changes of government in England: "When we have found an ox who makes a good leader of the team, we keep him there, instead of shifting the cattle about in the hope of finding a better one;" and in saying this he expressed the feelings and habits of his race. To an Englishman the Dutch seem to want that interest in politics for the sake of politics which marks not only the English (and still more the Irish) at home but also the English stock in North America and Australia. But this very fact makes them all the more fierce and stubborn when some issue arises which stirs their inmost mind, and it is a fact to be remembered by those who have to govern them. The things they care most about are their religion, their race ascendency over the blacks, and their Dutch-African nationality as represented by their kinsfolk in the two Republics. The first of these has never been tampered with; the two latter have been at the bottom of all the serious difficulties that have arisen between them and the English. That which was in 1897 exciting them and forming the crucial issue in Cape politics was the strained condition of things which existed in the Transvaal. I propose in the following chapter to explain how that condition came about, and to sketch its salient features.
CHAPTER XXV
THE SITUATION IN THE TRANSVAAL BEFORE THE RISING OF 1895
The agitation at Johannesburg, which Dr. Jameson's expedition turned into a rising, took place in December, 1895. I spent some time in Pretoria and Johannesburg in the preceding month, and had good opportunities of observing the symptoms of political excitement and gauging the tendencies at work which were so soon to break out and fix the eyes of the world upon the Witwatersrand. The situation was a singular one, without parallel in history; and though I did not know that the catastrophe was so near at hand, it was easy to see that a conflict must come and would prove momentous to South Africa. Of this situation as it presented itself to a spectator who had no personal interest involved, and had the advantage of hearing both sides, I propose to speak in the present chapter.
To comprehend the position of the Transvaal Boers one must know something of their history. From the brief sketch of it given in earlier chapters (Chapters [XI] and [XII]) the reader will have gathered how unlike they are to any European people or to the people of the United States. Severed from Europe and its influences two hundred years ago, they have, in some of the elements of modern civilisation, gone back rather than forward. They were in 1885, when the Rand goldfields were discovered, and many of them are to-day, a half-nomad race, pasturing their flocks and herds over the vast spaces of what is still a wilderness, and migrating in their waggons from the higher to the lower pastures according to the season of the year—
—Omnia secum
Armentarius Afer agit, tectumque laremque
Armaque, Amyclæumque canem, Cressamque pharetram.
Living in the open air, and mostly in the saddle, they are strangely ignorant and old fashioned in all their ideas. They have no literature and very few newspapers. Their religion is the Dutch and Huguenot Calvinism of the seventeenth century, rigid and stern, hostile to all new light, imbued with the spirit of the Old Testament rather than of the New. They dislike and despise the Kafirs, whom they have regarded as Israel may have regarded Amalek, and whom they have treated with equal severity. They hate the English also,[78] who are to them the hereditary enemies that conquered them at the Cape; that drove them out into the wilderness in 1836; that annexed their Republic in 1877, and thereafter broke the promises of self-government made at the time of the annexation; that stopped their expansion on the west by occupying Bechuanaland, and on the north by occupying Matabililand and Mashonaland; and that were still, as they believed, plotting to find some pretext for overthrowing their independence.[79] This hatred is mingled with a contempt for those whom they defeated at Laing's Nek and Majuba Hill, and with a fear born of the sense that the English are their superiors in knowledge, in activity, and in statecraft. It is always hard for a nation to see the good qualities of its rivals and the strong points of its opponents' case; but with the Boers the difficulty is all the greater because they know little or nothing of the modern world and of international politics. Two centuries of solitary pastoral life have not only given them an aversion for commerce, for industrial pursuits, and for finance, but an absolute incapacity for such occupations, so that when gold was discovered in their country, they did not even attempt to work it,[80] but were content to sell, usually for a price far below its value, the land where the gold-reefs lay, and move off with the proceeds to resume elsewhere their pastoral life. They have the virtues appropriate to a simple society. They are brave, good-natured, hospitable, faithful to one another, generally pure in their domestic life, seldom touched by avarice or ambition. But the corruption of their Legislature shows that it is rather to the absence of temptation than to any superior strength of moral principle that these merits have been due. For politics they have little taste or gift. Politics can flourish only where people are massed together, and the Boer is a solitary being who meets his fellows solely for the purposes of religion or some festive gathering. Yet ignorant and slow-witted as they are, inborn ability and resolution are not wanting. They have indeed a double measure of wariness and wiliness in their intercourse with strangers, because their habitual suspicion makes them seek in craft the defence for their ignorance of affairs; while their native doggedness is confirmed by their belief in the continued guidance and protection of that Providence whose hand led them through the wilderness and gave them the victory over all their enemies.
This was the people into whose territory there came, after 1884, a sudden swarm of gold-seekers. The Uitlanders, as these strangers are called (the word is not really Dutch, one is told, but an adaptation from the German), who by 1890 had come to equal and soon thereafter exceeded the whole number of the Boers, belonged to many stocks. The natives of England, the Cape, and Natal were the most numerous, but there were also many English-speaking men from other regions, including Australians and Americans, as well as a smaller number of Germans and Scandinavians, some Russians (mostly Jews) and a few Italians and Frenchmen. Unlike as these newcomers were to one another, they were all still more unlike the rude hunting and pastoral people among whom they came. They were miners, traders, financiers, engineers, keen, nimble-minded men, all more or less skilled in their respective crafts, all bent on gain, and most of them with that sense of irresponsibility and fondness for temporary pleasure which a chanceful and uncertain life, far from home, and relieved from the fear of public opinion, tends to produce. Except some of the men from the two Colonies, they could not speak the Boer Taal, and had no means of communication, any more than they had social or moral affinities, with the folk of the land. There were therefore no beginnings of any assimilation between them and the latter. They did not affect the Boers, except with a sense of repulsion, and still less did the Boers affect them. Moreover, there were few occasions for social intercourse. The Uitlanders settled only along the Witwatersrand, and were aggregated chiefly in Johannesburg. The Boers who had lived on the Rand, except a few who came daily into the towns with their waggons to sell milk and vegetables, retired from it. It was only in Pretoria and in a few of the villages that there was any direct social contact between the two elements.