* * * * *

The following was addressed by Mr. John Bellows of Gloucester, to Senator Hoar, United States, America, and was published in the New York Tribune, Feb. 22nd, 1900.  Mr. Bellows, on seeing the publication of his letter, wrote the following postscript, to Senator Hoar:—­

“As the foregoing letter was headed by the Editor of the New York Tribune, ‘A Quaker on the War,’ I would say, to prevent misunderstanding, that I speak for myself only, and not for the Society of Friends, although I entirely believe in its teaching, that if we love all men we can under no circumstances go to war.  There is, however, a spurious advocacy of peace, which is based, not upon love to men so much as upon enmity to our own Government, and which levels against it untrue charges of having caused the Transvaal War.  It was to show the erroneousness of these charges that I wrote this letter.”

The following is the text of the letter:—­

“Dear Friend, I am glad to receive thy letter, as it gives me the opportunity of pointing out a misconception into which thou hast fallen in reference to the Transvaal and its position with respect to the present war.

     “Thou sayest:  ’I am myself a great lover of England; but I do not
     like to see the two countries joining hands for warlike purposes,
     and especially to crush out the freedom of small and weak nations.’

“To this I willingly assent.  I am certain that war is in all circumstances opposed to that sympathy all men owe one to another, and to that Greater Source of love and sympathy in which ’we live and move and have our being.’  Where this bond has been broken, we long for its restoration; but it cannot but tend to retard this restoration, to impute to one or other of the parties concerned motives that are entirely foreign to its action.  Peace, to be lasting, must stand on a foundation of truth; and there is no truth whatever in the idea that the English Government provoked the present war, or that it intended, at any time during the negotiations that preceded the war, an attack on the independence either of the Transvaal or of the Orange Free State.  It is true that President Kruger has for many years carefully propagated the fear of such an attempt among the Dutch in South Africa, as a means of separating Boers and Englishmen into two camps, and as an incentive to their preparing the colossal armament that has now been brought into play, not to keep the English out of the Transvaal, but to realise what is called the Afrikander programme of a Dutch domination over the whole of South Africa.  Thus, he a short time ago imported from Europe 149,000 rifles—­nearly five times as many as the whole military population of the Transvaal—­clearly with a view to arming the Cape Dutch in case of the general rising he hoped for.  The Jameson Raid gave him exactly the grievance he wanted—­to persuade these Cape Dutch that England sought to crush the Transvaal.