Chapter VIII: The Englishman (2)

We are not unaware of the objection that may be raised. All Englishmen have not this love, nor does our past or present history always exemplify it. All Greeks were not philosophers; they poisoned Socrates. All Jews are not religious geniuses; they drove Moses half mad, hanged Jesus and excommunicated Spinoza. Yet the one is the most philosophic and the other the most religious people that ever existed. It is not by the attitude of the lower mass (lower in development, however high in wealth or authority) that a people can be measured or compared with others; the most developed and highest growths must be compared as, when we seek to classify plants, we compare their flowers, not their roots. We know that the mass of our people allow and have allowed that love of wealth and luxury, which is the national disease of our people, to sap all other considerations. We know that for years we, the great apostles of freedom, were the slave dealers and breeders of the world, that thousands of folk among us have to-day their wealth, power, culture and freedom from material cares, because their fathers' ships were loaded with men and women between the decks, one half to die there of heat and filth, the others sold at a lordly profit. We too have had our thumbscrews, our dungeons, our wars for lust of gain and power. We know that for years our sugar, cotton and coffee were wrung out of men's hands by the application of Englishmen's whips to their backs--but this too we know, that a time came when, as in times past, the leading section of the nation rose and did away with thumbscrews and dungeons and Star Chambers, so again it rose and declared the trade at an end; so too we know the world saw what it had never seen before (but what may be hoped will be seen many times again in different forms), part of a branch of the English speaking people, dominated by English ideas arise and pour out its blood like water, not for its own freedom, not for the freedom of its kind, but for a despised, scorned and feeble people. Some nations have set their slaves free, but only an English race speaking the English tongue and imbued with English ideals has shed its blood for them! This is a new thing under the sun. Many things have happened, but this never happened before. It is a new era. We know, none so well, how stained is our African record; we know with what envious eyes the government of English Ahabs eyes the patrimony of black Naboths and takes it, if necessary, after bearing false witness against Naboth; we know how Englishmen have crossed this continent and left behind them a trail of slime and gore such as few Arabic slave caravans leave; but we know that, with hearts full of soft concern for its inhabitants, and all the tenderness of strength and wisdom, Englishmen have trodden this continent and laboured among its lowest people; not Livingstone alone but a great corps of lesser unrecorded Livingstones whose names will be forgotten, but the fruits of whose lives will abide. And it was in South Africa that the English nation, when, in 1833, they voted twenty millions for the emancipation of slaves, expended over one million in buying freedom for the black man and Half-caste; and at the same time was promulgated in South Africa, by the will of the English people, the Magna Charta of the black man, which put, in the eye of the law, every free man, Hottentot or Kaffir, throughout the country, on the same level as the white.

In India our rule has been largely one of greed and self-seeking; we know that at Cawnpore, when an army of brave men, in making a last heroic stand for national freedom, killed a handful of white women and children, we, to be revenged on them, fell into inhuman and fiendish barbarities, which, if practised to-day by Boers or Kaffirs or by Frenchmen attacking Englishmen, would in our eyes brand them for ever as creatures beneath the human; we are silent about those horrors when with the fiendish savagery, not of Christians but of wild beasts, we made man after man, before we shot him, kneel down and lick up blood, so that to the horror of death might be added the horror of the fear of eternal damnation. I know no place in human history where barbarities more hellish are recorded, and when in drawing-rooms delicate-lipped women sing of Brave Havelock and his Highlanders, we see suddenly the sheen of the blood of a people fighting on their own soil for the freedom of their race, and we wish the delicate ladies could find something else to sing of.

All this we recognize, and we are willing to look the facts fully, if not unblushingly, in the face; but when all has been seen and said, this also must be allowed: that, though we have set our feet on the land over a hundred years, there are as many or more people of the aboriginal races in the land than when we came, and, if we should pass away from them to-morrow, all we shall have left them as our main legacy will be a certain knowledge of our language and laws, and they would not be a less free, rather a more free, people than when we found them. We have not been to them at least the upas-tree, killing out the race from beneath us, and if at times we have been conquerors and oppressors, and if more often we have made blunders, this one thing is certain, that perhaps not the majority of us, certainly not all of us, yet still a certain body of us, have meant well by them. We have meant to aid and raise them, to put them on an equality with ourselves, and the thought they were being crushed or murdered would be a blow to the most earnest sensibilities of our natures.

It may be replied: "Yes, that is your English cant; you alone of all people in the world have always a psalm in your mouth as you crunch the bones of your enemies, and, while you are putting the bread of the poor and needy in your own jaws, your eyes are turned upwards."

