The African Colony: Studies in the Reconstruction

But before South Africa can become an ally in federation she must make her peace with herself. If it is difficult to exaggerate the need for untiring intelligence in the making of this peace, it is even harder to over-estimate the profound significance which her success or failure in the task of self-realisation has for the prestige of our race. Our colonial methods are on trial in a sphere where all the world can watch. And while our aim is a colony, the means must be different from those which we have hitherto used in our expansion. A nascent colony was neglected till it asserted itself and appeared already mature on the political horizon. But in the growth of this colony England must play a direct part, since for good or for ill her destinies are linked with it, and supineness and a foolish interference will equally bring disaster. There is one parallel, not indeed in political conditions, but in the qualities required for the shaping of the country. If we can show in South Africa that spirit of sleepless intelligence which has created British India, then there is nothing to fear. For, as I understand history, India was made by Englishmen who brought to the task three qualities above others. The first was a wide toleration for local customs and religions – a desire to leave the national life intact, and to mould it slowly by those forces of enlightenment in which sincerely, if undogmatically, they believed. The second was the extension of rigorous justice and full civil rights to every subject, a policy which in the long-run is the only means of bringing a subject race into the life of the State. Last, and most vital of all, they showed in their work a complete efficiency, proving themselves better statesmen, financiers, jurists, soldiers, than any class they had superseded. This efficiency is the key-note of the South African problem, so far as concerns British interests. If the imperial Power shows itself inspired with energy, acumen, a clear-eyed perception of truth as well as with its traditional honesty of purpose, South Africa will gladly follow where it may lead. But she will be quick to criticise formalism and intolerant of a fumbling incapacity.

Sed nondum est finis. We stand at the beginning of a new path, and it is impossible to tell whither it may lead, what dark fords and stony places it may pass through, and in what sandy desert or green champaign it may end. Political prophecy is an idle occupation. American observers on the eve of the French Revolution saw England on the verge of anarchy and France a contented country under a beloved king. Even so acute a writer as de Tocqueville assumed that America would continue an agricultural country without manufactures, and that the fortunes of her citizens would be small. If philosophers may err, it is well for a humble writer to be modest in his conclusions. In the past pages an effort has been made neither to minimise the difficulties nor to over-estimate the chances of South African prosperity. “Whosoever,” said Ralegh, “in writing a modern history shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth.” I can ask for no better fate than to see all my forecasts falsified, the dangers proved to have no existence, the chances shown a thousandfold more roseate. But whatever may be the destiny of this or that observation, there can be no dispute, I think, upon the gravity of the problem and the profound importance of its wise settlement. And when all is said that can be said it is permissible to import into our view a little of that ancestral optimism which has hitherto kept our hearts high in our checkered history, for optimism, when buttressed by intelligence, is but another name for courage. There is an optimism more merciless than any pessimism, which, seeing clearly all the perils and discouragements, the hollowness of smooth conventional counsels and the dreary list of past errors, can yet pluck up heart to believe that there is no work too hard for the English race when its purpose is firm and its intelligence awakened. With this belief we may well look forward to a day when the old unhappy things will have become far off and forgotten, and South Africa, at peace with herself, will be the leader in a new and pregnant imperial policy; and the words of the poet of another empire will be true in a nobler and ampler sense of ours, “They who drink of the Rhone and the Orontes are all one nation.”