THE REAL ISSUES.
WE shall not quarrel with Mr. Morley for telling the electors in his address that the war is the chief issue before the electors,—the issue on which they must decide whether they will vote for a Unionist or a Liberal candidate. To this issue we must, however, add two others,—the questions of Home-rule and of administrative efficiency in the Army and Navy. What the electors have to decide is whether the South African settle- ment shall be carried out on the principles of equity and justice to both races, whether the Union shall be maintained, and whether we shall establish a sound Army and Navy. The essential question is, how can a vote be best used to obtain these things ? We admit that there are a certain number of things which can be criticised in the actions of the present Government, and, as our readers know, we have not hesi- tated to deal with them as occasion arose. For example, we have condemned the Ministry for shirking that most vital feature of Unionist policy, the establishment of a Catholic University in Ireland, for their failure to deal adequately with Mr. Rhodes and his misgoverning Company, and for their mistake in placing and main- taining at the War Office a Minister of insufficient administrative grasp and power. We admit also -that a section of the Liberal party who call themselves Imperialists claim, and no doubt with entire sincerity, to desire all the three things which we have just set forth. They claim to have abandoned Home. rule, for the time at least. They .claim to be strongly in favour of the settlement in South Africa foreshadowed by the Government. They claim also to be eager for a better organised Army. But the fact that this section of the Liberal party seems to offer as much as the Unionist leaders must not delude the electors. Voters must remember that it is one thing to offer, quite another thing to be able to perform. If the 'present Government were beaten and the Liberal party -were to come into office, does any reasonable human being believe that the Union would be as secure as it is with a Unionist Govern- ment in power ? The most the Imperialist Liberals can say is that they do not want to touch Home-rule ; but we must never forget that they have all voted for it in the past, and that not one of them is pledged not to vote for it again. If the Irish Members could contrive to make it timely once more, Lord Rosebery and Sir Edward Grey and the other leaders could not refuse, and very likely would not desire to refuse, their assent to a third Home-rule Bill. At any rate, they have never stated that they made a mistake in supporting the establishment of Home-rule, or given a pledge that they would now oppose it. But this is not all, for a Liberal Ministry, if it were to come in, would not be entirely composed of Imperialists. It would number many men who would be sincere, nay, fanatical, enemies of the legislative Union.
In the case of the South African settlement, the inability of the Liberal Imperialists to carry out their promises would be quite as marked. They may want to avoid i anything n the least approaching a lifajuba settle- ment, but they would be face to face with colleagues and supporters who would be resolutely intent on re- establishing the Boer Republics, not as free Colonies, but as autonomoue States. Again, ia the case of Army re- form, the Liberal Imperialists would be impotent. Their group might have sound ideas, but they would be thwarted and controlled by men who at heart did not want a stronger, but a weaker, Army, for in their belief a strong Army means militarism. In fact, if the Liberals came into power they could not, even though some of them would, do the things which we firmly believe the country desires. The Unionists, on the other hand, do not merely want to do those things, but can do them. That is a fact for the elector who thinks as we do to remember when he is tempted to vote for an Imperial Liberal. The Unionist can make the will of the voter executive, the Imperial Liberal cannot. Of course, it might be argued that the Unionist leaders are so" slack" that they will not though they can ; but that, in our opinion, is not true, for the weakness of the Unionist Government, though it has existed, has been grossly exaggerated. In any case, it is better to have a servant who could do the work if he would than one who physically cannot, however willing. The man with the physical capacity can always be made to work, and it will be the business of the electors to impress on Unionist candidates that it is -their duty, if necessary, to keep the Ministry up to. the -mark. • A word more in detail must be said as to the issue of the war and the settlement. There are doubtless a good many electors who still have misgivings as to the justice of the war, and who are haunted by the notion that it might have been avoided. Mr. Morley, who sincerely believes that the war was unjust and avoidable, naturally tries to impress this view as strongly as possible in his address, though, in our opinion, with singular want of success. However, Mr. Morley is a controversialist who is always worthy of respect, and we need not apologise for paying special attention to his address. Nowhere is the anti-war case better, or indeed so well put, as by him. We agree entirely with Mr. Morley when he says that war on the scale waged in South Africa "is a transaction in all senses so enormous that it has either been so demonstrably right or else so fatally wrong that it would be unworthy of the self-respect of free citizens to shirk the responsibility of looking at the case in all its bearings and forming and expressing at the polls a full and deliberate judgment, both upon the policy that has ended in so violent a catastrophe, and, upon the authors and managers of that policy:" Of course Mr. Morley decides that the war was unjustifiable, and he declares that "to have extinguished the independence of two States is no honour and brings no profit." At any rate, says Mr. Morley later in his address, "this