Chapter VIII: The Englishman (1)

In south Africa he bursts forth in all his multifarious shapes. Now he is the little liquor seller, braving full rivers and prohibitive legislation, with a wagon full of bad brandy made by the Boers, to sell to the natives and return to the Colony with a pile. Then he is a female missionary, buried in a remote native village to instruct heathen girls and women, with the enthusiasm of a St. Catherine. Over the way he is running guns and selling powder and shot which will be taken from the natives as soon as we have made our full gain in selling them. Now he is a cultured, sympathetic, freedom-loving man, talking humanity and consideration for the weaker classes; and then he is a Hart, tying up and flogging to death his black brothers. To sum him up, to say what he is and is not, would be as futile as to sum up the Jew: "We are anything, so please your worship; but we are a deal of that."

Probably no country in the world to-day gives more scope for individual action; therefore our extremes and intensities show themselves on a large scale. We are not weighted by traditions and the growths of an old society. If we speculate, pray, preach, or farm, we do it in our own fashion; the assertion which holds of one does not of another. Nevertheless, broadly speaking, one or two things may be postulated of us as a whole.

One is, that we in South Africa represent the modern nineteenth-century element, with high material development and complex wealth of ideas, as compared with the primitive savage and hardly less simple seventeenth-century Boer. Whatever is evil in modern civilization is ours, and also whatever is good.

In the complex problem of South Africa--the welding together of its peoples--we have the leading part to play; we are at least the cement which must bind into a whole the separate stones. And the main question before us is--how is this to be done?

For the moment, the incomparably more important question, involving, as it does, the world's greatest problem of how the primitive and aboriginal peoples are to be wrought into our social system, is almost obscured by the smaller and comparatively simple problem of the union of the two European folks of the country. That it is desirable may or may not be certain, but that it is inevitable and will take place is certain; how and when are the only questions left open to us.

We have before shown how mixed and interblended already are the two races throughout South Africa. Our so-called English colonies are largely peopled, and in parts almost exclusively, by Boers or their descendants, and the so-called Boer Republics, daily and hourly becoming more densely peopled by English and the nineteenth-century folk who come under their flag and speak their language, till the leading cities of these states are more intensely and really English than the majority of towns in the English colonies. Further, every week and month, as the descendant of the Boer obtains nineteenth-century culture, he learns the English speech, he adopts English methods of dress, and above all he imbibes English ideas. So that to-day in a South African drawing-room you are already unable to tell whether the grandfather and mother of the well-dressed English-speaking man or woman beside you were living on a Yorkshire moor or a Lancashire fen, or trekking in their ox-wagon across South African plains. Already, so mingled are our peoples, that the Free State Boer is often born and reared in the Colony;[76] his parents or his wife's live there; his children are being educated there; while his eldest son is studying medicine in Edinburgh and his daughter married to an Englishman. An English Johannesburg merchant, often born in Europe, may have taken a wife from Natal, have his children at school in Cape Town, and his business connections with the farmers of the Free State. Ten or fifteen years ago, the Boer and the Englishman, though living side by side, kept almost distinct in breed; to-day, throughout the colonies, Free State, and Transvaal, there are few large families some of whose members have not married into families of the other race.

[76] That is, the Cape Colony.

This amalgamation is proceeding always with increasing frequency. In thirty years half the men in South Africa from the Transvaal to Cape Town would have to fight against their own parents in any war of race. And there is no prospect of this process of amalgamation being stayed; it must go on with always increasing velocity as education draws the races together.

In answer to the question, then, how are the Boer and English races to be amalgamated? we would reply: By one who in this case will work unfailingly and without fail--by Time! In fifty years, fight and struggle against it as we wish, there will be no Boer in South Africa speaking the Taal, save as a curiosity: only the great English-speaking South African people. This movement cannot be hindered, it cannot be stayed, it is inevitable.

But it may be said, "Of what use is this amalgamation which may take place only when we are in our grave? The average adult man cannot safely reckon on ten, much less on fifteen or twenty, years of life, and, if we wait for the natural process to complete its work, what chance is there for us to gain the kudos, fame and immortal honour which we desire to make out of the amalgamation of these peoples? Is it not a great chance thrown away? Must we not amalgamate them now--by force, by--well--diplomacy, by anything! You can't lose such a fine chance as this."