And this is to a certain extent true. Cant lies across our national character as a hideous deformity, peculiar to ourselves. As we have one virtue, so we also have this vice which is ours and ours alone; but is it not the shadow of that very virtue? The disease which is an indication of its opposite? There are times when our heart sickens that we are English, and the meanest and most brutal nation seems great when we compare its attitude with that greasy whine of affected sanctity and humanity with which, often as individuals and continuously as a people, we try to gloss over our acts of greed, injustice and self-seeking.

The Boer, if he wishes to annex a Native territory, says: "The damned Kaffir; I'll take his land from him and divide it among my children." The Frenchman says, if he wishes to possess a territory: "I shall take it for the glory of France and keep it for her honour." And this is noble, direct and manly, if perhaps cruel and unjust.

But the Englishman speaks not so. When he desires an adjoining Native territory, he sighs, and folds his hands; he says: "It's a very sad thing the way these Natives go on! They believe in witches and kill them. I really can't let this go on! It's my duty to interfere. I can't let these poor benighted people go on so!" He says nothing about the coal mines he wants to work in their country or the rich nature of their lands of which he has already got vast grants; so he turns on the Maxim guns, and he kills a few thousands to save the ten witches; and witchcraft is put an end to--but he has the lands and mines, and dishomed and beaten Natives work them for him. How much nobler is the Boer's attitude is obvious. When we want a territory on a larger scale we do not say we are stronger than those people, let us go and kill them and take command of the land for the glory of the Englishman and the benefit of his trade.[79] We first send some Englishmen there till the people, knowing our character and that where one locust comes there come others, grow a little restive and show some displeasure at our fore-runners; then we draw ourselves together and say: "It is our duty to defend innocent men and women trusting to us who have ventured into a strange land" (how and why they came there we don't inquire), and so we draw out our guns in the name of a wronged humanity--and so conquer a new land; or we encourage our citizens to buy shares in a commercial enterprise, lend money may be, and then say: "It is our duty to take the management of its finance, and eventually of its government, because it is our duty not to allow innocent speculators to suffer." Whether the folk in the land will suffer we leave out of view for the moment, but we dwell on that great duty--till the land is ours. In the history of the world there was never a people whose record of relations with other peoples showed so hideous a record of falsehood and self-deception; other peoples have lied to each other; but that immeasurably more hideous lie, the lie told to oneself, has not been common. And we carry this hideous attitude into the relations of private life; it is the distinctive mark of the lower type of Englishwoman (often one of culture and philanthropic and religious inclinations) that she cannot speak the truth to herself, much less to others, with regard to her motives and actions. When she envies another and seeks to win her friend or lover from her, she does not, with the frank wild truth of the Italian or French woman, say: "I will undermine their friendship. I hate her. She has done me no harm but I will triumph over her." She says to herself: "It is my _duty_ to show that man what that woman is," and so, in the performance of her duty, she saves her conscience and attains her end. We cannot look fairly or frankly at our people in their private or public capacity without allowing that that is our deformed feature, our hideous and unique characteristic.

[79] He does not add: And so did my fathers two hundred
years ago, and all Europe and the Bible expresses faith in
them; "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live, says God";
for this kind of Englishman is not of a discerning and
analytical disposition. He never goes farther than the
matter in hand; and the matter in his own hands seldom
stretches farther than the length of his own nose.

But what does it mean when we come to analyse it? Is it not simply that deference which the less developed and more brutalized part of our nation, aye, and of the separate individual himself, pays to the higher? Is it not that the English nation and English individual, bent on an act of injustice at variance with the most deep-lying conviction of its nature, is obliged to gloss it over or it could not attain its end?

If the French or Chinese or Russian Government is not obliged to gloss over the fact to the mass of its people that in undertaking a certain war it is thinking nothing of justice or injustice, not the benefit of the conquered, but simply of itself; is it not because there is no large body of the people strong enough to hamper it and perhaps tie its hands altogether if it did not cozen and blind them?

What is the action of the English Government under such conditions, when Pitt drags in the words justice, right, mercy, to shield itself, but a covert assertion that such a feeling does exist, which would not stand by it if it did not believe that the freedom and emancipation of others would be aided by its action?

Nay, in the meanest souled Englishwoman, when she dare not say to herself openly: "I hate that woman and I will wrong her," but is obliged to bring in the blasphemed words duty, right, justice, to soothe her own soul--what is it but a testimony that, even in that poor specimen of the race, there lurks somewhere a feeling that right must be done, that for no gain to _yourself_ can you take an unfair advantage. It is the low, insincere element in the woman striving to justify itself before the profound English conception of the absolute necessity of justice and fair play between all men. She _dare_ not slander her fellow unless she has first silenced this.

