The Police Question

A question in regard to which a few voices have been raised but scarcely seriously hearkened to, may now be said to be "at the door.” It has been found in certain European States, and we shall soon prove it to be in our own day and land, one of the most difficult of problems, namely, that of discovering the best means of effectually counteracting or holding in check the strongly bureaucratic tendencies which we see to be Page 221 →stealing over almost every civilised nation. On the one hand we see imperially governed countries; and on the other democratic republics, with traditions and aspirations wholly different, but alike only in this? that police rule in each has so established itself as to become a standing menace to liberty, and an embarrassment and even a rival to the governments which aim at its reform or at the restriction of its functions.

The object of the present paper is to indicate the position of England in respect to this subject, to suggest certain lessons to be derived from the present struggle in France for decentralisation and the curbing of the power of the police, and to point out briefly the danger of the threatening tyranny—a tyranny which may establish itself under the shelter of a liberal or democratic government, no less than under an autocracy or empire. It is not difficult to recognise the present abuses and dangers which have been allowed to establish themselves in this department of the Executive. But to see the path which leads out of the actual complication is not so easy. To denounce the police, to pronounce what it ought not to be and do, is a simple enough task, so palpable are the inconveniences and wrongs to which the public in various lands are daily subjected by the growing influence of the ubiquitous and overshadowing Bureau; but to decide the question of what the police ought to be in a free nation, is a problem which will require for its solution the exercise of the wisest heads and the firmest hands among those alike who govern, and those who influence that public opinion whose support is required for the maintenance of any Government.

The principles which our forefathers held in regard to free government, however sound we may recognise them to be, have become less easy of application in these modern days of overgrown cities, crowded populations, perpetual locomotion, and complex social life. “Self-government,” said Grattan, “is life.” It is indeed life; life for the individual, for the family, for all organised communities, for municipalities, and for nations. The opposite is gradual death for each of these. Protests enough have been uttered against the evil influence of an absolute monarchy on the life of a people; but it is doubtful whether we have yet sufficiently considered, or whether our Liberal leaders are at all adequately awake to the fact, that precisely the same evils are accumulating under a bureaucracy (created it may be by the most Liberal Parliament), which forces to act, and does not encourage and fructify the principle of self-action. De Tocqueville, alluding to a tyranny represented, not by one man, but by many (in the case of a fully enfranchised people), says: “For myself, when I feel the hand of power lie heavy upon me, I care little to know who oppresses me, and I am not the more disposed to pass under the yoke because it is held out to me by the arms of a million of men.” Modern Police Government in its worst forms combines the evil of extreme centralisation with the activity, in every corner of the nation, of a vast and numerous agency of surveillance, whose very presence tends by slow degrees to enfeeble the sense of responsibility in the citizens in regard to the order and well-being of society. “It is necessary,” says Lieber, in his “Political Ethics,” “to have seen nations who have been forced for centuries to submit to constant and minute police interference, in order to have any conception of the degree to which manly action, self-dependence, and inventiveness of proper means, can be eradicated from a whole community.” Personal security against bodily violence or harm (the benefit above all others supposed to be guaranteed to the citizen by the everpresent police) is itself purchased at too great a cost, if it be obtained at the price of personal liberty. An extensive preventive police might, by fettering all free individual action, prevent many offences; but mere physical security is not the highest object of pursuit for society, although it is desirable, in order that it may obtain its highest objects. There is something bordering on the ludicrous, in the unconscious condemnation of the system which they represent, contained in the often repeated and somewhat sentimental lamentations of our metropolitan superintendents of police, over the growing dependence and carelessness of the population of London. A certain superintendent having reported the numbers of doors and windows found unguarded or open at night, asks despondingly, “When will the people of England ever learn to take care of themselves?” The answer is at hand, “Never, so long as they are educated by the constant presence of persons delegated by Government to take care of them, even in the minutest particulars.” Here is the fulfilment of Lieber's words—inventiveness, self-protection, and manly self-dependence are gradually driven out of a people by the delegation of the simplest and most primitive duties of citizens to the agents of the Government....