To which we would reply: "Yes, the life of the individual is short, but the life of the nation is long; and it is longer, and stronger, more vigorous and more knit, if it grow slowly and spontaneously than if formed by violence or fraud. The individual cannot afford to wait, but the nation can and must wait for true unity, which can only come as the result of internal growth and the union of its atoms, and in no other way whatsoever. For ages England has tried to fasten Ireland artificially on to herself, and after four hundred years it still hangs at her side a dislocated arm, almost as ready to drop off as when four hundred years ago Oliver Cromwell tried to plaster it on with blood and sword. A nation grows, but it cannot be manufactured. Were there no inherent mixture and tendency to sympathy in the different parts of our community, not only would it be impossible to unite them, but it would be undesirable. Were we divided into separate well-organized states without intermixture of peoples, and without that curious racial sympathy which _does_ unite Cape colonials of the old and new races when they are brought together, they would be better left separate; would grow into healthier, stronger and truly greater communities, because they were separate, because they were able to develop their individual genius and gifts untrammelled by alien influences. Mere increase in size never means necessarily increase in vitality and beauty, as little with a country as with an individual man who, as he grows in bulk, so it be only an accretion of superficial adipose tissue, diminishes in vigour and vitality. The world's great nations have never been large; England, Greece, Rome, Holland, Switzerland, have all been nations, minute in territory and small in comparative numbers, and the hour of external expansion is often the hour of internal death."

The reason why the conception of the union of South African peoples is forced on us is that no germs of separate organic national life exist among us (except among the native states). The composition of our states is common, and the little walls that divide us are nothing when compared with the identity of the substance of which we are all internally composed.

If it be suggested: "But if there is so much internal unity, why should we not just hasten on the consummation of the unity by a little external and artificial welding together of the states, so gaining great honour ourselves and helping on a good, at least an inevitable, end?" our reply is that all vital union must be spontaneous and natural, and by attempting to hasten it by a year you may defer it for a century or altogether.

The half-grown youth and maiden, who are slowly and coyly being drawn together, must be left severely alone and untouched if their undeveloped inclinations are to grow into the interknitted sympathy and interest which make the adamantine and indestructible basis of a union that is vital and life-long. Kind aunts and mothers may wish to hasten the matter; _they_ wish to have the pleasure of forming the match; they may even die without seeing the consummation they desire if they let it grow on along nature's delightful lingering ways; and they may succeed--either in rupturing the union altogether, and turning what was still a dream into the revolt of forced inclination--or they may succeed in what they wished, and may wed the still immature boy and girl, whose affections are not yet ripe and who physically are not yet strong enough for union; and the great, healthy fellowship of the ripe man and woman rejoicing in the fulness of freedom in a relation that was their own spontaneous choice, may be supplanted by the sickly fellowship of two souls who never forget that theirs was not a free choice and who, in place of a vital healthy offspring, bear the puny descendants of a premature mating.

When we are ripe and ready we will wed state with state, people with people; and not before. The attempt to wed us sooner by force or fraud will result in possible loss to the match-makers, and in certain loss to us.

Once already we have been interfered with, and the result has sent union back twenty years; and if to-morrow it were effected by external force, the blow at our internal and vital unity would be almost irrecoverable. If the external union comes without the internal, it will be to the irreparable loss of South Africa. If at any time in any of our states the people themselves change in their composition, and those who were in the minority should become the majority, let them do justice to themselves in their own state and demand their own independence; and not only will they succeed, but they will succeed backed by the conviction of even their opponents that they are in the right.

"_Wag 'n bietje, als zal reg kom_" ("Wait a bit, all will come right").

Time is on our side in this South African difficulty. What to-day might be effected with blood and tears will come with little trouble in five years' time, and be inevitable in ten. "_Wag 'n bietje, als zal wel reg kom._" Let us remember that the oak that grows the slowest outlives the most centuries; _and that peoples are not made but grow_.

We as English have above all least to lose by waiting. Every hour that passes, the descendants of a thousand Boers are learning the English speech, are adopting the English dress, are absorbing through literature and social intercourse our nineteenth-century ideals; every month that passes is landing on our shores scores or hundreds of Englishmen to inhabit the land and mingle their blood with the great South African people of the future. "Wait a little," and in this matter "everything will come right." When that time comes, when common ideals animate us, and common blood runs through us, we will be absolutely one folk, but not before; and time is labouring for it.

But it may be said: "If we cannot by force, or by that subtle series of deceptions which in public matters we call policy, bring about this external union, at least we are bound to labour vigorously for internal union between the races if that will help forward our designs. At all costs and at all prices we must keep the Boer pleased with us, that we may carry out our plans with his consent."

Now, to this we would reply: "Union is a very beautiful thing whether between races or persons--but the most ideal marriage that ever was conceived may be bought too dearly; there is a price too high even for union, the price of the integrity of the parties composing it. As in the world of individuals, the union between a man and woman otherwise most desirable, may become a crying evil and a living death when, to attain to it, it is necessary for either or both to sacrifice that which is of more value than any union--their own integrity. If union be not possible while each holds to what he or she believes to be best, if it be purchased at the price of whatever is highest in either character, then, however desirable such a union would on other terms have been, it becomes an unmixed evil, a prostitution and not a marriage. Only those souls united by what is greatest in each, not what is weakest and lowest, and reserving their integrity and independence, can form an enduring and noble union. Where this cannot be, it is better to wait, so by chance the day will come when both will see eye to eye; even if, as the lives of individuals are short and growth slow, the waiting for them should be eternal."

