Rensselaer Republican, Volume 13, Number 25, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 March 1881 — Great Britain in South Africa. [ARTICLE]

Great Britain in South Africa.

The small wan of conquest which Great Britain has undertaken of late years have not, as any candid Briton will admit added to the national renown. Foreigners are entirely at a roes to find any motive at all, creditable or otherwise, for these assaults on u noffendl ng people. Bat foreigners do not sufficiently consider the necessities of the case. For many years now —in fact ever since cheap coal, cheap iron and cheap labor gave her the onchallenged lead of the world as a manufacturing nation—it has become more and more desirable for Great Britain to extend the markets for British manufacture. Of late years this object, so long desirable, has become an object of vital necessity. The British islands are thronged with people who have been encouraged to exist, as one may say. by the great prosperity which British manufactures nave given to the nation under, free trade. The soil of the British islands cannot feed the people who inhabit them.' A large proportion of the foodsupply of Great Britain is and must be imported, and most of this imported supply comes from the United States. A nation which cannot raise food for its people is already in a weak and perilous condition, as any extensive foreign war in which such a nation might engage would at onoe make manifest. But the inherent weakness and peril of such a position are In the

case of great Britain enhanced by the peculiarity of the relations with this countrv. By reason of our hostile tariff, as Englishmen maintain, we do not buy of Great Britain anything like what we sell to her. The balance of trade between .Great Britain and the United States has during five, years at least been steadily, and during tho most of these years, largely in favor of this country. This difference must somehow be made up, and the only way in which it can be made up is,to find new customers for that proportion of British products which would l>e needed to adjust the exchanges of Great Britain with the United states. It will be seen, we repeat, that the finding of new markets is an absolute necessity of the British situation. The dread of “over-pro-duction” and of its consequences, which at this time and in Englanc would be simply frightful, can only be allayed by stimulating “over-con-sumption.” The result is seen in the recent policy of Great Britain in the East, in India, in Afghanistan, in China and Japan as well as South Africa. There is scarcely any parallel in modern history to the* overbearing and unscrupulous policy which England has followed in her dealings with weak nations in tho East, compared with the feebleness and timidity of her European policy, if indeed, except in the theatrical appearance of Lord Beaconsfield at Berlin, England can be said to have had any European policy. But both the truculence of English viceroys and agents in the East and the humility of English statesmen inTJui’opo are not merely intelligible but pardonabio when wc oonsider that tho Asiatic and African policy of England presents itself as a course dictated by the instinct of selfpreservation. It belioovos us still more to bear this in mind, inasmuch as their sole excuse for their outrage upon peaceable neighbors is one wHich obviously neither British Ministers at Westminster nor the diplomatic and military representatives of Great Britain in tho east can plead for themselves. The necessities of tho case will not bear public presentation. These considerations explain, perhaps, what to foreigners need explanation—the almost complete apathy with which the stories of outrages committed under color of British authority in the east have been received in the British Parliament and by the British public in general. But these outrages have not lacked earnest and outspoken condemnation from Englishmen who felt them as a personal disgrace. Curious to say, the most effective censors of these usurpations have been British officers. The arraignment of Lord Lytton’s treacherous behavior to the Ameer of Afghanistan was most forcibly and most intelligently made by Colonel Osborne in the Contemporary Review. The clearest exposure of the bad faith and the tyranny of which England has been guilty towards the unfortunate Boers lias been made by Colonel Butler in the current number of the same periodical. Colonel Butler makes it clear that for more than a generation there has been a persistent persecution of the Boers by British authority, and that during the whole of this period the Boers have been actuated by the single motive of getting clear and keeping clear of British authority. It was in 1835 that a large number of the British farmers of Cape Colony moved from under the protecting aegis of tho British Constitution “over the then organized boundary of Britisli dominion,” avowedly in order to escape British rule. In the address which they made public at the time the leaders of the movement declared: “We quit this colony under the full assurance that the English Government lias nothing more to require of us, and will allow us to govern ourselves without its interference in future,” f

The British Attorney-general of Cape Colony gave it as his official opinion that the Colonial Government had no (power either to prevent the migration o 1 these men or to follow them to their new retreats. The emigrants sent to the Zulu chief of the barbarous region into which they had penetrated in order to arrange for a cession, but the Dutch envoys were “treacherously slain,” and It was not without hard fighting that they conquered their right to live away from British protection. Until they had established, themselves the Government of the colony had token no part in the struggle with the natives tor possession. “But now,” says Colonel Butler—

“But now, when all troubles were over, when foreign enemies had been vanquished, when the ‘Promised Land’ had been alloted. the towns laid out, the Volksraad established, a proclamation was issued declanng that it was necessary to protect everybody—the Zulus from the Boers and the Boers from the Zulus. This proclamation was followed by the movement of 100 regular troops and one field gun from the Cape to Natal.” This detachment .was withdrawn, however, after a few months, and the Boers cultivated their promised land in quiet until 1842, when a body of British troops took possession, in the queen’s name, of Port Natal. The Boers at once rose, but, finding] resistance hopeless, abandoned their country and pushed into a still remoter wilderness, alter the British commissioner had refused even to see their envoy. No sooner had they settled the new country to which the British had driven them than, in 1848, appeared a proclamation declaring the country between the Vaal and the Orange rivers to be British territory. That they rose again in revolt, says Colonel Butler, “can be matter to whom “faith is fiction and belief in the “justice of a cause is foolishness.” But they were outnumbered and beaten, and after a single fight they fled for the third time, and this time to the Transvaal. In 1852 the British government “guaranteed to the emigrant farmers beyond the Vaal river the right to manage their own affairs, to govern themselves according to their own laws without any interference on the part of.the British Govera-Twenty-five yeare lat *r, In 1877, the British government “annexed” the Transvaal. Is it any wonder that the public opinion of Europe should now be unanimous in sym-

pithy with the protest of Holland against this long continued persecution of the Dutch colonists, or that some Englishmen should be found to consider even the national necessity of extending markets for British goods less urgent than the necessity of abstaining from such a policy as that which has made the history of British rule in Sooth Africa a disgrace to the British nation ?—New York World.