Chapter X: The Disarmament of the Dutch Population (2)

"It is, indeed, calculated to exercise a most important and, I
believe, beneficial influence upon the South African politics of
the future. Among the principal causes of the trouble of the
past and present was the contempt felt by the Afrikander
countryman, used to riding and shooting, and generally in
possession of a good rifle and plenty of cartridges, for other
white men less habituated to arms than he was himself. That
feeling can hardly survive the experience of the past twelve
months, and especially of the last six weeks. The splendid
fighting of the despised Johannesburgers of the Imperial Light
Horse, and of the other South African Colonial Corps, has become
a matter of history, and the present _levee en masse_ of the
British people, including the townsmen, of this Colony, is proof
positive that when the necessity is really felt they are equal to
the best in courage and public spirit. In this respect the events
of the past few months, unfortunate as they have been in many
ways, have undoubtedly their brighter side. The mutual respect of
the two principal white races is the first condition of a healthy
political life in the South Africa of the future. It is possible
that if the extreme strain of the most recent developments of the
war had never been felt throughout Cape Colony, the British
inhabitants would never have had the opportunity of showing that
they were inferior to none in their willingness to bear all the
burdens of citizenship, including that of personal service."

[Sidenote: Remember the loyalists.]

And Lord Milner urges that in the future England should not forget that there are loyalists in South Africa as well as Boers; and that the loyalists are Dutch as well as British.

"The important part now played, even from the purely military
point of view, by the South African loyalists ought, as it seems
to me, to have a good effect not only in South Africa but in
England. The inherent vice, if I may say so, of almost all
public discussion of our South African difficulties is the
tendency to concentrate attention too exclusively on the Boers.
Say what we will, the controversy always seems to relapse into
the old ruts--it is the British Government on the one hand and
the Boers on the other. The question how a particular policy will
affect not merely our enemies, but our now equally numerous
friends, seems seldom to be adequately considered. And yet it
would seem that justice and policy alike should lead us to be as
eager to consider the feelings and interests, and to retain the
loyalty, of those who are fighting on our side, as to disarm the
present enmity and win the future confidence of those who are
fighting against us. And this principle would seem all the easier
to adhere to because there is really nothing which the great body
of the South African loyalists desire which it is not for the
honour and advantage of the mother country to insist upon.

"Of vindictiveness, or desire to oppress the Afrikanders, there
is, except in hasty utterances inevitable in the heat of the
conflict, which have no permanent significance, or in tirades
which are wholly devoid of influence, no sign whatever. The
attitude of almost all leading and representative men, and the
general trend of public feeling among the loyalists, even in the
intensity of the struggle, is dead against anything like racial
exclusiveness or domination. If this were not so it would be
impossible for a section of pure-bred Afrikanders, small no doubt
in numbers but weighty in character and position, to take the
strong line which they do in opposition to the views of the
majority of their own people, based as these are, and as they
know them to be, upon a misconception of our policy and
intentions. These men are among the most devoted adherents to the
Imperial cause, and would regard with more disfavour and alarm
than any one the failure of the British nation to carry out its
avowed policy in the most complete manner. They are absolutely
convinced that the unquestioned establishment of British
supremacy, and the creation of one political system from Capetown
to the Zambesi, is, after all that has happened, the only
salvation for men of their own race, as well as for others."

[Sidenote: "One Country, One Flag."]

And, in conclusion, he writes of the "predominant, indeed the almost unanimous, feeling of those South Africans who sympathise with the Imperial Government," that--

"they are sick to death of the war, which has brought ruin to
many of them, and imposed considerable sacrifices on almost all.
But they would rather see the war continue for an indefinite time
than run the risk of any compromise which would leave even the
remotest chance of the recurrence of so terrible a scourge in the
future. They are prepared to fight and suffer on in order to make
South Africa, indisputably and for ever, one country under one
flag, with one system of government, and that system the British,
which they believe to ensure the highest possible degree of
justice and freedom to men of all races."

