1

against a prepared and intended attempt to take it away,1 affords no ground whatever for the Tory assertion that by such an act of patriotism and duty the Boers have forfeited their right to this control. The right remains, and will remain.

The leaders of the Jingo Party are thus pledged by their own words to respect the independence guaranteed to the Boers in the Gladstonian Convention of 1884. They must be held fast to their pledges let the cost be what it may. They must not be allowed to destroy a young nation. The course of Africander development must not go back; it must go forward. Who knows but that they are trying, like the Persians, to kill what may eventually prove to be a second Hellas ? If these honourable and right honourable gentlemen are allowed to break loose from their pledges, and from the bond of their Government, which the Convention is, they will only repeat in Africa what their ancestors carried on in Ireland. In a word, they will favour foreigners and interlopers at the expense of the sons of the soil. From this fate God save Africa! Before me as I write there is a picture of a woman fastened to a wooden cross. On her left is a soldier, a hired assassin. On her right is a crowd of skeleton children clamouring for the food which the soldier deprives her of for the benefit of himself and his hirers over sea. Just above her head a scroll is nailed to the wood. On this scroll is the word ERIN. Opposite the woman there is another cross which is vacant. South Africa, if you fail to keep the Government of this pirate Empire to its bond, that vacant cross will be occupied by you.2

They will call you traitor. Heed them not. No traitor ever yet fought for his birthright. They are the traitors. They are false to every principle of right, to every obligation of justice and humanity. They are false to their pledged word, to that of their Sovereign, to that of their statesmen. They are violators of the political barrier which justice placed between civil helplessness and military brutality.3 The most solemn agreements, the most sacred rights are only empty forms whenever they stand between them and those blinding passions of avarice and ambition by which they are actuated.

To conclude. Nothing less than the withdrawal of the British Imperial forces from South Africa will end the present strife in a decent and orderly manner, though even this will not now avail

1 Evidence of which is given in the WESTMINSTER REVIEW of November last, pages 497 to 499.

2

"Fear not that the tyrant shall rule for ever,

Nor the priests of the bloody faith ;

They stand on the brink of that mighty river
Whose waves they have tainted with death,

It is fed from the rills of a thousand dells;
Around them it hisses, and bubbles, and swells;
And their swords and their sceptres I floating see
Like wrecks, on the surge of eternity."

3 During the annexation of the Transvaal between 1877 and 1881, the licence of the British soldiers embittered the Boers, whose women were of course molested by those heroes!

to keep South Africa for the British Empire. The Africander people are now more really a nation than the loyal American colonists were when British injustice lost the thirteen colonies to Britain. A common injury has bound them together in a common bond for the realisation of a common object. They have suffered wrongs which make it absolutely impossible for them ever again to live in peace under British rule. After the home-burnings; the shootings and exilement of prisoners of war; the hangings of socalled rebels in the forced presence of their families; the starving of women and children by putting them on half-rations because their men were doing the duties of patriots.

With the aid of their

The Africander people will not be passive. friends in Europe and America they will make an end of this business once and for ever, by making South Africa one country under one flag their own. Not merely for their own sake, but for the sake of their children, and for the sake of their children's children to a thousand generations must this be done.

M. D. O'BRIEN.

THE SOUTH AFRICAN CONSPIRACY:

A DEADLY PARALLEL.

IN his Peace or War in South Africa, Mr. A. M. S. Methuen has drawn attention to the striking parallel between the policy that lost to the British Empire the North American Colonies, now the United States of America, and the policy at present pursued in South Africa, pointing out that, as the arrogant demand for "unconditional surrender" lost us the former, it must inevitably, if persisted in to the bitter end as the pro-war party demand, lose to the Empire South Africa also. We have not yet seen developed, however, the deadly parallel that as undoubtedly exists between the infamous South African conspiracy that plunged us into the Boer War and a conspiracy, no less infamous but of much longer standing, at home -between the economic struggle now being fought out in South Africa and that waged for centuries in this country.

To the Jingo Imperialist "the South African Conspiracy" is the alleged Dutch conspiracy to drive the British into the sea. But, to the man accustomed to weigh evidence and to base his opinions on ascertained facts, it is clear that this conspiracy theory is absolutely untenable, for whatever "evidence" has been adduced in support of the theory is nebulous and shadowy in the extreme. Small wonder, therefore, that Mr. E. T. Cook, late Editor of the Daily News, was constrained in his book, Rights and Wrongs of the Transvaal War, to reduce the conspiracy charge to a charge-nebulous and shadowy as the "evidence" itself-of "political ambitions." Small wonder, too, that in his article in the National Review Sir Edward Grey hastened to follow Mr. Cook's example.

To the superficial observer the war now being waged in South Africa is a fight for race ascendency. To the man who probes beneath the outward-seeming of things, however, it is manifest that it is a struggle, not for race ascendency but for class ascendency; that at bottom the South African War is not political but economic in its issues; that it was not sought by the Boers, but was unscrupulously forced upon them by a gang of cosmopolitan adventurers, anxious to consolidate their vast gold-mining interests, and, making

of the Rand a second Kimberley, enslave the workers, white and black alike.