Chartist Meetings and Police

The reports of debates in Parliament at this time [early 1800s], and other public documents, prove how strongly the instinct of the people (whether reasonable or not) rose up against the proposed change [to a centralized and military police force]. Sir Robert Peel obtained in 1828 the appointment of a committee of the House of Commons, to inquire into the expediency of establishing a uniform system of police in the metropolis. The Committee reported favourably of the scheme.... and in [1829] the Act of 10^th George Page 222 →IV. Cap. 44, passed both Houses and became law. A great conflict of opinion concerning the introduction of a principle of police rule foreign to English habits continued to prevail; in fact, it came to be more than a conflict of opinion when in 1833 an actual collision took place between the new police force and a meeting of Chartists in Coldbath Fields. Directions had been given to the police to disperse the meeting; in attempting to do so three police officers were stabbed, and one of them fell dead on the spot. A contemporary writer, favourable to the new system of police, remarked: “It might have been thought that such a resistance of a constituted authority ending in murder would have excited the indignation of the more respectable class of citizens; but precisely the contrary was the fact.” A coroner’s jury returned a verdict of justifiable homicide, a very significant sign of the feeling towards the new force of the class of citizens from which the jury was selected. Such an agitation was stirred up that a commission was called for to inquire into the conduct of the police, in order to satisfy the public. The same special pleader for the new system, above quoted, says, “Thus we see that this essential change in this branch of criminal justice was not made without creating a deep sensation. That stalking-horse, the liberty of the subject, which in truth meant the liberty to rob and plunder, was immediately paraded before the public; and indeed for Englishmen, jealous of their personal liberty, the establishment of this new force might at first have created some well-founded alarm. It was no longer a question of a few constables under municipal or local direction, but of a standing army of nearly 6000 men drilled like soldiers, taught to act in masses, entirely independent of the control of the ratepayers, and solely under that of a minister of State” ...

Illegal and Cruel Treatment of Prisoners

In close connection with the arbitrary powers granted to a State police is the subject of the treatment of prisoners both before and after trial. We may well ask, What has become of the first principles of English law in these days? Many even of the best of our public men do not seem fully impressed with the fact of the constant violation of the law in some of its highest principles by the Executive and their officers. The utterances of our greatest lawyers are very impressive on the subject of the sacredness of the persons of citizens at all times, and not least when condemned and in a condemned cell, awaiting, it may be, the extreme punishment awarded by law. Not Blackstone alone, but all great defenders of justice and law, have set forth this principle in the clearest and strongest manner. And well they might do so: for the brutality and secret tyranny, even to murder, which would be exercised on defenceless persons confined within the four walls of a narrow cell can be imagined, were not the persons of prisoners considered by the law as inviolable in the matter of private assault, as those of any citizen walking in the street or any magistrate sitting on the Bench.

The Pall Mall Gazette of December 1, 1887, under the head, “The Black Hole of Scotland-yard,” recorded some horrible facts of the brutality of the police to men in their power, whom they had just arrested. Surely, if “assault and battery” are punishable by law at any time, they are punishable in such a case; and every one of those policemen guilty of assault ought to be punished. Why is it that there is, apparently, so little said about it except among the poor people themselves? The want of general interest in the matter is a deadly sign. Even while repressing the natural feeling of compassion for the poor people thus maltreated, this apathy is in itself enough to stir the soul to its depths. It is to be hoped that these events may teach us again to defend the law with that zeal for it which once characterised the English people. No doubt there is a difficulty in bringing these police offenders to justice when the assault has been made in a narrow cell, with locked doors, and there is no witness on the side of the sufferer. Something might be done, however, by an observation being taken of the condition of the poor man's head and face and general appearance before entering the cell, and of the same when he leaves it. If he enters sound, and comes out again with black eyes and bandaged and bleeding head, &c., surely there is sufficient proof of assault within the cell, although no doubt the cowards who wounded him would be ready to swear, one and all, that he had wounded himself and blackened his own eyes. Persons cognisant of the matter assert that these cases of battery and assault by the police upon prisoners in cells, upon persons not tried or condemned, are now so common that they excite but little surprise.

Several typical cases in the past century or two have turned upon this question of the inviolability of the person of the citizen, no matter how obnoxious that citizen may have been to the existing Government. There is upon the Statute Book of England an Act to this day entitled the Coventry Act. The occasion of its enactment was as follows, and it is an illustration of the jealous spirit in which the slightest bodily injury inflicted by the public authority outside the law has been resented by the people of England. It is the case of Sir John Coventry. This gentleman had animadverted upon the immoralities of the king, Charles II. The king declared that “if this kind of talk was not summarily Page 223 →punished, it would become a fashion to talk so," and he sent some of his police—his personal bodyguard—to watch about the streets where Sir John lived, and to "leave some mark upon his person which should teach him not to talk at that rate for the future.” Bishop Burnet, in his "History of his Own Times,” says: — "The king’s men, Sands and O’Brian, went there, and finding Coventry going home they drew round him. He stood up to the wall, and snatching the flambeau from his servant’s hand, with that in one hand and his sword in the other, he fought so well that he got much credit by it. He wounded some of the men, but they inflicted a severe cut on his nose, to teach him to remember the respect he owed to his king, and so they left him. . . . This put the House of Commons in a furious uproar. They passed a Bill of punishment against the assailants, and put a clause in it that it should never be in the king’s power to pardon them.”

