There is one other fact which is disclosed by this official correspondence from the High Commissioner to the Secretary of State which cannot be overlooked. Mr. Merriman and Mr. Sauer both repudiated absolutely President Krüger's statement that Mr. Hargrove "had come here [i.e. to Pretoria], as he says, from Sauer and Merriman." In view of this repudiation, it is somewhat startling to find that the letters covering the minutes of the conciliation meetings, forwarded to Lord Milner from time to time with the request that they may be sent on to the Colonial Office, bear the signature of Mr. Albert Cartwright, as honorary secretary of the Conciliation Committee of South Africa. Mr. Albert Cartwright was editor of The South African News—that is to say, of the journal which, as we have noticed before, served as the medium for the expression of the political views of Mr. Merriman and Mr. Sauer. At the period in question The South African News rendered itself notorious by circulating the absurd, but none the less injurious, report that General Buller and his army had surrendered to the Boers in Natal and agreed to return to England on parole; by publishing stories of imaginary Boer victories; by eulogising Mr. Hargrove, whose acceptance of the £1,000 from the Netherlands Railway it definitely denied; and by its persistent and vehement denunciations of Lord Milner. At a later period Mr. Cartwright was convicted of a defamatory libel on Lord Kitchener, and condemned to a term of imprisonment.[221]
Mischievous effects.
The situation thus brought about is described by Lord Milner in a passage in the despatch[222] which covers the transmission of the newspaper report of the People's Congress at Graaf Reinet. After stating that in return for Mr. Schreiner's efforts to secure the postponement of the Bond Congress, he had himself persuaded the leaders of the Progressive party to abstain from any public demonstration of their opinions, he writes:
"There was a truce of God on both sides. Then came the 'conciliation' movement, and the country was stirred from end to end by a series of meetings much more violent and mischievous than the regular Bond Congress would have been, though, of course, on the same lines. The truce being thus broken, it would have been useless—and, as a matter of fact, I did not attempt—to restrain an expression of opinion on the other side. Hence the long series of meetings held in British centres to pronounce in favour of the annexation of both Republics, and to give cordial support to the policy of Her Majesty's Government and myself personally. On the whole, the utterances at these meetings have been marked by a moderation totally absent in the tone of the conciliators. But no doubt a certain number of violent things have been said, and a certain amount of unnecessary heat generated. I do not think, however, that those [the loyalists] who have held these meetings, under extraordinary provocation, are greatly to blame if this has occasionally been the case."
That the "conciliation" movement exercised a most injurious influence in a colony of which a considerable area was in rebellion or under martial law, and where the majority of the inhabitants were in sympathy with the enemy is obvious. But from the point of view of the Afrikander nationalists it was an intelligible and effective method of promoting the objects which they had in view. What is amazing is the part which was played in it by Englishmen, and the confident manner in which the promoters of the movement relied upon the political co-operation of the friends of the Boers in the ranks of the Liberal party in England. Every Afrikander who attended these meetings knew that he was doing his best to arouse hatred against the Englishman and sympathy for the Boer. The nature of the resolutions to which he gave his adherence left him in no doubt on this point.
"The war," said Mr. A. B. de Villiers, at the People's Congress, "was the most unrighteous war that was ever pursued. The simple aim was to seize the Republics. If that was persisted in, Afrikanders would not rest.... Britain would efface the Republics and make the people slaves. Race hatred would then be prolonged from generation to generation."
To publish abroad such opinions as these was obviously to invite rebellion in the Cape Colony, to encourage the resistance of the Boers, and to embarrass the British authorities, both civil and military, throughout South Africa. This was precisely what the Afrikander nationalist desired to do. But what is to be thought of the Englishmen who, both in the Cape Colony and in England, took part in this "conciliation" movement? Surely they did not desire these same results. Were they, then, the comrades or the dupes of the Afrikander nationalists? This is a question upon which the individual reader may be left to form his own judgment.
Comrades or dupes.
This much, at least, is certain. What gave the Afrikander nationalists the power to bring about the second invasion of the Cape Colony, and to inflict a year and a half of guerilla warfare upon South Africa, was the co-operation of these Englishmen—whether comrades or dupes—who opposed the annexation of the Republics. The intense sympathy felt by the Afrikanders for their defeated kinsmen was natural; but the means by which it was enflamed were artificial. Lord Milner himself, with his accustomed serenity of judgment, refused to take a "gloomy view" of the question of racial relations in the Colony, still less in South Africa as a whole.
"If it is true," he wrote on June 6th, "as the 'conciliators' are never tired of threatening us, that race hatred will be eternal, why should they make such furious efforts to keep it up at the present moment? The very vehemence of their declarations that the Afrikanders will never forgive, nor forget, nor acquiesce, seems to me to indicate a considerable and well-justified anxiety on their part lest these terrible things should, after all, happen."