In this luminous review of what Lord Milner terms "if by no means the most critical, possibly the most puzzling" state of affairs since the outbreak of the war, it will be observed that he puts the time required by South Africa to recover from the economic ravages of the war at "not many years." In point of fact, two and a half years after the surrender of Vereeniging nothing remained but the scattered graveyards upon the veld, the empty tins still tinkling upon the wire fences by the railways, and an occasional blockhouse, to remind the traveller of the devastating struggle from which the country had so recently emerged. This estimate of the period of recuperation affords a measure of the magnitude of Lord Milner's achievement in the three concluding years of his administration. For the rest, we look in vain for any trace of bitterness, or even of partisanship, in his frank and penetrating analysis. It is the survey of a man who is completely master of the situation; who is absolutely convinced of the justice of the British cause; who has no illusions and no fears.

[Sidenote: Feeding the enemy.]

With the circumstances in which the burghers were induced by their leaders to continue, or renew, their resistance to the Imperial troops before us, both the long duration of the guerilla war, and the methods by which it was finally brought to a close, become easily intelligible. At the same time it must not be forgotten that, from a purely military point of view, the relapse of the conquered territories into war was due to the insufficiency of British troops. By the end of April, 1900, as we have noticed before, all the reserves of the regular army had been exhausted; and, in addition to this, at the end of twelve months' service a considerable proportion of the Home and over-sea auxiliaries left South Africa to return to civil life. Had there been a sufficient number of trained soldiers to occupy effectively the Boer Republics, the war would not have swept back through them and over their borders into the Colony. Even so, the actual number of British troops in South Africa under Lord Roberts's command would have sufficed to subjugate the Boers, had the British military authorities employed the severe methods of warfare to which any other belligerent would have had recourse under the like conditions--methods of merciful severity which were employed, in fact, by the Union forces in the civil war in America.[255] But, by the irony of fate, the humane methods of the British, in the absence of a practically unlimited supply of trained troops, made the revival of hostilities possible on the part of the Boers, and thereby created the necessity for the employment of those more rigorous, but, by comparison, still humane and generous methods, in respect of which the charge of inhumanity was brought against Great Britain by the friends of the Boers in England and on the continent of Europe. No one will maintain that it is a part of the duty of a belligerent to support the non-combatant population of the enemy. Yet this duty was voluntarily assumed throughout the war by the British military authorities, who, from the occupation of Bloemfontein onwards, fed the non-combatant Boer population as well as they fed their own troops.

[Footnote 255: _E.g._ those employed by General Sherman in
his march to the Sea, through Georgia, in the latter part of
1864.]

[Sidenote: Lord Kitchener's task.]

An incident that happened after the occupation of Pretoria exhibits the remarkable generosity of the British attitude. At a time when, owing to the Boer attacks upon the railway, the utmost difficulty was experienced in getting supplies from the thousand-miles'-distant base at the coast, Lord Roberts was compelled to send away a part of the civilian population to General Botha, and they were removed by the Boer Commandant-General to Barberton. That is to say, while the British, on the one hand, were giving part of the supplies on which the existence of their troops depended, to the non-combatant population of the enemy, the enemy, on the other hand, was doing his utmost to destroy the single line of railway which alone stood between the British Army and starvation. When, therefore, Lord Kitchener succeeded to the command of the British forces in South Africa (November 29th, 1900), he found the task of disarmament complicated by two factors. There was the desire of the Home Government that the war should be conducted upon the humane lines hitherto adopted, and there was also the fact that the Imperial troops were not numerous enough to occupy effectively the whole territory of the Republics, or, in other words, to do the one thing of all others necessary to make this humane conduct of the war consistent with military success. It was impossible, with the troops at his disposal, for Lord Kitchener to hold the enormous territory of the conquered Republics. It was impossible, perhaps, to support a larger force in a country so poorly provided with food supplies and means of communication. An alternative plan had to be found. This plan was to remove the horses, cattle, and food supplies from the areas which he was unable to occupy, and to transport the non-combatant inhabitants to places where they could be both fed and protected. And, when this had been done--or, more correctly, while it was in process of being done--he had to capture the small, mobile bodies of burghers operating over the whole of the unprotected area of the late Republics and the Cape Colony, and to collect gradually the fighting Boers, captured or surrendered, into the colonial or over-sea prisoners' camps.