Observe the parallel. Certain London citizens had animadverted on the action of the Government in the matter of William O’Brien and Coercion in Ireland. The Government believed, apparently, that if it did not punish this sort of thing "it would grow into a fashion to talk so,” and therefore sent its Sir Charles Warren and his men to watch in the streets where these citizens were likely to be found, and "to leave some mark upon their persons which should teach them not to talk at that rate in the future.” But there the parallel ends. Other citizens have in some cases defended themselves as bravely as Sir John Coventry did, though only with sticks and umbrellas. They have got more than a wound upon their noses—a great deal more. But the representatives of London, being largely pledged to centralised and coercive policy, were not put into a furious uproar, unless it was against the people themselves, who claimed the right of free speech. It is, however, to be hoped that some day an Act of Parliament may be passed to punish future official assaulters of the citizens....

The Police as Disturbers of the Peace

The late Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Edmund Henderson, being a man of high principle and acknowledged prudence in the control of the immense machine over which he presided, we had for some years comparatively few of those outrages which a Government police is so constantly liable to commit, owing to the extensive and unconstitutional powers placed in their hands. But under a less prudent chief the scene has changed. In Paris and every bureaucratically governed capital we have the fullest proofs that not only is a State police apt to fail in its duty of protecting the persons of the citizens, but that its agents become themselves the violators of personal liberties, the assailants of the modesty and chastity of women, and the cause frequently of public disorders....

The danger of this growing tyranny on the part of the police is so much the greater now for us in England, because of the existence of that very element which has so rapidly and so deeply corrupted the personnel of the police in many other capitals, i.e., the encouragement of a portion of the metropolitan force as an organised body of women-hunters, with the most frightfully arbitrary and irresponsible powers to pursue, to accuse, and to condemn any woman who may be an immoral person, or not, or to whom they may have a personal enmity. To devote a certain number of the police force, acting under Government, to such an education as this, and for the exercise of such powers and functions, is a sure method of introducing into the whole force an arbitrary spirit, and immoral traditions and modes of action, which must exercise a deteriorating influence on the principles and personal character of the whole of the official staff under Government rule.

The people of England will endure for a long time, and with tolerable patience, tyranny and abuses of this nature; they endure them, until some great scandal occurs which agitates the public mind and brings about, not the abolition of the system, but the mere transfer of the unconstitutional power into the hands of a more trusted chief. Such a transfer will not essentially mend matters, and the same abuses will again spring up and flourish. The transfer must be made into the hands of the people themselves; and even then there will be danger enough, unless, taught by adversity and sore conflict, our people of all classes rise to a higher tone and to a greater respect for justice and for the liberties of all. The half of the human race, namely women, must not in future be left out of consideration, nor excluded from their right of equality before the law, as has, till now, been the case through all political struggles. They must be admitted to and rise to full citizenship. They already possess the municipal franchise, by which, happily for themselves, the women of London, under a future London Municipal Government, will be able in some measure to make their voice heard in many matters, including police hunting of women, a form of persecution which now goes on unchecked in all its abuses, under the cover of Vagrancy Acts and of sundry vague and unequal by-laws or police customs.

Summing-up of Proposed Reforms

To sum up in regard to the reforms which we propose, what measures shall we adopt in order to counteract the despotic tendencies which have been indicated? The following suggestions are offered: —

First—The placing of all police under municipal control.

Secondly—Its decentralisation, not only by removing it from the direct control of the central Government, but by relegating certain duties now combined under one great organisation to other persons and offices; and by inviting and encouraging as much as possible the action of the citizens themselves, in the guardianship of their own persons and property, and in the maintenance of order.

Thirdly—The severe restriction of the functions of a future municipal police to what is essentially legal and constitutional, and the guarding against that needless and mischievous multiplication of laws enacted year by year, whereby the police service and staff are necessarily greatly increased, and its functions enormously enlarged beyond what is good or safe for the public... .

A Revolution Needed in the
Consciences of Men

A hope at last seems to be dawning that the necessity of such a revolution in the consciences of men as will lead to large self-sacrifices is acknowledged even by the most privileged classes to some extent.

If this hope decays, we are left to the contemplation of the inevitable alternative of violent retribution. But surely we may hope that the privileged classes, possessors of wealth and of the soil, are awaking to the consciousness of the great responsibility weighing upon them; the consciousness may come darkly, vaguely, uneasily, as a nightmare to a sleeping man, driven away again and again, but still returning. The supposed awful sacredness of the “rights of property” is beginning to be estimated at its real and comparative worth; and the right of the hungry to eat forces itself to the front as a right at least as sacred. London poverty should be teaching to the most stupid the lesson that wherever there is a monopoly of advantages on the one hand, there is loss, misery, and a disinherited mass of humanity on the other. But will the privileged classes awake in time to avert calamity, bitter suffering, and crime? Will they acknowledge in time the insufficiency of the tax on their resources, for ordinary charity, and the dire necessity of sacrifice to the extent of self-spoliation, in order to restore the balance, and avert confusion and destruction?