An Englishman going to sit on the same jury with Boers to try a white man for killing a Kaffir dares not say frankly and openly to himself before he goes in or has heard the evidence, as the old Boer does frankly and truly: "That man is not guilty; no white man shall be punished for the death of a black"; but he says, when he hears the evidence: "After all, one can never be certain that evidence is true; why should I set myself up to condemn a fellow man, perhaps to lifelong imprisonment, when it may be unjust? And is it not my duty to avoid stirring up ill-feeling between Dutch and English by bringing in a Boer guilty?" And he votes with the rest. But what is this hideous fraud but the cringing of the man's lower nature before the higher element in himself? If he dare once, only once, admit frankly in his own heart: "That man committed murder, but I am going to bring him in not guilty because these Boers buy in my shop," he would not _dare_ to give the verdict, and, if he did, something even in that low groping nature would rise up and say: "You are not worthy to be an Englishman," and he would know the agony of remorse.

The Boer does not need to lie to himself because there is nothing in him that would rise up to reproach him if he did not. This hideous fraud in the nation and individual is evidence that there _does_ exist a part which follows after justice and freedom for all men and which has to be blinded and silenced before wrong can be done; it _does_ testify that. Even in the lowest English-speaking man or woman, somewhere, tucked away in the background of their being, is that awful and almost mysterious instinct of our people: "You can't wrong a fellow human being; a man is a man; and what is right for you is right for another. All men have a claim to fair play." And before this whisper the meanest man or woman of our race squirms when he tries to evade it, and, unable fully to understand it or explain it, it lives in the heart of our people, growing louder and stronger as the ages pass. We can no more tell you how and why we have it than the Greek can tell you why he had to make statues and love them; or the Roman laws and roads; or the German music. It seems it is inborn in us. We may try to annihilate it by argument; we may try to cozen it by lies; but in each one of us stands this instinct pointing with its upraised finger the path we have to walk in. It is the mysterious birthright of every English man and woman. We may call it the love of freedom, of justice, but neither of these quite defines it; it is something more; it is the deep conviction buried somewhere in our nature, not to be eradicated, that man as man is a great and important thing, that the right to himself and his existence is the incontestable property of all men; and above all the conviction that not only _we_ have a right and are bound to preserve it for ourselves, but that where we come into contact with others _we are bound to implant it or preserve it in them_. It is a profound faith, not in the equal talent, virtues, and abilities of men, but in the equal right of the poorest, most feeble, most ignorant, to his own freedom and to a perfect equality of treatment.

In all or almost all of us it is faintly present, and in the master minds which express our race it becomes a passion which in a thousand directions manifests itself, as the German instinct for music making now a Mozart and then a Beethoven, and the Greeks' artistic power making now a Phidias and then a Praxiteles. It is this which we believe and hold to be the peculiar attribute of the English people, our one gift which we have to contribute to the general sum of humanity's wealth--the desire not only to be free, but to make free--the consciousness of the importance of the individual as individual apart from any attributes of sex, nationality, talent or wealth. To us it has been given first among all peoples to perceive, though still dimly, the unity of all human creatures, and as a nation to endeavour to realize in our legislation and institutions and our relations with weak peoples our perception of the fact.[80]

[80] It is perhaps not only by good fortune that among us
should have arisen Charles Darwin. Those who study his
early work, the _Voyage of the Beagle_, when as yet he
was only perceiving faintly the relation of things which
he afterwards so clearly grasped, will see, curiously
manifest in almost every page of that work, those great
English qualities of love and freedom and human equality
in freedom. Neither does it seem anything but fitting and
natural that the man who first brought evidence to convince
the world of the identity of all life, seen and vaguely
indicated by the world's poets, from Lucretius to Goethe
and Shelley, should have been an Englishman. It is not
wonderful that the man who, in his youth, felt so keenly
the pain of seeing the savage ill-treated or the coloured
man slighted, should have been he to whom the mystery and
meanings of the humblest forms of life should have been
made clear and that, from the stripes on the wing of the
bird and the life and motions of the worm, he should have
read the open lessons that others had overlooked. Foreign
peoples often wonder that he should have appeared among
us, but he appeared in our own line of growth; he is an
efflorescence that naturally and rightly belongs to us. He
was our Englishman at his highest.

