The probabilities of the case are altogether against the hypothesis, and support the view of a temperate writer in the Edinburgh Review for October, who describes it as "a nightmare." What are these probabilities?
The Dutch in the Cape had been loyal till December 1895, and had indeed been growing more and more loyal during the last fifteen years. The Africander Bond had shaken itself free from the suspicions once entertained of its designs. Its leader, Mr. Hofmeyr, was conspicuously attached to the Imperial connection, and was, indeed, the author of a well-known scheme for an Imperial Customs Union. Even after December, 1895, its indignation at the attack on the Transvaal had not affected the veneration of the Dutch party for the British Crown, so warmly expressed in 1897. In 1898 the Cape Assembly, in which there was a Dutch majority led by a Ministry supported by the Bond, voted unanimously a large annual contribution to Imperial naval defence. Every effort was made by Mr. Hofmeyr and by the Prime Minister of the Cape to induce the Transvaal to make concessions which might avert war. As regards the Free State, its Dutch burghers had been for many years on the best terms with their English fellow-burghers and with the British Government. They had nothing to gain by a racial conflict, and their President, who is understood to have suggested the Bloemfontein Conference, as well as Mr. Fischer, one of their leading statesmen, strove hard to secure peace till immediately before war broke out.
There was, moreover, no prospect of success for an effort to overthrow the power of Britain. The Dutch in the Colony were not fighting men like their Transvaal brethren, and were, except for voting purposes, quite unorganized. Those of the Free State were a mere militia, with no experience of war, and had possessed, at least down to 1895, when I remember to have seen their tiny arsenal, very little in the way of war munitions. The Transvaal Boers were no doubt well armed and good fighters, but there were after all only some twenty or twenty-five thousand of them, a handful to contend against the British Empire. The Transvaal Government was, moreover, from its structure and the capacity of the men who composed it, if not indisposed to indulge in day-dreams, at any rate unfit to prosecute so vast an enterprise.
There seems therefore to be no foundation in any facts which have so far been made public for the belief in this "conspiracy of the Dutch race," or for the inevitableness of the imagined conflict.
The truth would appear to be that the Transvaal people did at one time cherish the hope of extending their Republic over the wide interior. They were stopped on the west in 1884. They were stopped on the north in 1890. They were stopped in their effort to reach the sea in 1894. After that year British territory surrounded them on all sides except where they bordered the Portuguese on the north-east. Many of them, including the President, doubtless cherished the hope of some time regaining a complete independence such as that of the Free State. Some ardent spirits dreamt of a Dutch South African Republic with Pretoria for its future capital; and there were probably a few men of the same visionary type in the Colony and the Free State who talked in the same wild way, especially after the Jameson invasion had stirred Dutch feeling to its depths. But from such dreams and such talk it is a long step to a "conspiracy of the Dutch over all South Africa." The possibility that the Dutch element would some day or other prevail, a possibility to which the slowness of British immigration and the natural growth of the Dutch population gave a certain substance in it down to 1885, was in that year destroyed by the discovery of gold in the Witwatersrand, which brought a new host of English-speaking settlers into South Africa, and assured the numerical and economic preponderance of the English in the progressive and expanding regions of the country. It is also true that the Transvaal Government made military preparations and imported arms on a large scale. They expected a rising even before 1895; and after 1895 they also expected a fresh invasion. But there is not, so far as the public know, any shred of evidence that they contemplated an attack upon Britain. The needs of defence, a defence in which they doubtless counted on the aid of the Free State and of a section of their own Uitlanders, sufficiently explain the accumulation of warlike munitions on which so much stress has been laid.
The conclusion to which an examination of the matter leads is that no evidence whatever has been produced either that there was any such conspiracy as alleged, or that a conflict between Dutch and English was inevitable. Such a conflict might, no doubt, have possibly some day arisen. But it is at least equally probable that it might have been avoided. The Transvaal people were not likely to provoke it, and every year made it less likely that they could do so with any chance of success. The British element was increasing, not only around their State, but within it. The prospect of support from a great European Power had vanished. When their aged President retired from the scene, their old dissensions, held in check only by the fear of Britain, would have reappeared, and their vicious system of government would have fallen to pieces. So far as Britain was concerned, the way to avert a conflict was to have patience. Haste had been her bane in South Africa. It was haste which annexed the Transvaal in 1877, when a few months' delay might have given her the country. It was haste which in 1880 wrecked the plan of South African Confederation. It was haste which brought about that main source of recent troubles, the invasion by the South Africa Company's police in 1895.
In these reflections upon recent events nothing has been said, because nothing could now be profitably said, upon two aspects of the matter—the character and conduct of the persons chiefly concerned, and the subterranean forces which are supposed to have been at work on both sides. These must be left to some future historian, and they will form an interesting chapter in his book. He will have proof positive of many things which can now only be conjectured, and of some things which, though they may be known to a few, ought not to be stated until proof of them can be produced.
It is right, however, even while war is raging, to consider the circumstances that have led to war, so far as these can be discussed from the information which we all possess, because a fair consideration of those circumstances ought to influence the view which Englishmen take of their antagonists, and ought to affect their judgment of the measures proper to be taken when war comes to its end, and arrangements have to be made for the resettlement of the country. Those who have read the historical chapters of this book, and have reflected on the history of other British colonies, and particularly of Canada, will have drawn the moral, which I have sought to enforce in the concluding chapter, that what South Africa most needs is the reconcilement and ultimate fusion of the two white races. Reconcilement and fusion have now, to all appearances, been thrown back into a dim and distant future. That man must be sanguine indeed who expects, as some persons say they do expect, to see the relations of the two races placed on a better footing by a bitter war between them, a war which has many of the incidents of a civil war, and is waged on one side by citizen soldiers. To most observers it seems more likely to sow a crop of dragon's teeth which will produce a harvest, if not of armed men, yet of permanent hatred and disaffection. Nevertheless, even at the darkest moment, men must work with hope for the future, and strive to apply the principles of policy which experience has approved. The first principle which governs the relation of Britain to her self-governing colonies is that she must do all she can to keep them contented and loyal. She cannot hope permanently to retain any which have become disloyal, and the defection of one may be the signal for the loosening of the tie which binds the others. The gift of self-government practically makes the maintenance of the Imperial connection dependent on the will of the colony; and where self-government exists, voting is more powerful than arms. The Transvaal Republic has been often troublesome, but an unfriendly neighbour is less dangerous than a disaffected colony. A wise policy will therefore use with moderation the opportunities which the conclusion of the present war will afford for resettling the political arrangements of the country, remembering that the Dutch and British races have got to live together, looking forward to a time, probably less than a century distant, when the exhaustion of mineral wealth will have made South Africa again a pastoral and agricultural country, and thereby increased the importance, relatively to the town-dwelling English, of that Dutch element which is so deeply rooted in the soil. To reconcile the races by employing all the natural and human forces which make for peace and render the prosperity of each the prosperity of both, and so to pave the way for the ultimate fusion of Dutchman and Englishman in a common Imperial as well as a common Africander patriotism—this should be the aim of every government that seeks to base the world-wide greatness of Britain on the deepest and surest foundations.
October 23rd, 1899.