There is no truer kindness than to remind those who, themselves just, perhaps, and generous, have been born to an inheritance of monopolised privileges, of the duties which such an inheritance entails. A man born to the possession of a great neglected estate, on which he finds his labourers degraded, cottages in ruins, and fields, which ought to be storehouses of sustenance for city populations, going to waste, undrained and untilled, will scarcely think he has done his duty to society if, having any available means of improving it, he dies, leaving his estate as he found it, content to charge the ruin and neglect upon his forefathers or upon a series of accidents. It would not be thought that an unjust accusation had been brought against such a landowner, if a friend were to take him by the hand and lead him through the dwellings of his tenants and labourers, and bid him mark the moral as well as the material harvest of misery which each year of continued neglect was preparing for a number of human beings: even if such a friend were to reason with him of “righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come,” until he trembled in the waking sense of deep responsibility, it would not be thought to be a harsh or needless counsel. Similarly it will be believed, that it is with an equal regard for the happiness of all human beings alike, men and women, the highly favoured and responsible as well as the spoiled and neglected, that upper-class men of the present generation are reminded that there is an entail even more grievous than that which spreads its blight over so many estates in our fair England—an entail which is injurious to those who are supposed to be benefiting by it, no less than to the human fields which it desolates. There is a moral deterioration which is the invariable attendant upon the habit of the careless and irresponsible enjoyment of possession at the expense of the happiness and good of others. No portion of the human family can continue from age to age in the enjoyment of advantages which are not justly shared with others, nor in an attitude of indifference to the disabilities of another and a dependent portion of the community—even though a monopoly of such advantages may have been an heritage to which they were born—without suffering deterioration, gradual but sure, in the deepest part of their nature. For persons in such a case, whether they or their forefathers be chargeable with the blame of it, there is no moral health possible save in the awakened perception of existing wrong, and the conscious will to restore the balance to society, as far as it lies in their power to do so, by bringing a share of monopolised blessings into the lot of those classes who have suffered deprivation....

I.

Apology for “yet another book” on the South African Question. Future Peace must be based on Justice,—to coloured as well as white men. Difference between Legalized Slavery and the subjection of Natives by Individuals. ...

In the midst of the manifold utterances and discussions on the burning question of to-day,—the War in South Africa,—there is one side of the subject which, it seems to me, has not as yet been considered with the seriousness which it deserves,—and that is the question of Slavery, and of the treatment of the native races of South Africa. Though this question has not yet in England or on the Continent been cited as one of the direct causes of the war, I am convinced,—as are many others,—that it lies very near to the heart of the present trouble.

The object of this paper is simply to bring witnesses together who will testify to the past and present condition of the native races under British, Dutch, and Transvaal rule. These witnesses shall not be all of one nation; they shall come from different countries, and among them there shall be representatives of the native peoples themselves. I shall add little of my own to the testimony of these witnesses. But I will say, in advance, that what I desire to make plain for some sincere persons who are perplexed, is this,—that where a Government has established by Law the principle of the complete and final abolition of Slavery, and made its practice illegal for all time,—as our British Government has done,—there is hope for the native races;— there is always hope that, by an appeal to the law and to British authority, any and every wrong done to the natives, which approaches to or threatens the reintroduction of slavery, shall be redressed. The Abolition of Slavery, enacted by our Government in 1834, was the proclamation of a great principle, strong and clear, a straight line by which every enactment dealing with the question, and every act of individuals, or groups of individuals, bearing on the liberty of the natives can be measured, and any deviation from that straight line of principle can be exactly estimated and judged.

When we speak of injustice done to the natives by the South African Republics, we are apt to be met with the reproach that the English have also been guilty of cruelty to native races. This is unhappily true, and shall not be disguised in the following pages;—but mark this,—that it is true of certain individuals bearing the English name, true of groups of individuals, of certain adventurers and speculators. But this fact does not touch the far more important and enduring fact that wherever British rule is established, slavery is abolished, and illegal.

This fact is the ground of the hope for the future of the Missionaries of our own country, and of other European countries, as well as of the poor natives themselves, so far as they have come to understand the matter; and in several instances they have shown that they do understand it, and appreciate it keenly.

Those English persons, or groups of persons, who have denied to the native labourers their hire (which is the essence of slavery), have acted on their own responsibility, and illegally. This should be made to be clearly understood in future conditions of peace, and rendered impossible henceforward.

That future peace which we all desire, on the cessation of the present grievous war, must be a peace founded on justice, for there is no other peace worthy of the name; and it must be not only justice as between white men, but as between white men and men of every shade of complexion.

A speaker at a public meeting lately expressed a sentiment which is more or less carelessly repeated by many. I quote it, as helping me to define the principle to which I have referred, which marks the difference between an offence or crime committed by an individual against the law, and an offence or crime sanctioned, permitted, or enacted by a State or Government itself, or by public authority in any way.

This speaker, after confessing, apparently with reluctance, that "the South African Republic had not been stainless in its relations towards the blacks,” added, "but for these deeds—every one of them—we could find a parallel among our own people.” I think a careful study of the history of the South African races would convince this speaker that he has exaggerated the case as against "our own people” in the matter of deliberate cruelty and violence towards the natives. However that may be, it does not alter the fact of the wide difference between the evil deeds of men acting on their own responsibility and the evil deeds of Governments, and of Communities in which the Governmental Authorities do not forbid, but sanction, such actions.

