The present war has revealed these strata just as they were deposited.  The northern State was the leader and aggressor.  The southern one, drawn in by its fiercer neighbour, was still true to the cause.  And so, too, the Dutch of the Colony were exactly to-day where they had been sixty years ago.  They could no more join the war than they could join the trek.  And, in spite of individual appeals to relations, &c., you may be sure that the northerners knew pretty accurately how the land lay.  Their own action shows this.

Therefore, I put aside utterly, so far as I am concerned, the Uitlander and Dutch conspiracy arguments, of which one hears so much, as things which, though they may occupy the attention of leading article writers in London, yet are not convincing, and have no smack of reality to any one who knows something about the Uitlanders from personal observation, and something about the Boers and Boer life from personal observation.  I put these aside and come back to the only argument that will really wash, that has no clap-trap in it.  And that is South Africa under one Government, and under a strong and progressive Government.  Human nature is pretty much the same all the world over, and if the Boers have been to blame in the past, no doubt the Britons have been just as much to blame.  Anyway, it is impossible and would be useless to strike a balance between them now.  The fact that stands out salient and that has to be dealt with in the present is that South Africa is divided against itself; that it never can and never will step up into its proper place until it is united, and that, therefore, to fight for a united South Africa is to fight on the right side and in a good cause.

And one thing I much like this plain reason for is, that it makes it easy for one to do full justice to one’s adversaries.  I admire their courage and patriotism very much.  I acknowledge fully their dogged obstinacy in defence and their dangerous coolness in retreat, and I am sorry for them, too, and think it a sad thing that such brave men should be identified with so impossible a cause.  You must be careful how you believe the reports sent home by war correspondents.  I suppose people like to hear harm of their enemies, and a daily paper’s best business is to give the public what the public wants rather than what is strictly true.  The consequence is that accounts of Boer fighting and of the Boers themselves (traitors and cowards are the commonest words) are now appearing which are neither more nor less than a disgrace to the papers which publish them.  I don’t know since when it has become a British fashion to slander a brave adversary, but I must say it seems to me a singularly disgusting one, the more so when it is coupled with a gross and indiscriminating praise of our own valour and performances.

LETTER XVII

THE MARCH NORTH

NEAR JOHANNESBURG, May 31, 1900.