Democratic Sentinel, Volume 20, Number 5, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 February 1896 — WHIP THE BRITISH. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

WHIP THE BRITISH.

VICTORY FOR BOERS IN THE TRANSVAAL BATTLE. Dr. Jameson Surrenders—Remnant of Hia Forces Now Imprisoned at Johannesburg London Instructions Disregarded—Parallel to Venezuela South Africa Excited. The invading English army in the Transvaal has been disastrously defeated by the Boers, A score or more hs»ve been killed, many wounded, and Dr. Jameson is a prisoner at Johannesburg. One of the most impudent acts of aggression ever committed even by British arms has thus met with swilt retribution. The details are meager of this inglorious finale of what was intended to be a brilliant piece of bravado, which success might justify but which failure would make a crime. All that is known is the Government messengers, with dispatches from London ordering Dr. Jameson to retreat to the Chartered Company’s territory, reached Dr. Jameson Wednesday morning. He pocketed the Queen’s orders, told the messenger laconically that he would attend to them, gave the command to his troops to saddle, and inarch ed, not on the back track, but on toward Johannesburg. At 4 o’clock in the afternoon he encountered the Boers at Krugersdorf. There was hard fighting until sundown, and the British troops suffered severely. The famous marksmanship of the Boers was no less deadly than in their gallafit defense against the same enemy fifteen years ago. Twenty men, including three officers, were killed, and fifty prisoners were taken before Dr. Jameson surrendered. A London dispatch says: The world

will now be overwhelmed with disavowals from everybody concerned except Dr. Jameson. Nobody will be louder in protesting their innocence than the Chartered Company and Cecil Rhodes, but nobody will believe them. Nothing will change the popular conviction that what has happened is simply the overthrow of a bold and reckless plot. The part that failed was the promised uprising of the Uitlanders in Johannesburg. The revolt there was expected to begin the day before Dr. Jameson crossed the frontier. His justification was to be: “The Boers are mas-

sacreing our countrymen. Blood is thicker than water. We will march to their rescue.” Even that excuse would be sentimental rather than legal, but it would go in South Africa and it would probably go in England if Germany and other countries did not make too much fuss about it. Hence the wires were cut and Dr. Jameson, with 700 men, dashed in at the appointed time to carry out their part of the plan. The faint-hearted foreigners in Johannesburg failed to begin the rebellion, and Dr. Jameson’s rescue expedition be-

came a horde of lawless freebooters, invading a friendly State. Such is I lie true aspect of the situation in the eyes of Englishmen. The British Government has already disavowed everything; so has Cecil Rhodes; so has the Chartered Company, through its directors in Lindon. It is by no means certain that the trouble in the Transvaal is at an end. Britain Thursday night was given the inter- sting spectacle of the British colonial secretary sending a beseeching appeal to President Kruger that the Boers deal leniently with the wounded and other prisoners. The reason of this is that great social pressure was brought to bear on Mr. Chamberlain to rescue a dozen officers of the guards, several noblemen's sons and other young bloods with high connections, who are included in Dr. Jameson's force of invaders. Cause of the Trouble. There is no Schomburgk line in South Africa. There is no other line, says a correspondent, which the imperialist passion of Great Britain and the greed of British colonists will recognize unless one or the other of the great powers, in its own interests, arbitrarily fixes a line beyond which the advance guard of British trade and British rule may not go with safety to the imperial Government. Twenty years ago English dominion in

South Africa extended only to latitude A) degrees south of the equator. To-day the provisional boundary of the British South African Company’s protectorate is at latitude 10 degrees south. How this has been accomplished the world knows.

Never were irregulars in time of war given freer rein than Rhodes and Jameson and the cape colonists generally have had in the butchery of natives and the seizure of territory. The war on poor old Lobengula, instigated and directed by this same defeated Jameson, wns an un-

paralleled blot on nineteenth century civilization. The feeling in Germany is amply warranted by the situation. The colonists have acquired by persistent advances all the enormous stretch of land in the interior from the southern line of the Congo State to the Cape of Good Hope, except the Orange Free State and the Transvaal Republic. With these two independent Governments in their possession the British would hold all the territory between German Mast Africa and German Southwest Africa. Nothing could be more natural than that'the Boers should seek ths ■\id 9? Germany, although by the terms of the treaty of 1881, which was wrung from Great Britain by the sword, they are bound not to conclude any treaty or engagement with a foreign Government except the Orange State. But a convention disregarded by one party is not binding on the other, and in tffo treaty of 1884 England stipulated that she would not interfere with the internal affairs of th? republic. The issue to which all the nations of the earth are gradually awakening—whether the time has not Come to forcibly prevent the extension of British dominion—has been precipitated by the rash act of Jameson, a jiigh-handed adventurer of a type more patiently considered in the heydey of piracy than in our own time. It is inconceivable that the secretary for the colonies should not have been able to stop the South African Company’s agent. Private letters prove that the sortie was in contemplation a month ago. Mr. Chamberlain's Inmentations are tardy. The predicament of the imperial Government is extremely awkward. On the one hand they have to restrain the Just and pugnacity of high-spirited cojonists who have never feared to speak of the slenderness of the ties by which they are bound to the parent State. On the other hand, they face a brave people and the possibility of European complications. Let no one imagine the Boers will, not fight. The English are disposed to -discredit their courage, but they showed steadiness and daring at the Drakens-

berg Pass and on the height of Spilzkop, and in these battles as elsewhere their marvelous riflemen potted the English calmly and accurately. The feeling of Africa is with them. In their rebellion they had the sympathy of the Ornngo State, and it would not require much to revive President Kruger's cry of "Africa for the Afrikanders, from Zambesi to Martin’s Bay.” It is a signfiecaut coincidence that on the day of the appointment of the Venezuelan commission England gave proof of the spirit of greed and oppression that moves her agents everywhere.

S. E. PAUL KRUGERR, PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF TRANSVAAL.

SOUTH AFRICAN TERRITORY IN WHICH THE TROUBLE OCCURRED.

DR. C. S. JAMESON, GOVERNOR GENERAL OF MASHONALAND.

THE TYPICAL “LAAGER” (DEFENSIVE POST) USED IN SOUTH AFRICAN WARFARE.