To those of us who hold this view of the past history of the English race, of its present position and of the characteristic which constitutes its peculiarity and strength among the peoples of earth, the upas-tree theory with regard to its future growth is not only inconceivable but, could we conceive it as possible, we should hold it undesirable. And there is nothing from our point of view either in its past history or present condition to support the theory. The Spaniard attempted the upas-tree form of colonization and empire, but he has not succeeded. No nation who has produced any approach to a permanent organization has followed that line and succeeded by following it. The Roman, the Great Mogul, attempted, where they conquered, to spread the benefits and rights of their own organization to the affiliated people; it was not the number of her slaughters that made the Roman Empire the greatest the world has yet seen or her rule the most enduring; the conquests of Rome, when she had attained her widest empire, had not cost so many lives as many a barbarian conquest which depopulated whole territories and passed like a smoke or a pestilence leaving no mark behind; the Roman Empire attained to that endurance and power it held because Rome was not a upas-tree to the races she came into contact with, but because, if in a partial and incomplete manner, yet more than others, where she planted her standard, she sought to raise and instruct, not to exterminate. No one can study the history of that great folk in imperial growth without feeling that behind all lay a dim perception of something higher than mere national expansion; and in those wise methods, which in the hour of her greatness she ordained, through which men of all nations and creeds might in time and by merit become Romans and by her medium spread everywhere the arts, the knowledge and the advantages peculiar to herself, we see the germ of the true idea of universal empire fitfully trying to incarnate itself. Rome fell because she herself became corrupted by wealth and the inequality of possession, but it took her three centuries to die, and it must never be forgotten that there were Gauls, Spaniards, Asiatics and Germans who fought as desperately in her cause at last as the children of the Seven Hills: so real a fact had been her empire, so true was her absorption of all peoples into herself. The Gaul, the Thracian, the Illyrian died generation after generation fighting for the Roman flag because it had conferred on them something that they valued, and rather than lose which they would die. It is not because she slaughtered but because she raised, not because she crushed but because she protected, that Rome reigned; and she is to some extent immortal and among us to-day still, not because of the men she slaughtered, which any savage or wild beast might have accomplished as well, but because she had something new and large to teach mankind, and she taught it to the race. There is not upon the earth to-day one pure blood Roman any more than there is one pure blood Greek, but Rome lives still in our institutions, in our learning, in our habits of thought; she has her part in every civilized individual; and, while the race continues on the planet and continues to grow, she will have her part in that growth, because, like Greece, she was one of the early forces which fed and shaped it; and her language, spoken by none, is still preserved because of the treasure imbedded in it; and in that large ultimate race of humanity she also will have her share because, while her blood will be fractionally represented in it, her thought will have played a large share in its creation.

Such empire and such immortality, only infinitely wider, deeper, and more indestructible, is that which we desire and hope for the English race, and language. We believe that we also have our contribution to make to the growth of humanity. We believe that our sense of the importance of individual liberty, irrespective of individual conditions, is a larger contribution to the wealth of the race on earth than any folk has yet made; and we believe that our desire to impart it is a more potent means of extending our true empire, and with it our speech over the surface of the globe, than any mere strength of arm or valour in slaughtering. We believe that it is not impossible that the day will come when from north to south, from east to west, over the globe, our English spirit will have spread; when, as the art of reading and writing which was once the discovery and possession of some prehistoric race but which is to-day becoming the property of the globe, so that in a hundred years' time no child on the globe will be without it, so our English freedom will spread and the day will come when in that large united people of the future every man will say: "In that I am free I am English," and the language, when even possible freedom has been preached all the world over, may form the foundation of the world's speech.

We look forward to no time when our brilliant little Japanese brother with his love of flowers and beauty and simplicity and his keen intellectual insight, when our Russian mate with his idealism and grim intensity of emotion, and even the Kaffir with his high sense of honour and justice and his almost abnormally developed sense of social unity and obligation, shall have passed away for ever from among the things of earth and when we shall reign in his stead. Our dream of the future of our race is of no John Bull seated astride of the earth, his huge belly distended with the people he has devoured and his teeth growing out yet more than ever with all the meat he has bitten and looking around on a depeopled earth and laughing till all his teeth show and the peoples' bones rattle in his belly: "Ha! I reign alone now. I have killed them all out!"