at least is true, that the Government we have broken up and trampled out of existence was a Government so chosen and cherished by the people to whom the country by all public law, right, and treaty belonged, that they were willing for it to sacrifice all that made life dear and to fight for it to the death." That no doubt sounds very well as a general proposition, but it is an utterly misleading way of looking at the problem. How misleading it is may be realised by remembering that exactly the same sort of thing was said towards the close of the American Civil War by the sympathisers of the South. Those who took the side of the South, like Mr. Gladstone, were for ever insisting that the North had broken up and trampled out of existence a Government so chosen and cherished by the people to whom the country belonged that they were willing for it to sacrifice all that made life dear, and to fight for it to the death. We were told then, as now, that the North were fighting for Empire and the South for freedom, and that the cause of Jefferson Davis and the Confederates was the cause of independence and of a people rightly struggling to be free. But then, as now, the wiser minds in America and here refused to make the devotion of the Southerners to their own States and to their flag, and their readiness to die for it, the test of the justice of the war. They looked deeper, and asked not whether the Southerners were devoted to their independence and hated the polity which desired to coerce them, but whether the aim of the Southerners in claiming their independence was right and ought to be allowed. If it was not, their bravery, their devotion, their patriotism, and their persistence against great odds might cause admiration, but could not be allowed to obscure the real issue. It is just the same now. Because the Boers are brave, and as patriotically devoted to their States as were the men of Virginia and Georgia and the Carolinas, we must not assume that their cause is good or that their aims must be tolerated. We must go to the origin of the war and ask what were the objects of the Boers before we decide whether we are to regret that their States have been extinguished. But the real origin of the war was the refusal of the Boers to grant good and free govern- ment to the settlers in their country, though they were bound in honour, if not in law, to give them equal rights. Had they treated the Outlanders properly there would and could have been no war. The Boers deliberately preferred war to giving the Outlanders the rights of civilised free men in the country of their adoption. There- fore a war to compel them to do so was just, and the extinc- tion of their States a subject which cannot be regretted by those who desire the triumph and spread of free institu- tions. Again, the essential political objects of the Boers were of a kind that could no more be permanently tolerated by the British than could the aspirations of the Southern Secessionists be tolerated by the Northern States. The Boers without doubt desired to drive the British from South Africa, and to establish a Dutch racial ascendency —a great community with Dutch language, Dutch laws and customs, and Dutch ideas as to the treatment of the natives—which should rule from the Zambesi to the Cape. And this aspiration the Boers absolutely refused to abandon, but made every effort to carry out. Con- sequently the war was inevitable as well as just. In truth, the more the war is considered in the light of recent events the more clear does it become that it could not have been avoided, and that the extinguish- ment of the Dutch aspiration for a racial supremacy was absolutely necessary. Between the destruction of the Boer oligarchy and the secession of South Africa from the British Empire there was no middle course, for the Boers were determined to make no compromise, and regarded war as a much less evil than the loss of their aspiration for a Dutch South Africa.
We have only space to speak shortly of Mr. Morley's gloomy prophecies as to South Africa becoming a second Ireland. To be plain, we believe his sombre vaticinations to be entirely unfounded. It is pure conjecture on his part, and the conjecture of a pessimist on all questions involving the relations of our oversee possessions and Colonies. It might conceivably be true if the South Africa of to-day were going to remain as unchanged as, say, Yorkshire or Munster. But it will not remain as it is. In the course of the next twenty years the Orange Colony and the Transvaal will change as completely as did the States of California and Texas between the years 1848 and 1868. The great influx of British-born population that is about to take place, the opening up of the country by railways and irrigation as well as by mining, and the dispersal of the Hollander clique will transform the country and entirely alter its nature. The Boer in the Transvaal will become like the Spaniard in California or Texas,—a negligible quantity. Mr. Morley will say that this also is mere conjecture Possibly, but at any rate it is as good a conjecture as his. In any case, something for the future peace of South Africa has been achieved by the destruction of the dangerous and disturbing elements produced by Mr. Kruger and his gold-kept oligarchy, men demoralised by power and bribery, and buttressed by the imported Hollanders who, headed by Dr. Leyds, supplied the Boers with a bureaucracy and a police system recalling the worst days of the Second Empire. The war may have been a terrible ordeal, but at any rate it has accomplished the removal of factors fatal to the peace of South Africa. In our belief, it has done a great dear more, and when in another generation South Africa accepts a Federal Constitution like that of the Common- wealth of Australia, the majority of the inhabitants, both Dutch and British, will bless the day that saved them from Pretoria rule and the establishment of the ascendency of the Boer oligarchy from the Zambesi to Table Bay.
Previous page