It is sometimes said: "We must pander to the Boer. We don't, of course, agree with his views on this and that matter, but union, you know, we are working for that! We don't believe that the quickest way to raise natives, and the best way, is to flog them; it's an antiquated idea; but the Boer likes it and we must vote for it for the sake of union. The Boer likes us so much if he thinks we share his little follies."

The native tribes have trusted us, have _given_ themselves up to us; we pass them over to the Boer, for the sake of union. And so we barter point after point on a matter infinitely more important to the ultimate destiny of the country, for the sake of settling the difficulties of the hour. We barter our birthright of free, open speech and the frank defence of the lines which we rightly or wrongly believe to be those of justice and mercy at the shrine of a political chimera.

It is not by watering down our civilization and robbing it of its most developed attributes, it is not by affecting to sink to his level in the matters in which he is behind us, that we shall draw him into a great and ennobling union or that we shall in the end win his trust and confidence.

It is by standing firmly and serenely by our own highest traditions of development, it is by wisely and generously seeking to understand him, and in the end by infecting him with all that is best and greatest in ourselves, not by selling our birthright for a mess of pottage, that the great and royal union of the two South African stems will be effected. It is not by the reckless bartering, on either side, of that which our convictions hold as best that any ennobling cementing between us can ever take place.

The seventeenth-century Boer has hardly less, perhaps much more, to teach us than we to teach him; let us each hold by our own till we have convinced and enlightened each other.

The one great lesson of a broad humanity, and the rights of man as man, which, amid fields of war, the European family has learnt in the last two hundred years, and which we, without any inherent virtue, have learnt from our fathers and imbibed from the life about us, we have to teach him. It is our contribution to the solution of the problem of our land; amid all the noise and hurry and fœtid decay which underlies much of our nineteenth-century civilization this knowledge is our great gain, and to betray ourselves on this matter is to rob our fellows of almost the only truly great and noble attribute we have to bring to our union, to which he brings much.

For the child of the seventeenth century, if he will but be true to his traditions and convictions, has much to bring to the union and to transmit to the people of the future. The seventeenth century, too, has its message for the nineteenth, a message which it needs not less than the seventeenth the nineteenth.

In the whirl and din of our material advancement, in the fierce struggle for external gains and progress, there is a side of life we have well nigh forgotten, and the Boer on his solitary South African plains has saved up a tradition we have forgotten and for need of which we may yet die. To a curious extent Boer and Englishman, if they will be faithful to their profoundest convictions, seem fitted to complete and complement each other's growth and make possible a people rarer than either might have produced alone.

While we bring to the Boer the doctrine of a higher humanity, the external literary culture which enlarges the power of the man, he has his own lessons for us. While we have set gold on a pedestal and dance till we are drunk around it like the Israelites about their calf, the Boer, nurtured in his primitive solitude, still knows there are things our god cannot give us, and that material luxury and wealth are not the beginning and end of life, that the man is not greater because his name can stir three millions in the bank, that the cut of a coat is an accident, and that a man sees God as nearly face to face from the front box of his wagon as from the steps of a queen's palace.

A broad, simple conception of human life and its relations, without varnish or finesse, is, if he remains true, his contribution. And if through what is still, in many houses, the impenetrable wall of the Taal, our cry could reach him, we would adjure him, "_Hou maar vas, Oom Piet; hou maar vas, Tant' Annie!_ We have one great lesson to teach you, but you have more to teach us! We will not pander to the one weak spot in your soul, where the trouble and conflict of ages and of tradition has made a gangrene; but, if we hold out firmly and teach you our lesson, teach us yours. Do not let yourself be blinded and misled. All is not gold that glitters. Our trains and our large houses and our grand French clothes, they are all very well; but the greatest men the world ever knew trod the sand with bare feet or rode upon an ass; and a train is better than an ox-wagon only when it carries better men; rapid movement is an advantage only when we move towards beauty and truth; all motion is not advance, all change is not development, and a train full of soldiers bent upon an inhuman attack is a more ghastly sight than a squad of Indians with their scalping knives and arrows on their prairie horses, in so far as the one mode of progression is more effective than the other. The size of our houses and the labour of a thousand weary hands upon our walls do not necessarily give us the happiness you would think. Believe us, the kiss of the man on the lips of the woman he loves, and the joy of the mother over her babe, can be as intense in the little house your own hands built as in a mansion raised and decorated by the hands of others. When a man accumulates too much about him he gets buried under it. Our French clothes are very well; but do you know that in forty years time your portly figure in its black skirt and white kappie, if painted as they are to-day, would seem to the men of that time more things of beauty than the misproportioned productions of the fashions of the day. Hold but fast, Tant' Annie! Under that capacious waist of yours lie sleeping the ancestors of heroes of a larger, freer mould than would ever have sprung from you if the iron band of fashion had compressed you to a point. Hou maar vas! We have need of your simplicity to save us from the disease of our artificiality, we have need of your faith in the value of things that cannot be bought and sold, to save us from the terrible scepticism that is creeping over us, that perhaps there is nothing worth living for but success, and that success means wealth. Hou maar vas, Tant' Annie! Hou maar vas, Oom Piet! And if we will faithfully teach you our lesson and you will teach us yours, the day will come when we will build up between us a people of whom the world will not be ashamed. We will try to heal you of the disease that exists in your condition; we look to you to save us from the disease that battens on ours."