Certain districts, of which those surrounding the towns of Kimberley, Bloemfontein, Pretoria, and Johannesburg were the more important, had from the first been effectively occupied and securely held. All the troops at Lord Kitchener's disposal, that were not absorbed in the work of garrisoning these districts and maintaining the lines of communication, were organised into mobile columns, which were distributed among General Officers respectively attached to a particular area. In a despatch of July 8th, 1901, Lord Kitchener was able to report that, as the result of the recent work of these mobile columns, the Boers, although "still able, in case of emergency, to concentrate a considerable number of men," were, in his opinion, "unable to undertake any large scheme of operations." Apart from the heavy drain from prisoners captured and deaths in the field, the loss of their ox-waggons had seriously affected their mobility and supply arrangements.

"Divided up into small parties of three to four hundred men," he
writes, "they are scattered all over the country without plans
and without hope, and on the approach of our troops they
disperse, to reassemble in the same neighbourhood when our men
pass on. In this way they continue an obstinate resistance
without retaining anything, or defending the smallest portion of
this vast country."

He estimates that there are not more than 13,500[256] Boers in the field in the Transvaal, the Orange River Colony, and the Cape Colony. But he adds that--

[Footnote 256: This estimate was very much too small: at the
Vereeniging surrender, when many thousands more of Boers had
been captured or killed 21,256 burghers and rebels laid down
their arms. Cd. 988.]

"with long lines of railway to hold, every yard of which has to
be defended, both to secure our own civil and military supplies,
and, what is more important, to prevent the enemy from obtaining
necessaries from the capture of our trains, the employment of
large numbers of troops continues to be a necessity.... The Boer
party who declared war have quitted the field, and are now urging
those whom they deserted to continue a useless struggle by giving
lying assurances to the ignorant burghers of outside assistance,
and by raising absurdly deceitful hopes that Great Britain has
not sufficient endurance to see the matter through."[257]

[Footnote 257: Cd. 695.]

But it had become evident that some more systematic effort was required for the capture of the commandos, unless the slow task of wearing down the Boer resistance was to be almost indefinitely protracted; and this same month of July, 1901, witnessed the extension of the blockhouse lines, which proved the turning-point in the guerilla war. The origin of Lord Kitchener's system of blockhouse defence is described by him in his despatch of August 8th, 1901.

[Sidenote: The blockhouse system.]

"Experience had shown," he writes, "that the line of defensible
posts, extending across the Orange River Colony, from Jacobsdal
to Ladybrand, constituted a considerable obstacle to the free
movement of the enemies' roving bands, and that the gradual
completion of chains of blockhouses placed at intervals of a
mile, sometimes less, along the Transvaal and Orange River Colony
railways, had obtained for our traffic a comparative security
which it had not previously enjoyed."[258]

[Footnote 258: Cd. 820.]

In July, therefore, Lord Kitchener made arrangements for the construction of three additional lines of blockhouses. The first ran from Aliwal North westward, following the course of the Orange River, to Bethulie, and was continued thence alongside the railway through Stormberg, Rosmead, Naauwpoort, and De Aar, northward to Kimberley. The second commenced at Frederickstad and ran northward by the source of the Mooi River to Breed's Nek in the Magaliesberg, from which point it was connected with the British garrison at Commando Nek, and thus screened the western side of the Pretoria and Johannesburg area. The third, running from Eerste Fabriken in the north, by Springs and Heidelberg, southward to the Vaal River, protected the same district from attack upon the east. These new blockhouse lines, Lord Kitchener wrote, promised to be of much assistance in the future. Not only did they protect the British communications, and render inter-communication between the different portions of the Boer forces difficult, but, in the absence of frontiers, natural or artificial, they served as barriers against which the British mobile columns were able to drive bands of the enemy and force them to surrender. Indeed, the blockhouse lines proved the chief instrument of success; for with the gradual extension of the system, the area of active hostilities was confined in an increasing degree to the vast half-deserted regions through which the commandos roamed, and the British columns swept at intervals in pursuit of them.