If such a consummation were within the remotest grasp of possibility, the best thing the peoples of earth could do would be to combine and kill the ogre while there was yet time. But no such consummation of his fate is conceivable. The North American has indeed died out before us as the Bushman almost died out before the Dutch and will utterly die out, unless with great care and at much expense we have the taste and the wisdom artificially to preserve him for future ages and to complete as far as possible the links in the chain of life; but we have not really killed them, they had not the power unless they were artificially preserved to grasp the conditions of a more complex existence. Negro, Indian, and even Irishman, they all tend to increase, not to die out, under our rule. Our dream of the future empire of our race is not of an empire over graves but in and through living nations. The future of our race is never prefigured in our minds by the upas but as a huge tree, among whose shelving roots and under whose protecting shadow, endless forms of life may spring up and flourish that might otherwise be destroyed, and in whose wide umbrageous branches every form of bird and creature shall find resting place and nourishment, a tree of life and not of death. We do not dream of our language that it shall forcibly destroy the world's speeches and all they contain, reigning in solitary grandeur, but, as gold in a ring binds into one circle rare gems of every kind and some of infinitely greater beauty than itself, so we dream that our speech being common may bind together and bring into one those treasures of thought and knowledge which the peoples of earth have produced, its highest function being that of making the treasures of all accessible to all.

We think of the great race of earth, which shall be in the future, not as composed of English blood with all the beauty and strength of other races and peoples excluded; but rather we figure it as a great temple reared up of material of every size and colour, from marble and alabaster to ebony and starred porphyry, but in which every stone and doorpost shall be cemented with the freedom that is the gift of our people. We look for the future growth of England not as the result of the merciless slaughter of mankind or the use of force, but because, as time passes and we become freer ourselves, we shall spread our freedom wherever our foot touches, and whoever is trampled, oppressed or feeble on earth will gather to us and grow up under our shelter to strength; we look for the spread of our language, not because it is of necessity the finest and most complex and expressive instrument of thought, though, after our instinct for freedom, it is the noblest outgrowth of our race, having perchance not the music of the Italian, the exact brilliance of the French, the ready power of expressing deep and powerful emotion of the German, or the multiple advantages of other forms of speech, yet, like some great and complex organ with understops and pipes which skilfully managed may produce almost any effect, being fitted to equal and perhaps surpass any language in its breadth of power,[81] but because in this tongue will be preached the most valuable lesson humanity has yet to learn; because, wherever a people has come into contact with it, it has meant for them freedom and advance.

[81] How far does the passion of a workman for the tool he
works with speak in us here?

There is an old saying that a slave cannot breathe in the air of England because the moment his foot touches the shore he is freed. We look for an enlargement of this old parable in the future. We look for the time when it shall be said: "Slavery, injustice, the oppression of the weak by the strong, cannot exist in any land where an Englishman breathes; the moment his foot touches a shore, they pass away before him." And in this will lie the Englishman's power to dominate and his claim to immortality.

In the great nation that shall govern and cover the whole earth there may be found not one pure-blooded Englishman, any more than there is to-day one Greek or Roman on earth. He will as little be found in three hundred years' time in London or New York, as in Pekin or Yokohama. But what was great in him we believe will have encircled the globe; and English freedom will extend from Greenland to Borneo when the Englishman shall have melted into something larger.