The question of the relation of Englishman and Boer differs from the question of the relation between Caucasian and African races in this, that, while our problem of relation to the Boer tends to simplify and finally to dissolve itself as the mere result of the course of time, the question of the relation of African and European races does not so tend to dissolve and solve itself.

When any two peoples inhabiting one country are so physically related that they have a powerful sexual attraction for each other, and that individuals brought face to face are unconscious of racial difference, the problem of union can be one of great moment, but cannot be one of permanent difficulty. Wait, do nothing, and in time, literally and not figuratively, love finds out the way, smoothes away difficulties, and makes of the two races one. Where races are so far removed that they are more or less sexually repellant to one another, that not difference of speech and training divide them, but marked differences of physical and mental conformation, of colour and build, then, if these two races are obliged to inhabit the same territory, the difficulty of arranging for their happy and useful interaction becomes steadily greater as time passes, _and does not tend to solve itself_.

All thoughtful trainers of young children are aware that there are certain faults or defects extremely troublesome and unpleasant for the moment, but over which no wise elder ever seriously troubles themselves; they are aware that time will heal these things and of necessity do away with them; while there are faults, for the moment far less inconvenient, which every wise trainer regards as of infinite import because they are exactly those which tend to grow with years, and the teacher or parent who should devote all his energies to training down the boisterous noise and roughness of childhood which must naturally cure themselves with adolescence, and regarded with indifference the germs of selfishness or cruelty, which tend to ripen only with adult years, would be universally regarded as unfit for his labour.

Yet such often appears to be our action in South Africa. To render smooth our trivial and momentary difficulty with the Boer, which time will inevitably remove and smooth out, we are willing to complicate and make more difficult a problem which in thirty years' time Boer and Englishman's descendants will alike have to face in its huge proportions.

Every step in civilization, in education, in approach to the European, which the African makes, will render the problem more difficult, not necessarily more easy, of solution.

What we consider the attitude of the Englishman in South Africa should be to the alien, and especially the African, races beneath him, depends mainly on the view we take of his nature and his world-wide functions in the unfolding of human life on the globe generally.

There are four views on this matter.

Firstly, that of the average Englishman who has no view in the matter at all, who eats, sleeps, begets children, and accumulates as little or as much wealth as he is able without ever reflecting that he forms part of a great people, or considering the future of the organism of which he is part. The views of these persons, by the _vis inertiæ_ that they impart to the whole body of which they form part, are not without their powerful practical influence on the actual condition and action of the race.

There is a second view, held with more or less clearness or mental confusion, but with a great deal of vivacity and sometimes emotion, by a large number of Englishmen.

It is difficult to represent with justice and exactitude ideas that are held somewhat vaguely and with varying degrees of intensity by the individuals holding them, but we believe we most accurately sum up the views of this party by stating that they more or less vaguely hold that the whole world was made for the Englishman, much as in our childhood we were taught that the sun and stars were created to give light to the earth, which probably came into existence a few trillion years after many of the youngest of these. This party has a very vague but vigorously held conviction that at some time or in some way, which they do not specify, the English inhabitants of the British Isles invented all that is known as modern civilization; we have never heard it directly asserted that literature, art, science, and religion took their rise on the globe eight or nine hundred years ago in Britain, but it is tacitly assumed that it was so, if any logical structure is to be placed on the assertions made; in right of this inherent superiority over all earth's people, the same party assumes, still with a certain vagueness but with intense warmth, that the English race is destined ultimately to possess the whole planet and people it. How this is to be done--whether all earth's multifarious peoples, compared with whom the Englishmen on this earth are to-day but a handful, are to be exterminated by means of fire, of sword, of poison, or simply by infection with the diseases of our civilization, with our liquor and kindred institutions--is not often, perhaps ever, clearly stated. The strength of this party lies not in clear and lucid thought, but rather in somewhat florid assertion which, questioned, leads quickly to irritation and warm blood.[77]

[77] One skinny Frenchman,
Two Portugee,
One jolly Englishman,
He lick all three!