A month later, August 8th, Lord Kitchener reported a further step in advance. He had formed "some specially mobile columns for independent and rapid action in different parts of the country, generally at some distance from the operations of other troops." The commanders of these new mobile columns had a free hand in respect of their movements, since they were guided by the special intelligence, which they themselves collected, and not solely by information from headquarters. The effect produced by the development of the blockhouse system, combined with the greater freedom of initiative allowed to the new mobile columns, became apparent in the increasing number of Boers captured or voluntarily surrendering themselves in the month of August, when altogether more than two thousand of the enemy were accounted for.[259] On the 7th of this month the delayed[260] proclamation was issued, and a date--September 15th--was fixed as the limit within which the guerilla leaders might, by voluntarily surrendering, avoid certain penalties which were duly set out. In order to counteract the effect of this action on the part of the British Government, General Botha stimulated his followers to increased military enterprise.

[Footnote 259: There were 186 killed, 75 wounded, 1,384
prisoners, 529 voluntary surrenders; while 930 rifles, 90,958
rounds of ammunition, 1,332 waggons and carts, 13,570 horses,
and 65,879 cattle were captured. Cd. 820.]

[Footnote 260: See p. 420.]

"But," says Lord Kitchener, "though there has been no general
surrender, the device to which the Commandant-General resorted
for turning the thoughts of his burghers in another direction has
probably cost him and his cause [a heavier loss] than a simple
pursuance of the usual evasive tactics would have even entailed."

[Sidenote: Large captures of Boers.]

The precise extent of this loss is shown in the returns for September, which record captures and surrenders almost as numerous as those of the preceding month.

"It cannot be expected," Lord Kitchener adds, "even under the
most favourable conditions, that in the presence of the
ever-diminishing numbers opposing us in the field, these figures
can be maintained, but I feel confident that so long as any
resistance is continued, no exertion will be spared either by
officers or men of this force to carry out the task they still
have before them."[261]

[Footnote 261: Cd. 820. The September returns were: 170 Boers
killed in action, 114 wounded prisoners, 1,385 unwounded
prisoners, and 1,393 surrenders.]

[Sidenote: The railway lines secured.]

In another month a position had been reached in which it was possible for the work of administrative reconstruction--interrupted a year ago by the development of the guerilla warfare--to be resumed. At this date (November, 1901), the resistance of the Dutch population had been weakened by the loss of 53,000 fighting Boers, of whom 42,000 were in British custody, while the rest had been killed, wounded, or otherwise put out of action. In the Transvaal 14,700 square miles, and in the Orange River Colony 17,000 square miles of territory had been enclosed by blockhouse lines. A square formed roughly by lines running respectively from Klerksdorp to Zeerust on the west, from Zeerust to Middelburg on the north, from Middelburg to Standerton on the east, and from Standerton to Klerksdorp on the south, enclosing Pretoria and the Rand, was the protected area of the Transvaal. The whole of the Orange River Colony south of the blockhouse line, Kimberley-Winberg-Bloemfontein-Ladybrand, was also a protected area; and the Cape Colony, south of the main railway lines, was similarly screened off. But an application of what may be termed "the railway-cutting test" yields, perhaps, the most eloquent testimony both to the magnitude of the original task undertaken by the Imperial troops, and to the degree of success which had been obtained. In October, 1900, the railway lines, upon which the British troops depended for supplies of food and ammunition, were cut thirty-two times, or more than once a day. The number of times in which they were cut in the succeeding November was thirty; in December twenty-one; in January, 1901, sixteen; in February, as the result of De Wet's invasion of the Cape Colony, they were cut thirty times; in March eighteen; in April eighteen; in May twelve; in June eight; in July four; in August four; in September twice; and in October not at all. Still more significant of the approach of peace was the fact that now, for the first time, the British population was allowed to return to Johannesburg in any considerable numbers.[262]

[Footnote 262: In August 648 refugees returned; in November
the number had risen to 2,623.]