As an old Abolitionist, who has been engaged for thirty years in a war against slavery in another form, may I be allowed to cite a parallel? That Anti-Slavery War was undertaken against a Law introduced into England, which endorsed, permitted, and in fact, legalized, Page 226 →a moral and social slavery already existing—a slavery to the vice of prostitution. The pioneers of the opposition to this law saw the tremendous import, and the necessary consequences of such a law. They had previously laboured to lessen the social evil by moral and spiritual means, but now they turned their whole attention to obtaining the abolition of the disastrous enactment which took that evil under its protection. They felt that the action of Government in passing that law brought the whole nation (which is responsible for its Government) under a sentence of guilt—a sentence of moral death. It lifted off from the shoulders of individuals, in a measure, the moral responsibility which God had laid upon them, and took that responsibility on its own shoulders, as representing the whole nation; it foreshadowed a national blight. My readers know that we destroyed that legislation after a struggle of eighteen years. In the course of that long struggle, we were constantly met by an assertion similar in spirit to that made by the speaker to whom I have referred; and to this day we are met by it in certain European countries. They say to us, “But for every scandal proceeding from this social vice, which you cite as committed under the system of Governmental Regulation and sanction, we can find a parallel in the streets of London, where no Governmental sanction exists.” We are constantly taunted with this, and possibly we may have to admit its truth in a measure. But our accusers do not see the immense difference between Governmental and individual responsibility in this vital matter, neither do they see how additionally hard, how hopeless, becomes the position of the slave who, under the Government sanction, has no appeal to the law of the land; an appeal to the Government which is itself an upholder of slavery, is impossible. The speaker above cited concluded by saying: “The best precaution against the abuse of power on the part of whites living amidst a coloured population is to make the punishment of misdeeds come home to the persons who are guilty of those misdeeds; and if he could but get his countrymen to act up to that view he believed we should really have a better prospect for the future of South Africa than we had had in the past.”

With this sentiment I am entirely in accord. It is our hope that the present national awakening on the whole subject of our position and responsibilities in South Africa will—in case of the re-establishment of peace under the principles of British rule—result in a change in the condition of the native races, both in the Transvaal, and at the hands of our countrymen and others who may be acting in their own interests, or in the interests of Commercial Societies.

I do not intend to sketch anything approaching to a history of South African affairs during the last seventy or eighty years; that has been ably done by others, writing from both the British and the Boer side. I shall only attempt to trace the condition of certain native tribes in connection with some of the most salient events in South Africa of the century which is past.

In 1877, as my readers know, the Transvaal was annexed by Sir Theophilus Shepstone. There are very various opinions as to the justice of that annexation. I will only here remark that it was at the earnest solicitation of the Transvaal leaders of that date that an interference on the part of the British Commissioner was undertaken.... The results, however, for the Republic were for the time, financial relief and prosperity, and better treatment of the natives. The financial condition of the country, as I have said, at the time of the annexation, was one of utter bankruptcy. “After three years of British rule, however, the total revenue receipts for the first quarter of 1879 and 1880 amounted to £22,773 and £47,982 respectively. That is to say, that, during the last year of British rule, the revenue of the country more than doubled itself...” (quoted from Parliamentary Blue Book).

In 1881, the Transvaal (under Prime Minister Gladstone’s administration) was liberated from British control. It was given back to its own leaders, under certain conditions, agreed to and solemnly signed by the President. These are the much-discussed conditions of the Convention of 1881, one of these conditions being that Slavery should be abolished. This condition was indeed, insisted on in every agreement or convention made between the British Government and the Boers; the first being that of 1852, called the Sand River Convention; the second, a convention entered into two years later called the Bloemfontein Convention (which created the Orange Free State); a third agreement as to the cessation of Slavery was entered into at the period of the Annexation, 1877; a fourth was the Convention of 1881; a fifth the Convention of 1884. 1 do not here speak of the other terms of these Conventions, I only remark that in each a just treatment of the native races was demanded and agreed to.

The retrocession of the Transvaal in 1881 has been much lauded as an act of magnanimity and justice. There is no doubt that the motive which prompted it was a noble and generous one; yet neither is there any doubt, that in certain respects, the results of that act were unhappy, and were no doubt unanticipated. It was on the natives, whose interests appeared to have had no place in the generous impulses of Mr. Gladstone, that the action of the British Government fell most heavily, most mournfully. In this matter, it must be confessed that the English Government broke faith with the unhappy natives, to whom it had promised protection, and who so much needed it. In this, as in Page 227 →many other matters, our country, under successive Governments, has greatly erred; at times neglecting responsibilities to her loyal Colonial subjects, and at other times interfering unwisely.

In one matter, England has, however, been consistent, namely, in the repeated proclamations that Slavery should never be permitted under her rule and authority.