We remember in our childhood to have heard an improved
version of this statement to the effect that one Boer might
equal four niggers, but one Englishman would lick fifty
Boers. We remember lying in our bed at night and pondering
over this problem--why with such terrible partiality the
God who loves all equally, should have confined all courage
and fighting power to the inhabitants of Great Britain--and
we had before us a vivid picture of the one solitary
British soldier standing on a kopje waving his gun, while
before him fled frantically fifty powerful Boers armed
to the teeth but making no endeavour to secure him. The
adventure of Majuba Hill came strangely to terminate this
vision, nor have we ever been able to recall it save as an
exploded nightmare.

He takes it as understood that the Englishman is to dominate and populate the entire globe, and the descension to the questions of how and when, and the grounds for the desirability of such an occurrence, he regards as unpatriotic and childish.

This theory, in its most developed form, may be described as the upas-tree theory, which regards the inhabitants of the British Isles as a kind of growth which is bound to kill out and destroy by its mere existence all the other infinitely complex interesting forms of human life on all earth's vast continents, and to exist alone monarch over a bared earth, like a colossal upas-tree under whose shadow or among whose branches, according to the old fable, it was impossible for plant to flower or beast or bird to breathe.

Impossible and repulsive as this conception would appear to many minds, there is no doubt that, held more or less constantly or vaguely, it does colour the actions and thought of large numbers of folk and is a force to be reckoned with.

Thirdly, there is the view which is, generally, that of all non-English nations and peoples; not only do they not share the upas-tree theory with regard to the mission, the future, of the British people, but it is difficult to make them conceive that it is held by any wholly sane persons. To these non-English nations and peoples, the English are an energetic folk, shrewd even beyond the Jew in business matters, and with a subtlety which in every civilized country has appended to their name the adjective "perfidious." To men, French, German, Russian, Dutch, who have grown up from childhood to adult years surrounded by the arts and civilization that are the common inheritance of the modern world from the ancient, and whose religion and history have never more than incidentally mentioned the name of Britain to them, there is something not merely astonishing but ludicrous in the conception that earth's vast millions, civilized and uncivilized, Asiatic and European, black and white, are to be swept away by this trading fragment of the race; nor is it possible to adduce logical grounds on which to convince them that it will be so. How the Englishman is going to crush out and annihilate the countless millions of China, India, Russia, Japan and Europe, and people the earth they now occupy with the descendants of his body, so that Englishmen may be all and in all on the earth, is inconceivable to those who consider that in the space of some hundreds of years the Briton has not been able to annihilate or gain racial possession of the little island at his side, that Ireland still contains as many Irishmen as it did a thousand years ago; that America, their earliest founded colony, is largely filled by Germans, Swedes, Jews and Irish; that India, though the wealth, wrung from its poverty, flows into English pockets, and affords a noble exercise ground for the sons of the upper English classes, still is as thickly inhabited by men of the darker races as it was before the Englishmen landed. Looking at these facts it is indeed difficult to maintain the position which implies, if it does not assert, that the earth of the future will be peopled by the fruit of British loins, and, when looking round and inquiring, "Where are the descendants of all the races of earth?"--the reply will be, "Gone!"

There is, however, yet a fourth view with regard to the functions and destiny of the English race in the future. It may be that those of us who hold it are, unknown to ourselves, still blinded by that mist of race prejudice which, hanging before our eyes from the first moment of our birth, is perhaps more difficult for even the greatest and strongest man to brush aside than the obscuring vapours of personal egoism; nevertheless, it seems to some of us, looking at the matter with what impartiality we are capable of, that it is a view which is capable of being defended by logical argument, and that the hope founded on it is not wholly chimerical; moreover that it is a view, did they but give themselves time to contemplate it, that would win the assent of many who now seem to hold untenable views of the Englishman's upas-like powers.

We who hold this view are perfectly willing to allow that there have been, are, and will be races as great as and greater than ourselves in many if not in all respects. We not only know, but hold in mind the fact, that not much more than a thousand years ago our fathers were barbarians scarcely higher than the Kaffirs of to-day in the stage of culture and civilization they had reached; that even religion and the art of letters and of material civilization were brought to us by the higher barbarians of the Continent, who had received it as a relic from super-nations of antiquity, who in turn had received it from those wise small Semitic and Egyptian folk to whom mankind owe almost all they are; we did not receive it much more lustily than the Kaffir of to-day. And Alfred, like some white-skinned Khama, led or strove to lead his savage children to accept and prize a civilization and a learning they would never have invented and could hardly grasp.