It remains to consider two questions which cannot be omitted from any account; however brief, of the manner in which the disarmament of the Dutch in South Africa was effected. The first of these is the charge of inhumanity brought against the Imperial military authorities in respect of the deportation of the Boer non-combatants to the Burgher Camps; and the second is the actual effect produced upon the burghers in the field by the public denunciations of the war by members of the Liberal Opposition in England.

[Sidenote: The Burgher camps.]

In charging the British Government and Lord Kitchener with inhumanity in the conduct of the war, Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman and other friends of the Boer cause relied in the main upon the circumstance that a certain proportion of the Boer population was removed compulsorily from districts which the British troops were unable to occupy effectively, and upon the further fact that the Burgher Camps exhibited an unusually high rate of mortality. The necessity for the removal of this non-combatant population will scarcely be disputed in view of the methods adopted by the Boer leaders to compel the burghers to continue their resistance to the Imperial troops, and the fact that nearly every house in the Transvaal and Orange River Colony, inhabited by the Dutch, served as an intelligence office, a recruiting depot, and a base of supplies for the roving commandos. Nor will it be denied that the responsibility for the unnecessary suffering incurred by the Boer people in the guerilla war rests upon those of the Boer leaders who formed and enforced the decision to continue the struggle, and not upon the British Government. The alleged "inhumanity," therefore, of the Imperial military authorities consists in the circumstance that, instead of leaving these helpless non-combatants to be supported by the Boer leaders, they removed them to places of security, where they were fed, housed, and generally maintained, in as little discomfort as circumstances permitted. If the lesser suffering of the Burgher Camps was the only alternative to greater suffering, and possibly starvation, on the veld, the Boers had only their own leaders to thank for the position in which they found themselves. The death-rate of the Burgher Camps was exceptionally high as compared with that of any ordinary European community. But the population of the camps was no less exceptional. It consisted of women and children, with a small proportion of adult males; and of all these the majority had come to the camps as refugees, insufficiently clothed, weakened by exposure and often by starvation. Obviously the death-rate of such a refugee community would be much higher, under the most favourable conditions, than that of an ordinary European town; and, in order to find a valid point of comparison, we must seek statistics provided by similar collections of refugees, brought together under the like exceptional circumstances. We are unable to find any such parallel case, for the sufficient reason that history records no other example of a nation at war which, at the risk of impairing the efficiency of its own forces in the field, has endeavoured, not merely to feed and clothe, but to house, nurse, and even educate the non-combatant population of its enemy.

[Sidenote: Reduction of the death-rate.]

What we do know, however, is that, of the total deaths in these camps of refuge, the great majority were those of infants and children. This is a circumstance which in itself goes far to make the excess of the camp death-rate apparent rather than real; since, in the first place, the Boer mothers, owing to their insanitary habits and ignorance,[263] are not accustomed to bring more than one out of every two children to maturity; and in the second, the rate of infant mortality is abnormally high, as compared with that of a given community as a whole, even in the most highly developed countries. The highest monthly death-rate was that of October, 1901, when, out of a population of 112,109 in all camps, there were 3,205 deaths, or 344 per thousand per annum.[264] But of these deaths, 500 only (in round numbers) were those of adults, and 2,700 were those of children. That is to say, in this worst month we have in the refugee camps an adult death-rate of (roughly) 50 per thousand, as compared with a European death-rate varying from 16.7 in Norway to 33.2 in Hungary,[265] and a children's death-rate of 300 per thousand, as compared with the 208 per thousand of the contemporary rate of infant mortality in thirty-three great towns of the United Kingdom, or in Birkenhead alone of 362 per thousand. And from this time forward the death-rate of the refugee camps was rapidly reduced. The reason for this reduction is significant. By the development of the blockhouse lines the British military authorities had been enabled to protect their supplies from the attacks of the guerilla leaders. In other words, Lord Kitchener was now able to defend the Boer non-combatants against the efforts made by their own leaders to deprive them of food and other necessaries of life. And ultimately the mortality in the Burgher Camps was reduced to a point "much below the normal rates under ordinary local circumstances."[266]

[Footnote 263: For the grotesque, repulsive, and even fatal
remedies employed by the Boer women in the treatment of their
children in sickness, the reader is referred to the medical
reports on the condition of the refugee camps published in
the Blue-book.]