We know that this consummation is not inevitable or certain; dreams as large as this have been dreamed by races before and come to nought. We are not unaware that to carry this conquest out the English race must first free itself before it can consciously or unconsciously accomplish its missionary enterprise. During the last years there seems a pause in the generous outflow of English inspiration, and, where we appear to be bent on suppressing a slave trade, it will be manifest to the least observant looker-on that our Government is merely making that project a shield for financial and national aggressions. The truth is that all English-speaking countries are in the throes of a great effort demanding not less of the vital energies of our people in England, America and the Colonies than the old internal struggles which resulted in the freedom of Barons as opposed to the Monarchy, the freedom of the men of the middle class as opposed to the hereditary powers. What the future of the English race will be depends on the result of that conflict. If it results as we who share in its struggles believe, it will show the world when the strife is over, for the first time, a perfectly free land in which the superficial differences of sex and class shall be sunk in the greater personality of the human creature, in which every creature from its birth shall stand free and untrammelled and the inequalities between men shall not be those of artificial construction but of inherent deficiencies or powers; in which a new aristocracy shall be formed out of the great labour of the head or hand and not of those of great possessions, of those who give much to their fellows and not those who receive; when the child will be told to take off his hat and bow to the labourer who for sixty years has worked in the field for the community, or has thought for it in his chamber, and not to the woman who lies back in her carriage, consuming and having consumed without return the labour of hundreds, or the man who, in the gambling of the roulette table, the stock exchange or the share market, has made his millions. It may be that the arrest in our outward efforts to extend our freedom and humanity's may be the result of this internal trouble and that when, before the race is exhibited for the first time in the history of the globe an absolutely free civilized people in which the individuality of the male and female, the powerful and the weak, are respected, we shall take up our work with renewed ardour, and, almost whether we will or no, the freedom we have attained for ourselves will infect all the race and constitute us its leaders. This may be; this is what there is some promise of ultimately being--but it may also not be. We may have become so much degraded by the ideal of existence which has been held before us, that the strife of our women and masses, which now seems an ennobling strife for more and nobler fields of labour, shall degenerate into a demoralizing strife after universal inaction and that our ideal as a race will be what is now merely the ideal of a class, existence on the labour of others without exertion--and then the English race will be degraded, as many have been before it, and the Russian, the Japanese and even the Kaffir must lead the world's people in their march; we cannot. We do not pretend there are not certain signs which suggest the possibility of ultimate failure, and make us fear for it. In a country like South Africa we see that, where the English and in truth any branch of the white race comes into contact with a more primitive dark, there is a hideous tendency at once to degenerate. We will not work. The most feeble and unrichly brained man or woman who could be worth their keep to humanity and perhaps as richly productive as a hand worker, but never as anything else, refuses the one order of labour he is fit for, and prefers a hideous dependency on society, which in Africa is ultimately a dependence on the dark races, rather than to undertake the one form of labour for which nature has fitted him. We see a hideous tendency to leave all the work of life to the dark races; for the moment this seems to leave us free for higher efforts, but as time passes surely it will enervate; like a rotten aristocracy we shall die out, and the hands which for generations have made our roads, planted and reaped our fields, built our houses and tended our children, will at last be united to the brains that make the laws and govern the land, and we shall fade away. That the day may be far distant does not make less clear and painful the first symptoms of the disease of which all great conquering nations of the past have ultimately died. Again our hope, that the English working man and the woman when freed will impart their gain to all the world and so rule over life, is belied at least by two symptoms--that the man who is trying to free himself from the tyranny of class still does in certain instances strive fiercely to maintain that of sex, and that, as he gains or thinks he is gaining his own freedom, he strives jealously to exclude men who are not of his blood from sharing it. These are perhaps the two ugliest symptoms in the modern movement; and if it means anything but the action of a man who, nearly drowned, wrings the hands of his fellow off him and throws him back into the water, only that he may be able to gain the shore and return with a rope for his fellow--it is the most hopeless symptom that has appeared in our social growth for many years. In South Africa, where our national English greed for speedy wealth without exertion has made us, not satisfied with the dark labour of the country, introduce yet more from Asia, then when they have served us and filled our pockets, we attempt to refuse them the rights of citizens and labourers, the English love of freedom and fair play does not seem growing. There are countless other symptoms which give us cause for consideration and most anxious doubt. We are going to spread freedom and justice over the earth, but in Africa at present our doom seems to be to drag its natural wealth from its bowels, and to expend it in intensifying the luxury of the old world. We prefer, as a great South African millionaire once said, "the land to the Natives," and for a time that part of us which seeks to rule over nations and permeate the peoples seems silenced by that part of us which desires to fill its hands with the fruits of the land and the labour of its people--and then desires nothing more.

All this we see and see clearly. That a tree is full of buds does not prove that there will ever be fruit; that a child moves beneath its mother's heart is no certain promise that there will ever be a man; and, seeing clearly many conditions which may check its progress and even symptoms of conditions which may ultimately terminate its existence, nevertheless, while the buds are on the tree, we do not fail to dig and water, and, while the child is in the womb, we do not cease to prepare for its coming because of the possibility of its abortion.

To those of us who take this view of conditions, functions, difficulties and possible future of the English race, it is not very difficult to determine what in the little South African world our relations and course of conduct towards the black man and the alien races should be. The man who holds to the upas-tree function of the English race and the possibility and desirability of our exterminating and using entirely for our own advantage all the peoples of earth is not more confident as to what his line of action should be than we. Nay, we believe we are a little more confident, because we believe there lies in every Englishman, behind his philistinism and jingoism, something that makes the upas-tree line of action a little difficult to him.

We are not unaware of the difficulties and complexities of our position in this country, but upon all matters small and large we know our course. We are asked sometimes: "Well, but what do you intend this country to be, a black man's country or a white?" We reply we intend nothing. If the black man cannot labour or bear the strain and stress of complex civilized life, he will pass away. We need not degrade and injure ourself by killing him; if _we_ cannot work here, then in time, wholly or in part, the white man will pass away; and the one best fitted to the land will likely survive--but this we are determined to do: we will make it a free man's country. Whether the ultimate race of this country be black, white or brown, we intend it to be a race permeated with the English doctrine of the equal right of each human to himself, and the duty of all to defend the freedom of it.