Mr. J. A. Hobson, in his able and convincing book, The War in South Africa, in which he has completely unmasked the conspirators, tells us that for the natives "the Kimberley compound' system converts a labour contract into a period of imprisonment with hard labour and a truck system of wages."1 While as regards white labour, he says (p. 239):

"The white miners at Kenilworth, the suburb of Kimberley, are absolutely under the control of De Beers Company; drawing their wages from De Beers, living in houses owned by De Beers, trading with shops controlled by De Beers, they are the political and social serfs of the Company; if they object to any terms imposed upon them by the Company, they must quit not only their employment but their homes, and must leave Kimberley to find a means of living outside the clutches of the diamond monopoly."

Such is the industrial ideal of Rhodes, De Beers, Beit, Eckstein, Neumann, Wernher, Joel, Albu and other "patriots"! But the Transvaal Government and the Transvaal mining laws, the latter among the best in the world, stood in the way of the realisation of this ideal on the Rand. Therefore the Transvaal Government and the Transvaal mining laws must go.2

First the Jameson Raid was engineered, Mr. Rhodes financing the adventure to the tune of some £200,000, while a forged letter alleging that the women and children of Johannesburg were in grave danger from the Boers, supplied the "motive" for the attack on the South African Republic. But, the Raid proving an ignominious failure, Mr. Rhodes declared his intention of gaining his ends by "constitutional means," a phrase which must be understood to cover the persuasive powers of the " Hawkesley dossier " as applied to Mr. Chamberlain, the "chartering" of a lying Press, and the presentation to her late Majesty of a colossal "Outlander's Petition," the bulk of the signatures to which were either absolute forgeries or had been obtained by bribery or by means of that economic pressure which Mr. Rhodes knows so well how to apply.

Thus it was that this "small confederacy of international financiers working through a kept Press" brought about the war. As Mr. Hobson says (chapter iv.), "For what are we fighting?" "There is no secret about the matter. This war is a terrible disaster for every one else in England and South Africa, but for the mine-owners it means a large increase of profits from a more economical working of the mines, and from speculative operations. Mr. Fitzpatrick puts into the mouth of leading men of the Rand' the following statement of grievances

1 P. 237.

2"One of the most impudent pieces of jobbery ever perpetrated even in South Africa is the appointment during the war of a British Commission to overhaul and amend what has been freely and generally recognised as the most liberal Gold Law in the world. The Commission is simply packed with mining capitalists and their professional advisers."-The Speaker, December 7, 1901. VOL. 157.-No. 1.

B

in 1896: If you want the chief economic grievances they are: the Netherlands Railway Concession, the dynamite monopoly, the liquor traffic, and native labour, which together constitute an unwarrantable burden of indirect taxation on the industry of over two and a half millions sterling annually.' In other words, the mining capitalists stood to gain an income of two millions and a half by a successful political or military coup."

After showing that Mr. J. B. Robinson and Mr. Hays Hammond confirm this estimate, and that "wages form about 55 per cent. of the working expenses of the mines," Mr. Hobson continues:

"The attitude of the mining industry towards the Transvaal Government in respect of the labour question is instructive. Witnesses before the Industrial Commission at Johannesburg were unanimous in maintaining that it was the duty of the Government to procure a steady and sufficient supply of Kafirs for the mines. The Government was called upon to accredit and assist agents of the mining industry, to obtain Kaffir labour, to'pay premiums to Kaffir chiefs,' to furnish extra pay to native Commissioners for the same object, to convey this labour under supervision' to the mines, erecting compounds' along the road, reducing railway fares to one-third of the existing rate, and in a dozen other ways spending public money to serve the private interests of the mines. Why politics and economics are so closely connected' that the public purse should be used to keep down the wages-bill of the mines is not intelligible to English people. But it is perfectly clear that under a 'reformed' Government the mine owners will take every care to press their claims."

6

Quite so. And has not the Duke of Abercorn told us that our Government will in the settlement following the war "neither wish nor be able to disregard the sentiments of their loyal supporters in South Africa"? Have we not even seen Kaffirs, attempting to escape from the slavery of the compounds, shot down by British soldiers?

With cynical frankness the conspirators themselves have by their utterances on the labour question left us in no manner of doubt as to their intentions. So far back as 1894, Mr. Cecil Rhodes, speaking at Capetown, said (Cape Times, Oct. 29, 1894):

"We have all got to think over the proposition why the English labourer works at the rate of twelve shillings a week, why the Indian works at twopence a day, and why we pay (the natives), including food, £4 a month. . . . And if you ask me for a big foreign policy, it is the question whether we can bring these natives to understand the dignity of labour, and whether we can make arrangements with neighbouring States to co-operate in bringing this about."

At the meeting of the Consolidated Goldfields Company of South Africa, held Nov. 14, 1899, Mr. Hays Hammond, consulting engineer, explained how the saving of two and a half millions sterling above referred to could be effected:

"There are in South Africa [he said] millions of Kaffirs, and it does seem preposterous that we are not able to obtain 70,000 or 80,000 Kaffirs to work upon the mines.

...

"With good government there should be an abundance of labour, and