[Footnote 264: The figures are those given by Miss Hobhouse,
as based upon the official returns (_The Brunt of the War_,
pp. 329-31).]

[Footnote 265: _I.e._ annual per 1,000 on a basis of 25 years
(1874-98).]

[Footnote 266: Cd. 1,163, p. 159. See also _ibid._, p. 151,
and p. 178. Lord Kitchener's reply to the official Boer
complaint against the system of the Burgher Camps (made by
Acting President Schalk Burger), is as follows:

"Numerous complaints were made to me in the early part
of this year (1901), by surrendered burghers, who stated
that after they laid down their arms their families were
ill-treated, and their stock and property confiscated by
order of the Commandant-Generals of the Transvaal and
Orange Free State. These acts appear to have been taken
in consequence of the circular dated Roos Senekal, 6th
November, 1900, in which the Commandant-General says:
'Do everything in your power to prevent the burghers
laying down their arms. I will be compelled, if they do
not listen to this, to confiscate everything movable or
immovable, and also to burn their houses.'

"I took occasion, at my interview with
Commandant-General Louis Botha (February 28th, 1901), to
bring this matter before him, and I told him that if he
continued such acts I should be forced to bring in all
women and children, and as much property as possible, to
protect them from the acts of his burghers. I further
inquired if he would agree to spare the farms and
families of neutral or surrendered burghers, in which
case I expressed my willingness to leave undisturbed the
farms and families of burghers who were on commando,
provided they did not actively assist their relatives.
The Commandant-General emphatically refused even to
consider any such arrangement. He said: 'I am entitled
by law to force every man to join, and if they do not do
so to confiscate their property, and leave their
families on the veld.' I asked him what course I could
pursue to protect surrendered burghers and their
families, and he then said, 'The only thing you can do,
is to send them out of the country, as if I catch them
they must suffer.' After this there was nothing more to
be said, and as military operations do not permit of the
protection of individuals, I had practically no choice
but to continue my system of bringing inhabitants of
certain areas into the protection of our lines. My
decision was conveyed to the Commandant-General in my
official letter, dated Pretoria, 16th April, 1901, from
which the following is an extract:

"'As I informed your Honour at Middelburg, owing to the
irregular manner in which you have conducted and
continue to conduct hostilities, by forcing unwilling
and peaceful inhabitants to join your Commandos, a
proceeding totally unauthorised by the recognised
customs of war, I have no other course open to me, and
am forced to take the very unpleasant and repugnant
steps of bringing in the women and children.

"'I have the greatest sympathy for the sufferings of
these poor people, which I have done my best to
alleviate, and it is a matter of surprise to me and to
the whole civilised world, that your Honour considers
yourself justified in still causing so much suffering to
the people of the Transvaal, by carrying on a hopeless
and useless struggle.'

"From the foregoing, it will, I believe, be perfectly
clear that the responsibility for the action complained
of by Mr. Burger (the so-styled Acting State President
of the Transvaal), rests rather with the
Commandants-General of the Transvaal and Orange Free
State, than with the Commander-in-Chief of the forces in
South Africa....

"It is not the case that every area has been cleared of
the families of burghers, although this might be
inferred from the despatch under discussion. On the
contrary, very large numbers of women and children are
still out, either in Boer Camps or on their farms, and
my Column Commanders have orders to leave them alone,
unless it is clear that they must starve if they are
left out upon the veld....