If it be suggested to us that the Natives of the land are ignorant, we have the reply to make that we are here to teach them all we know if they will learn--if they will not, they must fall.

If it be asked whether we think them our equals, we would reply: Certainly in love of happiness and their own lives--perhaps not in some other directions; but we are here to endeavour to raise them as far as it is possible; we are determined to make them a seed-ground in which to sow all that is greatest and best in ourselves.

If it be asked whether we are negrophiles, we reply: "No--we are trying to be but we are not yet. The white man in us yet loves the white as the black man loves the black. It would be a lie to say that we love the black man, if by that is meant that we love him as we love the white. But we are resolved to deal with justice and mercy towards him. _We will treat him as if we loved him_: and in time the love may come. When you pick up a lost child in the streets covered only with rags and black with dust, you have first to take it home and wash and dress it and then you want to kiss it. When we have dealt with the dark man for long years with justice and mercy and taught him all we know, we shall perhaps be able to look deep into each other's eyes and smile: as parent and child."

If it is said to us that our idea of the function of the English race is all very well, but in reality all that races seek is self-aggrandisement, we reply that we are fully aware of this tendency to the most blatant self aggrandisement in our people, but we know also other tendencies; and Washington, Lincoln, John Brown, Florence Nightingale, Josephine Butler, John Stuart Mill, Howe, Livingstone, Moffat, and the multitudes who harmonize with and follow them, are not less truly English. In every land where the English race is growing, in Australia, New Zealand, America, England and even South Africa, side by side with its less specialized elements we have this broad humanitarian element, as surely and unfailingly developed in every land, and on this we build our hope. This element, which we believe to be ultimately the dominant and vital element in our people, is animated entirely by one instinct and works to one end. We do not follow ultimately either the Union Jack or the Stars and Stripes. Over our heads waves always a larger and wider flag, inscribed with that one word, "Freedom," which being fully interpreted means justice and liberty for all, or, being yet more simplified: Do unto all men as you would they should do unto you. Under that standard we range ourselves to conquer. We regard it as the true flag of our race, beneath which we are willing to die, but which, British, American, Australian, New Zealander or even South African, we are never willing to see fall. It is this English standard which alone we would see planted in every country of the earth. It is this unseen flag, waving over our heads, which stimulates us to persevere in our course; it is this which we believe constitutes the ultimate glory of the English people.

If we are asked how we can expect any folk ever to dominate in the world as a power everywhere spreading freedom and imparting its benefits to all, when in all the history of the past such a thing is not recorded of any people, we reply that it is useless to talk to us in Africa of what has been, as though it of necessity limited what shall be in the world of human growth. Outside our doors, even as we write and think, sits cowering the little human ape Bushman, and, when we turn from him to the Kaffir working in our kitchen and the bust of Shakespeare on the mantleshelf, we do not only hope and believe but we see physically before our material eyes the infinite growth of humanity, the unmeasurable power of change and the arrival of entirely new traits which is possible in the human creature. You may as well try to stop a great people on its line of growth by telling it that no people has ever done before what they are attempting to do, as you could stop the creative mind of a genius in its labour by telling it that work had never been done before. "Exactly so," replies the artist, "I know man has never seen the face I see and am trying to paint or the fact I see and am trying to record; that is my joy, I am doing an entirely new thing and through me humanity grows a little in a new direction."

It is exactly because we believe no nation on the earth has ever manifested just this desire, not only to be free, but to make free, that we are filled with an almost infinite hope as to our function and future. This is why we value it more highly than all the qualities we share with other peoples. It is our stroke of genius, our new contribution to human growth.

If we are asked how, looking round on the little world of South Africa to-day, we dare to entertain such lofty conceptions of the function and future of our race, we reply: "Yes, we dare." We are not blind to the self-seeking and injustice which surround us on every hand. We are not for a moment blind to the fact that sometimes, where we seem to be defending the Native, we are merely using him as a rod with which to strike our white brothers of another speech; we do not forget that English hands have in this country flogged men to death and that, because the man killed was of a dark race, we as an English community have not dared to do more than inflict a fine. We are aware how devoid of any consciousness of large racial function are a mass of our English-speaking folk and how completely devoid of any aim but that of self-betterment are numbers of our units; but, looking these facts directly in the face and allowing all they mean, we yet do not give up hope.