The formal document of agreement between Her Majesty’s Government and the Boer leaders, known as the Convention of 1881, was signed by both parties at Pretoria on the afternoon of the 3rd August, in the same room in which, nearly four years before, the Annexation Proclamation was signed by Sir T. Shepstone.

This formality was followed by a more unpleasant duty for the Commissioners appointed to settle this business, namely, the necessity of conveying their message to the natives, and informing them that they had been handed back by Great Britain, "poor Canaanites,” to the tender mercies of their masters, the "Chosen people,” in spite of the despairing appeals which many of them had made to her.

Some three hundred of the principal native chiefs were called together in the Square at Pretoria, and there the English Commissioner read to them the proclamation of Queen Victoria. Sir Hercules Robinson, the Chief Commissioner, having "introduced the native chiefs to Messrs. Kruger, Pretorius, and Joubert,” having given them good advice as to indulging in manual labour when asked to do so by the Boers, and having reminded them that it would be necessary to retain the law relating to Passes, which is, in the hands of a people like the Boers, almost as unjust a regulation as a dominant race can invent for the oppression of a subject people, concluded by assuring them that their "interests would never be forgotten or neglected by Her Majesty’s Government.” Having read this document, the Commission hastily withdrew, and after their withdrawal the Chiefs were "allowed” to state their opinions to the Secretary for Native Affairs.

In availing themselves of this permission, it is noticeable that no allusion was made by the Chiefs to the advantages they were to reap under the Convention. All their attention was given to the great fact that the country had been ceded to the Boers, and that they were no longer the Queen’s subjects. I beg attention to the following appeals from the hearts of these oppressed people. They got very excited, and asked whether it was thought that they had no feelings or hearts, that they were thus treated as a stick or piece of tobacco, which could be passed from hand to hand without question.

Umgombarie, a Zoutpansberg Chief, said: "I am Umgombarie. I have fought with the Boers, and have many wounds, and they know that what I say is true. I will never consent to place myself under their rule. I belong to the English Government. I am not a man who eats with both sides of his jaw at once; I only use one side. I am English. I have said.”

Silamba said: "I belong to the English. I will never return under the Boers. You see me, a man of my rank and position; is it right that such as I should be seized and laid on the ground and flogged, as has been done to me and other Chiefs?”

Sinkanhla said: "We hear and yet do not hear, we cannot understand. We are troubling you, Chief, by talking in this way; we hear the Chiefs say that the Queen took the country because the people of the country wished it, and again, that the majority of the owners of the country did not wish her rule, and that therefore the country was given back. We should like to have the man pointed out from among us black people who objects to the rule of the Queen. We are the real owners of the country; we were here when the Boers came, and without asking leave, settled down and treated us in every way badly. The English Government then came and took the country; we have now had four years of rest, and peaceful and just rule. We have been called here to-day, and are told that the country, our country, has been given to the Boers by the Queen. This is a thing which surprises us. Did the country, then, belong to the Boers? Did it not belong to our fathers and forefathers before us, long before the Boers came here? We have heard that the Boers’ country is at the Cape. If the Queen wishes to give them their land, why does she not give them back the Cape?”

Umyethile said: "We have no heart for talking. I have returned to the country from Sechelis, where I had to fly from Boer oppression. Our hearts are black and heavy with grief to-day at the news told us. We are in agony; our intestines are twisting and writhing inside of us, just as you see a snake do when it is struck on the head. We do not know what has become of us, but we feel dead. It may be that the Lord may change the nature of the Boers, and that we will not be treated like dogs and beasts of burden as formerly; but we have no hope of such a change, and we leave you with heavy hearts and great apprehension as to the future.” In his Report (made on the spot), Mr. Shepstone (Secretary for Native Affairs) says, "One chief, Jan Sibilo, who had been personally threatened with death by the Boers after the English should leave, could not restrain his feelings, but cried like a child.” ...

Many more of such extracts might be quoted, but it is not my motive to multiply horrors. These are given exactly as they stand in the original, which may all be found in Blue Books presented to Parliament.

It has frequently been denied on behalf of the Transvaal, and is denied at this day, in the face of innumerable witnesses to the contrary, that slavery exists in the Transvaal. Now, this may be considered to be verbally true. Slavery, they say, did not exist; but apprenticeship did, and does exist. It is only another name. It is not denied that some Boers have been kind to their slaves, as humane slave-owners frequently were in the Southern States of America. But kindness, even the most indulgent, to slaves, has never been held by abolitionists to excuse the existence of slavery....

There is unhappily a tendency among persons living for any length of time among heathen people, to think and speak with a certain contempt for those people, at whose moral elevation they may even be sincerely aiming. They see all that is bad in these “inferior races,” and little that is good. This was not so in the case of the greatest and most successful Missionaries. They never lost faith in human nature, even at its lowest estate, and hence they were able to raise the standard of the least promising of the outcast races of the world. This faith in the possibility of the elevation of these races has been firmly held, however, by some who know them best, and have lived among them the longest.

