the only Englishman he had met who told him the truth. It would have been easy for Chamberlain to manage Kruger, as it was easy for Kruger to placate Chamberlain. But, alas! they preferred to fight, and I cannot but admit that the chief wrong was Chamberlain's. The consciousness of power leads usually to provocative bullying. The struggle cost poor Kruger his life.
My proof that the South African War had cost Great Britain millions and had worsened our relations with South Africa made me many enemies in England. All the evil effects of the war had seldom been adequately or carefully stated. Let me give here some new facts.
In 1901, the Commission of Police in London reported that in the twelve months during which Lord Kitchener was looting and burning and devastating South Africa, the criminal classes were carrying on similar operations in the heart of the Empire. In a single twelve months, burglaries in London rose 50 per cent. Forgeries also showed a similar increase; house-breaking rose 22 per cent, and shop-breaking 15 per cent. As with crime, so with drunkenness. The number of convictions for drunkenness in the five years from 1897 to 1901 showed an increase of 50 per cent in London over the convictions for the five years from 1892 to 1896. The increase in vagrancy was even more appalling. In 1901 the number of vagrants relieved at the workhouse showed an increase of 20 per cent, and in 1901 the number was actually 100 per cent higher than the figure at which it stood ten years before.
The tide of pauperism, which had been steadily ebbing during the liberal regime of peace, turned completely. In 1900 there was 1 pauper for 42 of the population, in 1901 1 in 40, and in November 1902, 1 in 38.4. Not less ominous was the tale told in the Labor Gazette as to the increase in the number of unemployed. When the war began, the percentage reported as unemployed by the trades unions was little more than 2.5. In November 1902, the percentage had doubled. The poverty in England chiefly due to the English ruling classes was intensified through this purposeless war. Here I will use another authority:
In 1904, Montague Crackenthorpe in an article in The Nineteenth Century gave some figures which deserve to be widely known. He proved that “nine hundred and twenty-nine out of every thousand persons in the Kingdom die in poverty and one of every four in London dies supported by public charity. Eight millions of people in the United Kingdom are on the edge of starvation, and twenty millions are not comfortable.”
Such facts should be known to every man, but not one Englishman in ten thousand cares to note them, and not one in ten million attempts to understand their profound significance, much less dream of a remedy.
Perhaps the worst of all is Crackenthorpe's true statement: “The people of England have come to look on starvation and suffering, which they call distress, as part of the social order. Chronic starvation is regarded as a matter of course.”
I cannot help adding a table showing the cost of armaments in each of these first years of the century:
France?38,400,000
Germany?38,000,000
United States?38,300,000
Russia?43,000,000
Italy?15,700,000
Great Britain spent?69,000,000
The South African war was made by England and it was well perhaps that she should pay for it; but the wrongs she committed in South Africa were beyond belief.
In the South African war, Chamberlain made the mistake of choosing the worst possible Lieutenant. Lord Milner was all for fighting until the Boers surrendered unconditionally. He armed scores of thousands of blacks. He closed the gates of the refugee camps against the miserable women and children whose homes he had burned and let loose his armed savages upon the helpless wanderers. A little further pressure and these methods of barbarism would, he believed, result in unconditional surrender.
But, thank God, the King was wiser; he was sick and tired of the war. We had drained the Empire of our last resources in recruits. The Peace of Vereeniging was the result. Peace was made on terms despite Lord Milner, but as the execution of the terms was left to him, the Boers maintain that the difference was chiefly on paper. Surrender on terms is all very well, but if the terms are not executed, and no means exist whereby they can be enforced, such surrender is particularly unconditional.
Some time after the South African war, I met Joseph Chamberlain in the lobby of the House of Commons, and he came over to me in the friendliest way and wanted to know why I had refused his last invitations to dinner. I said that the dreadful South African war was the cause of my coldness. “I thought you would be the greatest English statesman,” I said, “but you had the bad luck to choose Milner, and the two of you have written one of the worst pages in all English history.”
“I did what I thought my duty,” he said. “Milner went beyond all my orders, but now it is all over and done with.”
“Not to me,” I said. “That war marks the beginning of the fall of the British Empire.”
“I am sorry,” he said and turned away. Even now, a quarter of a century later, I see no reason to modify my opinion, though Campbell Bannerman by his wise concessions to the Boers did much to blot out the worst results of the Chamberlain-Milner rule and, of course, the world-war had still more disastrous consequences. Thanks to this last blunder, Britain lost the leadership of the nations and can never again regain it in spite of the wonderful opportunity which still exists for her in Africa.
Very few realize that Africa is made up of three zonesthe first all along the ocean, unhealthy save in the north and south; go three hundred miles inland and you will come to a land lifted from 1,250 to 2,500 feet above the sea, a plateau which is healthy and sun baked; go inland another hundred miles and you will come to the center-table land lifted from 3,000 to 5,000 feet above the level of the sea.
This central plateau is perhaps the healthiest and most interesting portion of the known world. And the English now own the whole of it from Khartoum to the Cape. If they would spend one hundred million pounds yearly in transporting their unemployed to this central plateau and giving them decent work and housing, they would retrieve all their losses of the world war in two or three generations and form a Central African Empire healthier and more fruitful than the United States.
One man, and so far as I know only one, understood thisMr. Abe Bailey, born and bred in South Africa. He understood what might be done. He has farms in the north of Cape Colony, near Colesberg; they extend for an area of about 200,000 acres. When I met him, years ago, he had about 3,000 acres in cultivation. He contemplated an extension of the cultivated area to 15,000 acres. By far the greatest part of his holding consisted of Karroo.
“The Karroo,” said Mr. Bailey, “is the best soil in the world and is capable of the greatest development.”
“I thought it a wilderness,” I said.
“It is a wilderness of untold wealth” he replied. “It only requires intelligent cultivation to make South Africa one of the greatest farming countries in the world.”
“But you have no water in the Karroo.”
“That is where you make your mistake,” said Mr. Bailey. “I have bored ninety-three times in various parts of my farms and have struck water every time except one. Sometimes it was only fourteen feet below the surface, and the deepest boring we found necessary to make was 135 feet. In some instances the water rises to the surface by itself, but as a rule it has to be pumped up by windmills. We have about ninety windmills on our farms. There is plenty of wind, and with their aid, all my cattle can be watered where they are pastured.
“I hope before long to have fifteen thousand acres under alfalfa. We take five or six crops off it every year, and after I fed all my stock last year, we had six hundred and fifty tons of hay left on hand. It is marvelous what alfalfa will do. I estimate its value at?7 an acrenot bad for land which I bought seven years ago at 17 shillings an acre.”
“Don't you exhaust the soil?” I asked.
“Not at all. The alfalfa grows up by itself. It continues to grow year after year; supply it with water and you have an unfailing supply of fodder for your stock.”
“What stock does your farm carry?”
“I am rather proud of the variety. Mine is the only farm in the whole world on which you will find sheep, cattle, horses, Angora goats, and ostriches, all doing well, and all the best of their kind.”
“Do you think there is much land in South Africa that could be made as profitable as your farm?”