"Finally, I indignantly and entirely deny the
accusations of rough and cruel treatment of women and
children who were being brought in from their farms to
the camp. Hardships may have been sometimes inseparable
from the process, but the Boer women in our hands
themselves bear the most eloquent testimony to the
kindness and consideration shown to them by our soldiers
on all such occasions."

With this statement it is interesting to compare Sir Henry
Campbell-Bannerman's words at Bath, November 20th, 1901:

"Is our hypocrisy so great that we actually flatter
ourselves upon our great humanity, because we have saved
from starvation those whose danger of starvation we have
caused?... The hypocrisy of these excuses is almost more
loathsome than the cruelty itself.... We have set
ourselves to punish this country, to reduce it
apparently to ruin, because it has ventured to make war
against us."

Truly an extraordinary attitude for a future Prime Minister
of England!]

The charge of prolonging the war by public declarations of sympathy with the enemy[267] was definitely formulated against certain members of the Liberal Opposition and the Irish Nationalist party by Lord St. Aldwyn (Sir Michael Hicks Beach), at Oldham on October 10th, 1901.

[Footnote 267: What was even worse than such declarations of
sympathy with the Boers was the manifestation of hostility
against the loyalist population of South Africa. _E.g._ Sir
William Harcourt (in a letter in _The Times_ of December
17th, 1900), wrote: "I sometimes think that those bellicose
gentlemen--especially those who do not fight--must
occasionally cast longing, lingering looks towards the times
before they were subsidised (_sic_) by the authors of the
Raid to bring about the position in which they now find
themselves."]

[Sidenote: Why the war was prolonged.]

"The real cause of the prolongation of this war has been
something which, on my word, I believe could never have been seen
in any other country in the world. It has been the speeches in
Parliament of British members of the House of Commons, doing
everything they could against their country and in favour of her
enemies. It has been articles in certain journals taking
absolutely the same lines--I am not talking of mere attacks on
his Majesty's Government, or even calumnies of individual
ministers, that is part of the ordinary machinery of political
warfare, and one of the advantages of an absolutely free Press.
No, what I am talking of is the prominence given to the opinions
and sentiments of men who were called Pro-Boers, as if they
represented the feelings of a large section of their
fellow-countrymen. The invention of lies, like the alleged
quarrel between Lord Kitchener and the War Office, was intended
to damage this country in the conduct of the war, as was also the
wicked charges made against the humanity of our generals and our
soldiers in the Concentration Camps and in the field, the
attempts, such as I saw only the other day in one of these
papers, to prove that in those gallant contests at Fort
Itala[268] and on the borders of Natal our soldiers had not
repulsed their enemies, but were themselves the defeated party.
We here do not attach any importance to those things. We rate
them at their true value because we know something about their
authors--but what do you think is thought of them when they go
out to South Africa? What do the Boers and their leaders think
when they read the newspapers written in England which are full
of these things? The Boers have many faults, but they are a
simple and patriotic people. They never can imagine that English
newspapers would print these things, that English members of
Parliament would speak them, taking always the side of their
country's enemies, unless these things were true. They are
deceived. They greedily swallow all this as representing the
opinion of a great section of the public in this country, and
those who have said these things and those who have circulated
them are the parties who are guilty before God of prolonging this
war. There are the Irish Nationalists. Let me read to you words
which I heard with the greatest pain in the last session of
Parliament from the leader of the Irish Nationalists, a man of
consummate eloquence and perfect self-control. What did Mr. John
Redmond say? He prayed God that the resistance of the Boers might
be strengthened, and that South Africa might take vengeance for
its wrongs by separating itself from the Empire which had deluged
it with blood, and become a free and independent nation. We in
England pass over words of that sort, though I believe they would
not have been uttered with impunity by a member of the
Legislative Assembly of any other country in the world."

[Footnote 268: September 26th, 1901. See Cd. 820 for report
of this action.]

[Sidenote: Campbell-Bannerman's reply.]

Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's reply to the charge brought against him by Lord St. Aldwyn, and subsequently by Lord Salisbury,[269] is contained in the words following, which were spoken by him at Plymouth, on November 19th:

[Footnote 269: Letter to Miss Milner, November 11th, 1901.
See p. 416.]