Mr. Rider Haggard writes thus on this subject: — “So far as my own experience of natives has gone, I have found that in all the essential qualities of mind and body they very much resemble white men. Of them might be aptly quoted the speech Shakespeare puts into Shylock’s mouth: ‘Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?’ In the same way, I ask, has a native no feelings or affections? does he not suffer when his parents are shot, or his children stolen, or when he is driven a wanderer from his home? Does he not know fear, feel pain, affection, hate, and gratitude? Most certainly he does; and this being so, I cannot believe that the Almighty, who made both white and black, gave to the one race the right or mission of exterminating or of robbing or maltreating the other, and calling the process the advance of civilization. It seems to me, that on only one condition, if at all, have we the right to take the black men’s land; and that is, that we provide them with an equal and a just Government, and allow no maltreatment of them, either as individuals or tribes, but, on the contrary, do our best to elevate them, and wean them from savage customs. Otherwise, the practice is surely undefensible.

“I am aware, however, that with the exception of a small class, these are sentiments which are not shared by the great majority of the public, either at home or abroad.” ....

VII.

Transvaal Policy since 1884.... Transvaal law. The Grondwet or Constitution. The High Courts of Justice Subservient to the Volksraad or Parliament. Article 9 of the Grondwet referring to Natives. Native Marriage Laws. The Pass System....

... I cannot find it in my heart to criticize the character of the Boers at a time when they have held on so bravely in a desperate war, and have suffered so much. There are Boers and Boers,—good and bad among them,—as among all nations. We have heard of kind and generous actions towards the British wounded and prisoners, and we know that there are among them men who, in times of peace, have been good and merciful to their native servants. But it is not magnanimity nor brutality on the part of individuals which are in dispute. Our controversy is concerning the presence or absence of Justice among the Boers, concerning the purity of their Government and the justice of their Laws, or the reverse.

I turn to their Laws, and in judging these, it is hardly possible to be too severe. Law is a great teacher, a trainer, to a great extent, of the character of the people. The Boers would have been an exceptional people under the sun had they escaped the deterioration which such Laws and such Government as they have had the misfortune to live under inevitably produce.

A pamphlet has lately been published containing a defence of the Boer treatment of Missionaries and Natives, and setting forth the efforts which have been made in recent years to Christianize and civilize the native populations in their midst. This paper is signed by nine clergymen of the Dutch Reformed Church, and includes the name of the Rev. Andrew Murray, a name respected and beloved by many in our own country. It is welcome news that such good work has been undertaken, that the President has himself encouraged it, and that a number of Zulus or Kaffirs have recently been baptized in the Dutch Reformed Church of the Transvaal. But the fact strikes one painfully that in this pleading, (which has a pathetic note in it,) these clergymen appear to have obliterated from their mind and memory the whole past history of their nation, and to have forgotten that the harvest from seed sown through many generations may spring up and bear its bitter fruit in their own day....

Their Grondwet, or Constitution, must be removed out of its place for ever; their unequal laws, and the administrative corruption which unequal laws inevitably foster, must be swept away, and be replaced by a Page 229 →very different Constitution and very different Laws. If this had been done during the two last decades of Transvaal history, while untrammeled (as was desired) by British interference, the sincerity of this recent utterance would have deserved full credit, and would have been recognized as the beginning of a radical reformation.

The following is from the last Report of the Aborigines Protection Society (Jan., 1900). Its present secretary leans towards a favourable judgment of the recent improvements in the policy of the Transvaal, and condemns severely every act on the part of the English which does not accord with the principles of our Constitutional Law, and therefore this statement will not be regarded as the statement of a partisan:—"It is laid down as a fundamental principle in the Transvaal Grondwet that there is no equality of rights between white men and blacks. In theory, if not in practice, the Boers regard the natives, all of whom they contemptuously call Kaffirs, whatever their tribal differences, pretty much as the ancient Jews regarded the Philistines and others whom they expelled from Palestine, or used as hewers of wood and drawers of water, but with added prejudice due to the difference of colour. So it was in the case of the early Dutch settlers, and so it is to-day, with a few exceptions, due mainly to the influence of the missionaries, whose work among the natives has from the first been objected to and hindered. It is only by social sufferance, and not by law, that the marriage of natives with Christian rites is recognised, and it carries with it none of the conditions as regards inheritance and the like, which are prescribed by the Dutch Roman code in force with white men. As a matter of fact, natives have no legal rights whatever. If they are in the service of humane masters, mindful of their own interests and moral obligations, they may be properly lodged and fed, not overworked, and fairly recompensed; but from the cruelties of a brutal master, perpetrated in cold blood or a drunken fit, the native practically has no redress.” ...

I am especially concerned with what affects the natives.

Article 1 of this section says:—A native must not own fixed property.

(2) He must not marry by civil or ecclesiastical process.