We are aware that we have not been the leading race of the world in arts and science; that as those ancient fellow folk of ours, who are lost in the dawn of history, invented the alphabet and the art of inscription, and reading, and astronomy, and reared mighty palaces and wove rare garments when our fore-elders were dancing in hyperborean forests, or on Asiatic mountain peaks; so later all that the cultured man of to-day prizes in plastic art, philosophy and literary art was brought to a perfection in Greece which no people since has ever surpassed; and in Rome the arts of war and civil life were perfected and the colossal buildings and paths which we have never even equalled were laid down while, naked barbarians, we still hunted and drank. We know that even in the last thousand years we cannot set our names higher than our fellows in the regions of art and learning. Beside the Euclids, the Copernicuses, the Galileos, Theophrastuses, of the old, and the Herschels and Keplers of the modern, world, we have indeed the superb name of Newton to set down, but it cannot out-glitter its compeers; nor can even our prince, Shakespeare, outweigh the names of Dante, Goethe, Voltaire; nor have we, till Charles Darwin of this century, ever possessed a man who in the world of thought has transformed it, as Luther or the French thinkers of the eighteenth century transformed it, great and beloved as to many of us of to-day are the names of our J. S. Mill and Spencer. In the lower world of military art we have produced none of those men of genius before whom the whole civilized world has trembled, Tamurlane, Alexander, Cæsar, Napoleon; even Alaric and Attila have had no counterpart among men of our blood. And perhaps no serene and impartial intellect can look at the history of the race and say we have ever produced a man who, in fame and extent of influence on the race, has equalled Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, Mohamet, Socrates and Plato, or even Paul. Even in the arts and mechanical inventions on which we so pride ourselves to-day, we start back with astonishment when we begin to examine how and when we came by them. While our fathers in skins or clotheless wandered in the wilds, the fertile brain of the Chinaman had not only invented the coarser or thicker woven fabrics, but had made from the thread of the silk-worm such silk as the most skilled looms in England can hardly yield to-day, and had formed porcelain of which our creations are a humble imitation; our savage forefathers, if they could have penetrated to the villas and cities of the Roman Empire, would have found them filled with articles of art and luxury, and of delicate manufacture, which he was slowly to be taught, and which to-day he often only imitates with difficulty. Our woollen manufactures were brought us from Flanders and Holland, our silk from France, our muslins from India, our carpets from Persia, and even to-day there is scarcely a manufactured article except in iron work which is not manufactured better in some other country than with us, in spite of the vast bulk of shoddy work we produce for sale. Even in dress to-day we are not only unable in many instances to equal the delicacy and finish of foreign fabrics and ornaments, but we are absolutely dependent on the brains and taste of a foreign people for the cut and manufacture of our clothing, and the direction which our manufacture of textiles and fabrics shall to a large extent assume. Hardly any free savage or civilized people in the world has not been able to invent and determine for itself what class or shape of clothing is suited to its needs, but the great English people hangs with a servility, which would excite our ridicule were it not a matter of national shame, on the breath of the Frenchman's lips and the throb of a French man or woman's brain to determine how it shall clothe itself and what materials its manufactories shall produce; and one French woman, she may be a prostitute, or a public dancer, or a woman of fashion, hitches her dress at one point or wears a protuberant sleeve, and five millions of English all over the earth, with patient zeal and much labour, cast aside their old skirt and sleeves and strive to do as she did; and a few throbs of the brain of a French man milliner will determine that hundreds of thousands of English hats and bonnets are to be thrown aside, while with abject servility five millions of English women seek to cover their heads with what he has invented.

Such abject dependence on the thought and guidance of another people in a matter of daily concern can only be ascribed to the profound conviction of the whole people of the Frenchman's superiority to himself in this direction, and the conviction of the English woman that she is not, in matters of taste, the equal of the French woman, a humble conviction which reduces the English folk to a species of buffoonery, when, in the simple wild suburbs of Cape Town or amid the dust storms and heat of Johannesburg or Kimberley, they persist in following the Frenchwoman and donning the garbs she with taste invented to harmonize with the artificial surroundings of a Paris home on the Champs Elysées!

Whether we allow it theoretically or only in practice, it is undoubtable that in the plastic arts we not only do not surpass, but cannot readily imitate other nations, ancient or modern. We have not only never produced a Phidias or a Praxiteles, but we have no Michaelangelo or Raphael or Tintoretto, like the Italian, no Albrecht Durer with the German, or even, if we except Turner, a man who can stand as a national representative beside Holbein and Rubens, and national painters of the Dutch and Flemish schools; and in the nineteenth century, great as has been our awakening in this respect, it is still to foreign schools that our artists go for instruction.

If we except our superb old abbeys and Gothic relics, which we share with the rest of Europe, our architecture is imitative, and, in the case of such buildings as St. Paul's, shows the grotesque folly of a people who, in an unsuitable climate and spot, will attempt in their search of the beautiful and harmonious to imitate the growths of other climates and conditions. The appalling hideousness of our cities when compared with those of any country in Europe, their grim indifference to harmony and beauty, and yet more appalling attempts to gain them, oppress the new arrival heavily.

