20th Oct.
Oom Pavt's ultimatum, which Reuter tells us has sufficed to unite all parties in England, must have come as a great and unexpected blow to those who were urging Mr. Chamberlain and Sir Alfred Miler to be firm. Mr, A. J. Wilson and Mr. Labouchere and the Daily Chronicle kept on warning the English people that the firmness that Mr. Chamberlain and Sir A. Milner were urged to maintain meant war; and a war that however it ended would be long and costly. Those who held with the Government that unless we coerce the Transvaal now we must give up all hope of maintaining our supremacy in South Africa, were certain that if we were firm the Boers would give way without fighting. " Diplomiaticus " in the August Fortnightly already congratulated Mr. Chamberlain' on the triumph he had achieved; Sir Sidney Shippard, k.c.M.G., in the S-tember Wineteenth Century "Tu our present preparation for war Tsee the throughout South Africa. The Transest hope for _Pefmanent pence vaal Boers will doubtless refuse to sanction the necessary reforms as long as they see the slightest chance of having their own way through Radical or Fenian support in England or otherwise, but when at length they realise that Her Majesty's Government is in earnest, that they have no foreign support to expect, and little or nothing to hope for in the way of active assistance from their friends and neighbours in the Orange Free State, the Cape Colony, and Natal, they will show themselves to be greater fools than I take them for if their natural shrewdness does not teach them to bow to the inevitable, and agree with their adversary quickly while they are in the way with him, lest a worse thing befall them." This is the forecast of the late Administrator and Chief Magistrate of British Bechuanaland, who ought to have been able to for ha whould have the neccesary local ive Mr. Chamberlain sound advice,
Knowledge. Mr. Edward Dicey, C. B., has an article in the September Fortnightly under the title which we have placed at the head of this article, which he opens with the following paragraph: "<If the Home Government is firm, the 'Transvaal question will be settled in a few months without firing a shot.' 'This is the opinion expressed by Mr. Rhodes only a few weeks ago in the Cape Parliament, and this, I do not hesitate to add, is the conviction entertained not only by the personal friends of the' speaker, amongst whom I am proud to count myself, but by ninon teen out of every twenty men who have any knowledge of South African affairs, and still more of South African politics. If I entertained jarly doubt as to the Home Government remailling firm, I, for my part, should regard war as inevitable." It would seem to follow that Mr. Wilson and Mr. Labouchere, and those opponents of Mr. Chamberlain whom it is customary to stigmatise as " Little Englanders" had a more dependable foresight than the vast majority of. those who claimed to have an intimate knowledge of South African politics.
Mr. Dicey's article, to which we have just referred, is an answer to Mr. Bryden's article headed " British; and Dutch in South Africa," which we noticed in these columns on the 13th instant.
Mr. Bryden's view is] that the game is not worth the candle, " that we should do better to leave the Uitlanders to their fate, than to espouse their cause in such a manner as to expose ourselves to the risk of a war, which would tax the whole energies and resources of the British Empire." Mr. Dicey, while protesting that he is so little of a Jingo that he would have given in to the United States on the Venezuela question because the territory involved was not worth a war, holds that there is no analogy between that case and the Transvaal question. "Tf we decline," he says, "to uphold the rights of our fellow-countrymen in the Transvaal, we are not only guilty ofa gross breach of national duty, but we risk the loss of our South African colonies, and open the way to the establishment of a South African Republic in which Dutch influence would be supreme, and which, therefore, to say the least, would not be friendly to great Britain... I have not the slightest hesitation in saying that it is both our duty and our interest to uphold the cause of the Uitlanders, even if by so doing we should be compelled, however reluctantly, to go to war with the Transvaal." Meanwhile, Mr. Dicey has not the smallest doubt as to the result of a war. If Mr. Bryden, he says, has any personal acquaintance with South Africa, "if he has travelled through the South African Republic and the Orange Free State on the one hand, and through Natal, the Eastern province of the Cape Colony, the Kimberley district, and the other parts of South Africa in which the British element is supreme, on the other, and still entertains a doubt as to which of the two elements, Boer or British, must go to the wall, supposing they once come into collision, his powers of observation and deduction must be singularly limited."
Mr. Dicey declines altogether to accept Mr. Bryden's estimate of the number of men the Boers can put into the field. Mr. Dicey does not believe that in the Dutch population of the Cape altogether there are more than 36,000 men over twenty years of age, against Mr. Bryden's In the Orange Free State there cannot be more than 13,000 Dutch adult males, against Mr. Bryden's 18,000, and the State itself is now threatened, if the news we publish this morning is true, with a rising of. the Basutos, on its south-east border. The attitude of the blacks, who so largely outnumber the whites in South Africa is an unknown and dangerous element in the war that is just beginning. In the Transvaal itself there are, according to Mr. Dicey, only 14,000 Boers over twenty, at the outside. "Supposing that tone-half of all the adult Boers in the Transvaal, the Orange Free State, and the Cape Colony, were to take the field in the event of a British war with the South African Republic, the utmost numerical force which the Dutch could conceivably raise would be 31,500, whereas he (Mr. Bryden) estimates the number at 90,000." Mr. Dicey holds that common sense, right, and_ justice will prevent the Cape and Free State Boers from joining the Transvaal.
will be remembered that Mr. Bryden, fortified by Mr. Solons, held
or rather, when we have conquered that even if we conquer the Boers, the Boers, we shall have to face a recurring crop of insurrections. Mr, Dicey denies that we propose to con-wer the Transvaal. What we shall lo is to see that the South African with all the white inhabitants placed Republic becomes a real Republic,
on a footing of political and legal equality. A few of the Boers might trek northward, but the greater number would have to remain in the Transvaal, and "would have motive for conspiring against a Government of their own under which they enjoyed the same rights and privileges as their British fellow-citizens." In his concluding paragraph Mr. Dicey says: "I have as stron; a desire to avoid a war with Soutl Africa as Mr. Bryden himself can possibly entertain." It is exactly because I am anxious that war should be averted that I have thought it well to point out the fallacy of his plea for peace at any price. From my long and close acquaintance with the leading South African authorities, Iam able to state with confidence that, in their well-nigh unanimous opinion, there will be no war, because in the end the Government of Pretoria must give way to the demands of Great Britain." But the Government of Pretoria has not given way, and so seriously does our Government regard the war and its possible consequences that it is sending out an Army Corps under Sir Redvers Buller, and has had to call out the reserves, and is now embodying the militia and calling out the militia reserves. No one can tell what force will be wanted in South Africa if other tribes of blacks take the oppor-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.