"Now I declare, ladies and gentlemen, for myself, that from first
to last I have never uttered one syllable that could be twisted
by any ingenuity into encouragement by the Boers. No, I have
never even expressed ordinary pity for, or sympathy with them,
because I did not wish to run the risk of being misunderstood.
What I have done, and what I hope I shall continue to do, is to
denounce the stupidity of the way in which the Government were
dealing with the Boers."

There is only one method by which the amazing effrontery of this denial can be sufficiently exhibited. It is to place underneath it quotations from speeches delivered by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman himself at Stirling on October 25th, by Mr. Thomas Shaw, M.P., at Galashiels on October 14th, and by Mr. E. Robertson, M.P., at Dundee on October 16th, as printed in the "Official Organ of the Orange Free State Government," dated September 21st, 1901, a copy of which was found in a Boer laager on the veld. The extracts selected are these:

Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman:

"The whole country in the two belligerent States, outside the
mining towns, is a howling wilderness. The farms are burned, the
country is wasted. The flocks and herds are either butchered or
driven off; the mills are destroyed, furniture and instruments of
agriculture smashed. These things are what I have termed methods
of barbarism. I adhere to the phrase. I cannot improve upon it.
If these are not the methods of barbarism, what methods did
barbarism employ?... My belief is that the mass of the British
people ... do not desire to see a brave people subjugated or
annihilated."

Mr. Thomas Shaw, M.P.:

"The war was unnecessary, and therefore unjust.... He wished he
could agree that we were fighting in a just cause, that we had
always fought according to acknowledged civilised methods; but as
an honest man he could not do so."

Mr. Edmund Robertson, M.P.:

"The victory of the Government (at the last General Election) had
been the main cause of the prolongation of the war. If they had
been defeated their successors would have been men with a free
hand, and the Boers themselves might have been ready to make
concessions, which they would not make, and had not made, to
those whom they believed to be their enemies and persecutors. If
the Empire was to be saved, the Government must be
destroyed."[270]

[Footnote 270: The facts are stated in a letter published in
_The Times_ on March 10th, 1902.]

Can any human being of ordinary intelligence believe that these passages, containing denunciations of the war, were circulated by Ex-President Steyn for any other purpose than that of encouraging the burghers to continue their resistance to the Imperial troops?

And to this evidence may be added the protest made by "An Old Berliner" in _The Times_ of November 27th, 1901:

[Sidenote: "Methods of barbarism".]

"What I want to impress upon your readers is the much more
serious and, indeed, incalculable mischief done by the public
utterances of responsible politicians, and, to take the most
pernicious example of all, by the reckless language of Sir Henry
Campbell-Bannerman. The words he uttered about England's methods
of barbarism have been used ever since as the watchwords of
England's detractors throughout the length and breadth of
Germany."[271]

[Footnote 271: See also note, p. 399 (Extract from the
_Vossische Zeitung_). The baseless and malevolent allegations
of specific acts of inhumanity or outrage on the part of
British soldiers, circulated by Boer sympathisers in England
and on the continent of Europe, have been passed over in
silence. For an exposure of these calumnies the reader is
referred to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's _The War in South
Africa_ (Smith, Elder). A record of the manner in which they
were repudiated by the Boer population in South Africa will
be found in Cd. 1, 163, pp. 99, 106-111, 113-121. Among those
who protested were German subjects, and Germans who had
become British subjects, resident in South Africa. Perhaps
the most significant of all these protests is the resolution
passed unanimously by the members of the Natal House of
Assembly, all standing: "That this House desires to repudiate
the false charges of inhumanity brought against His Majesty's
Army by a section of the inhabitants of the continent of
Europe and certain disloyal subjects within the British
Isles, and this House places on record its deliberate
conviction that the war in South Africa has been prosecuted
by His Majesty's Government and Army upon lines of humanity
and consideration for the enemy unparalleled in the history
of nations."]