In music we have produced no genius and no noble work; the Bachs, Mozarts, Beethovens, Mendelssohns, Wagners are Germans, and we have no men who can approach the lesser but great Italians, or even the Chopins and Meyerbeers. Our music, like the Elgin marbles and the divine gods in the British Museum, is all imported; and when we would raise a monument to our own glory, we rob Egypt of one of her obelisks which, as a ruin among desert sands, was divine, and plant it in damp ugliness on the oozing bank of our mercantile river to proclaim to all the world, "Here is a people with money to import anything; but not the skill to raise their own monuments!"

In the modern arts and manufactures, we have during the last century taken a place in the front beside other peoples in right of a discovery hardly, if at all, less important in its practical effects than the electrical discoveries which in their inception we owe to the Italians and others; and in the daily and hourly small inventions and improvements in manufacture and the domain of practical science, England, if she holds her equal place, does no more than hold it beside the laboratories and workshops of France, Germany and Italy.[78] In the world of art, in those arts in which _language_ is the medium, we are alone able to hold our heads proudly beside the best of modern peoples, not only because we possess a Shakespeare or a Chaucer, but because our literature as a whole is a noble accretion of the beautiful and great.

[78] It is remarkable that Edison, the great American, who
has so perfected electrical invention, is, like Whitman and
Bret Harte, largely Dutch in his origin, his forefathers
having come from Holland a hundred years ago.

In that great and beneficent give and take which binds and has ever bound the children of men together, as the blood which flowing through the organs of the body blends and identifies it, we have received, like our fellows, all that humanity has thought or found, from the first and greatest discovery of fire by our prehistoric and perhaps Bushman-like ancestors, to the hardly less mighty invention of letters and arts, and we have also brought our quota to the common stock. But when we look at the matter impartially, the conviction must be forced upon every mind that, in arts and sciences, in manufacture and inventions, in spite of the contributions we have made, we are far more receivers from the common stock than contributors to it; that the world could still get on as far as religion, science, art, philosophy and material inventions are concerned without the Englishman, or were all he has contributed taken away; but the Englishman, if he lost all that in the last thousand years he has gained from Europe, and through it from all the earth, would be again a savage in aboriginal wildness.

And the question then suggests itself to us: Have we really so little to give to the common stock of our fellows? Are our assertions of our own greatness and importance brought down to the fact that, while the majority of other nations owing to their continental position have been obliged to employ the mass of their folk as soldiers, and suffer in all ages from the devastations of war upon their own soil, we, guarded by our island condition, have been able to employ the mass of our working class and to use our abundant coal and iron to produce a larger bulk of a less finished quality of saleable articles than any other civilized people, whom we are therefore able, at the price of the health and joy of our working classes, to undersell in the nineteenth century? Is this the fact, that the narrow and fixed limits of our island home did not admit of our retaining all our population within its limits, and has compelled us to send out swarms of folk to America and all vacant or savage-peopled parts of the earth? Are these accidents our only claim to greatness and to the respect of mankind? When we are called perfidious and money-wringing from our own poor and the weak of all the peoples, is our character summed up, and is our function no higher in the modern world, no higher than that of the Phœnicians in the old, to be the carriers and traders of the race while the world has need of us and then to pass away when our work is done, leaving hardly a trace?

We believe that it is not.

When our wild German forefathers, Saxon, Danish or Frisian, landed in Britain and mingled their blood with the remnant of wild Britons who inhabited the fastnesses of the land, there was one great treasure common to all the barbarian peoples of Europe and Central Asia which they carried with them, the tradition and fact of personal freedom. The Greeks and the Romans believed themselves free; it was the freedom of an enfranchized minority reigning despotically over a vast body of women and slaves, and Athens, in her noblest days, contained thirty thousand free adult males, while her population numbered hundreds of thousands.

In Eastern civilization the proportion of free men was generally smaller, and the absolutely free and independent individual in the nations was sometimes only the solitary despot who ruled. This is never the case with a nomadic people who, if they take captives, have no land for them to labour on, and no dungeons in which to confine them, and whose women and captives of war are therefore always more or less independent. Most of all was this so with our German ancestors, whose women were the most honoured part of the nation, supposed to possess a knowledge and insight which made their advice necessary on every great national question, who accompanied their husbands in peace and war, who gave them as wedding gifts no rose or lock of hair, but a sword and shield which were the man's most precious possessions throughout life, whose scorn and reproach were what the coward most dreaded, and who again and again led the tribes to conflict and victory, as when Velleda, the white-haired priestess, led the Germanic troops to Italy; and whose captives, when by rare chance they kept them alive, were in turn incorporated in the general body.