Is it absolutely nothing that in this country there are to be found men who, whether as judges or when serving on juries, are not only incorruptible before the forces of gold or personal interest but before the much more terrible corruption of racial prejudice and passion? Is it nothing that there are men among us in whose hands the most miserable feeble Bushman or Hottentot is as sure of rigid justice as though he were a royal prince or millionaire? Is it not something that there is throughout the length and breadth of the land hardly an Englishman who dares to use the power of a dominant people without making for himself a screen of lies, behind which to hide from his conscience when she comes to seek for him, that there is hardly a man or woman among us who dares to act to one of the subject races as they could not be acted to without first shielding themselves behind an excuse? Is it nothing that, poor as our rule is, at least while the people of England have still held rule in the land, the Native races have drawn to our standard, and at least, comparing us with others, have recognized that our flag meant justice and freedom for those who stood under it? Is it nothing that in the space of fifty years England has sent out to us at least once a man who in his capacity as ruler bent with an unfeigned solicitude over every element in our complex people and endeavoured to tighten the reins of sympathy between Englishman, Boer and Native, and to see, unblinded by that intense passion for their own people which all deep natures feel but which high natures control, the needs and the failings and the sufferings of each section and sought to remedy them? Is it nothing that, at least once, we have had an English ruler who possessed all passion for impartiality and humanity which characterizes a race fitted to rule over empires of varied peoples, and that among men more closely South African we have one who, though a Jew by name and descent, was an Englishman by language and education, through a long life consistently and without intermission sought to enforce practically the ideal of English rule as a great freeing impartial force? Is it nothing that, in addition to the names of such men as Sir George Grey and Saul Solomon upon our South African record, and with the story of such lives as Livingstone and Moffat mingled with that of our English occupancy of the country we have also the names of at least a few hundred individuals less known but following in their steps and animated by the same principle?

Have we not heard it said again and again by the Boer: "You Englishmen know no difference between one man and another; you treat a black man as if he was yourself"; and in that one saying have we not ground for hope?

But it may be asked us whether we do not see a possibility of our hopes for the English race and its future falling to the earth; we reply: "We do; we recognize that it is possible that we may not even kill out the black races of Africa but that, a seething and ignorant mass, they may live under us, at last infecting us and dragging us down to themselves; we know it is possible that our conception of the English race, as possessed of a vast fertilizing and liberating power which shall spread from it till it permeates the whole race, may be mistaken and the result of national egoism and mental refraction; we know that the twentieth century, instead of being, as we dream, the great blossoming time of the English race, as the fourth century before Jesus was of the Greek, may be the century of our decay; that the spread of the consciousness of the unity of all men and the importance of their individual freedom may be not for us to spread but for some other people; and that when we have shown the world how lucifer matches can be made for one penny the gross by girls who work for three shillings a week; and that, if you can make guns which discharge so many bullets a minute, you can bring down so many unarmed black men in a minute; and that, if a few men can gain a grant of the mineral wealth of half a continent, they can buy mistresses, palaces, titles, governments, and roll in gold as if it had been water--then our work will be done. We know that this is possible, and I suppose there are moments of horrible bitterness when to all of us it has seemed almost more than possible."

If it be asked us: Even if our view be true and the function and destiny of the English race be what we hope it, what after all is the use of our striving to bring it nearer; may we not in our individual action be mistaken, and, where we believe ourself to be helping a great race to walk in the path which shall serve all humanity, we are simply sacrificing ourselves to no purpose? we reply: "We know this. Under the sea millions of insects work, and, as the ages pass, they raise at last a bank that in time becomes an island on which great trees grow and the sun shines. The work of no one insect is necessary to the growth; the almost invisible speck of coral he makes may be broken off and crushed to powder, and the work yet grows; but by just such an infinite accretion of specks the island rises, and the wide instinct which compels all to contribute their part builds at last the island.

"So we work, only _not_ quite unconsciously. If our individual addition be worthless and be broken off--well--we are obeying the deepest necessity of our being; we are working on in the only direction we know of, and, unlike our fellow insects of the sea, we, where we work, have dreams of the future land, not that will be, but that _may_ be--and which we believe we are building."

A man far out at sea on a dark night, struggling with the waves in his small boat, sees far away a light he thinks to be the harbour light and strikes towards it; knowing he may be mistaken, and that long before daybreak man and boat may be engulfed, he still strikes towards it, labouring without certainty of ever reaching it but with unalterable will and determination, because it is the only light he sees.

So we, realizing the possibility that we are mistaken, and knowing the chances of failure, yet strike for what seems to us the largest possibility open to our race and to ourselves as part of that race.

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