This absolute freedom and independence of almost a whole society was not peculiar to those northern races who conquered and peopled England, but to that profound consciousness of the necessity and importance of the preservation of individual freedom and the liberty of uncoerced personal action, so wholly distinct from that sometimes misnamed freedom in which the individual is bound to sink his individuality and personal inclination in that of the class or state to which he belongs and to submit abjectly to _its_ rule--this freedom was not originally peculiar to the English, nor has it alone been kept by them. The Swiss in their mountains have preserved the blood and the speech of personal freedom of the Germanic races more pure than anywhere else on the surface of the earth, and nowhere, where that free barbarian blood spread itself, has the instinct and aspiration towards freedom become absolutely extinct. It has lived on in our brothers, the Dutch and French, and turns up again in their descendant, the African Boer; but when the matter is looked fairly in the face, we cannot avoid the deliberate conviction that, among great and dominant civilized people, the English race has kept more unsullied and borne highest, though often half furled or drooping for a time, the flag of individual freedom, which our barbarian ancestors handed down to their European descendants. England has not been free from foreign conquest; she bent beneath the heel of the Conqueror nine centuries ago; but she forced on her conquerors her speech; she has not been without her serfs, but early they became freed men; she has not been without her tyrannies of kings and nobles, but always her people have risen up against it and in time asserted their liberty of action; the masses of her people may have seemed to be flat on their bellies under the feet of rulers as under the early Stuarts, but it was only to rise more resolute than ever under Cromwell, and to rebel against his form of tyranny, too, when his dictatorship promised no increase of freedom.

To-day, when the strife is between wealth, which in skilful hands has usurped a power over men's lives and national destinies which was not contemplated when the laws of property were framed, the men of England will amend these laws as they before amended the laws with regard to kings, so that the power shall be broken and the individual be free; but if they are true to their tradition of the past they will stop when the power of a class to diminish freedom has been broken, and, as the rule of the king or baron was never allowed to become an absolute tyranny, so the yet more powerful rule of the many will not be allowed to become the slavish submission of the few, and the right of the individual to do as he pleases while his act does not hurt his fellow will be as of old the goal at which we shall aim.

The majority of Englishmen love freedom, but they love it in three different ways. The majority love it as a possession for themselves alone; they will not be interfered with, nor will they have their freedom of action barred by any one or any thing; they are not careful of the freedom of others, nor are they at all reluctant to sacrifice and annihilate it entirely if it increases their own; but to their own they cling with tenacity.

This love of freedom the Englishman shares with most savage and nomadic barbarous peoples; it is found in almost the highest perfection in the South African Boer. As a first step towards something higher it is invaluable; in its highest development its mere intensity makes it almost sublime, as is the attitude of the eagle when, having devoured all the lambs and rabbits it can find, it sails alone in the blue; it is an immensely higher quality than a mere servile submission in a people or an individual, and it is necessary as a foundation to the higher developing of the same feeling; but in itself it does not raise the nation or the person feeling it higher than the level of the noble savage.

There are a large number of us, though small compared to the first class, who love freedom for ourselves but also do not desire to grasp our liberty at the cost of others. We love liberty so dearly that we would not willingly inflict an injustice or a wrong on another, and we respect the freedom of others while we venerate our own. This love of freedom we share with all the great and noble souls that have ever existed, from the Persian prince, called the Lover of Justice or the Even-Handed, to the wise and just and far-seeing folk of every land to-day. It is a high and great, a noble, quality, but I do not think it makes us unique among the peoples of the world.

But there is yet a third way in which some of us love freedom. I do not know that any large and strong section of any people has ever loved it so before, though isolated individuals, Chinese, Indian, Jewish and Greek, have been irradiated by more or less of the glory of this passion; it is peculiar as a large racial and worldwide acting phenomenon to the English race and people. We love freedom not only for ourselves, but we desire with a burning passion to spread it broadcast over the earth; to see every human being safeguarded by it and raised to the level at which they may enjoy it; we desire freedom not only for ourselves but for humanity; and we labour to spread it. _This_ I hold is the one great gift which England and England alone possesses; this is the quality which makes us unique among the nations of the earth; this is the gift which we have to contribute to the great common offertory of humanity.

The Greek has art and philosophy, the Jew religion, the Roman high civil organization; each nation and people of the past throws in its offering to the collection of humanity's common possessions. Even the Bushman, if we will keep him a little longer, will creep up and drop in his mite, if it be only by the light with which when, well studied, he will illumine the past, and the hope he gives us of the future of the race when we see what it has already risen from--but the Englishman puts in, I think, the noblest gift of all.

It is a rash hand that dares to lift itself to set the crown on its own head, yet more on that of its own nation; but I believe that, in virtue of this one quality and lacking so much else, we stand to-day the first race on earth, and that we dare to thank the fate that we are Englishmen.