(3) He must not be allowed access to Civil Courts in any action against a white man.

Article 9 of the Grondwet is not only adhered to, but is exaggerated in its application as follows:—“The people shall not permit any equality of coloured persons with white inhabitants, neither in the Church, nor in the State.”

.... As to the access by the natives to the Courts of Law.

“If you ask a native he will tell you that access to the lawcourts is much too easy, but they are the Criminal Courts of the Field Cornets and Landdrosts. He suffers so much from these, that he cannot entertain the idea that the Higher Courts are any better than the ordinary Field Cornets’ or Landdrosts’. However, there are times when with fear and trepidation he does appeal to a Higher Court. With what result? If the decision is in favour of the native, the burghers are up in arms, crying out against the injustice of a judgment given in favour of a black against a white man; burghers sigh and say that a great disaster is about to befall the State when a native can have judgment against a white man....

No. 2.—The Native Marriage Laws. “Think,” says Mr. Bovill, “what it would mean to our social life in England if we were a conquered nation, and the conquerors should say: 'All your laws and customs are abrogated; your marriage laws are of no consequence to us; you may follow or leave them as you please, but we do not undertake to support them, and you may live like cattle if you wish; we cannot recognise your marriage laws as binding, nor yet will we legalise any form of marriage among you.’ Such is in effect, the present position of the natives in the Transvaal....

“The injustice of such a law must be apparent; it places a premium on vice. It gives an excuse to any ‘person of colour’ to commit the most heinous offences against the laws of morality and social order, and protects such a one from the legal consequences which would necessarily follow in any other civilised State.”

It is stated on the authority of The Sentinel (London, June, 1900), that Mr. Kruger was asked some years ago to permit the introduction in the Johannesburg mining district of the State regulation of vice, and that Mr. Kruger stoutly refused to entertain such an idea. Very much to his credit! Yet it seems to me that the refusal to legalize native marriages comes rather near, in immorality of principle and tendency, to the legalizing of promiscuous intercourse.

Mr. Bovill has an instructive chapter on the “Compound system,” and the condition of native compounds. This is a matter which it is to be hoped will be taken seriously to heart by the Chartered Company, and any other company or group of employers throughout African mining districts. “The Compound system of huddling hundreds of natives together in tin shanties is the very opposite to the free life to which they are accustomed. If South African mining is to become a settled industry, we must have the conditions of the labour market settled, and also the conditions of living. We Page 230 →cannot expect natives to give up their free open-air style of living, and their home life. They love their homes, and suffer from homesickness as much as, or probably more than most white people. The reason so many leave their work after six months is that they are constantly longing to see their wives and children....”

Mr. Bovill goes into much detail on the subject of the “Pass Laws.” I should much desire to reproduce his chapter on that subject, if it were not too long. That system must be wholly abolished, he says: “it is at present worse than any conditions under which slavery exists. It is a criminal-making law. Brand a slave, and you have put him to a certain amount of physical pain for once, but penalties under the Pass Law system mean lashes innumerable at the direction of any Boer Field Cornet or Landdrost. It is a most barbarous system, as brutal as it is criminal-making, alone worthy of a Boer with an exaggerated fear of and cowardly brutality towards a race he has been taught to despise.”

Treating of the prohibition imposed on the Natives as to the possession in any way or by any means of a piece of land, he writes: “Many natives are now earning and saving large sums of money, year by year, at the various labour centres. They return home with every intention of following a peaceful life; why should they not be encouraged to put their money into land, and follow their 'peaceful pursuits' as well as any Boer farmer? They are capable of doing it. Besides, if they held fixed property in the State, it would be to their advantage to maintain law and order, when they had everything they possessed at stake. With no interest in the land, the tendency must always be to a nomadic life. They are as thoroughly well capable of becoming true, peaceful, and loyal citizens of the State as are any other race of people. Their instincts and training are all towards law and order. Their lives have been disciplined under native rule, and now that the white man is breaking up that rule, what is he going to give as a substitute? Anarchy and lawlessness, or good government which tends to peace and prosperity?

VIII.

.... Exploitation of Natives by Capitalists. British colonizing.—its causes and nature.... The moral teachings of the war. Our responsibilities. Hasty judgments. Denunciations of England by Englishmen. The open book. My last word is for the Native Races.

This elimination of the Imperial Factor is precisely that which is the least desired by those who see our Imperialism to mean the continuance of obedience to the just traditions of British Law and Government. The granting of a Charter to a Company lends the authority (or the appearance of it) of the Queen's name to acts of the responsible heads of that company, which may be opposed to the principles of justice established by British Law; and such acts may have disastrous results. It is to be hoped that the present awakening on the subject of past failures of our government to enforce respect for its own principles may be a warning to all concerned against any transgression of those principles.

Continental friends with whom I have conversed on the subject of the British Colonies have sometimes appeared to me to leave out of account some considerations special to the subject. They regard British Colonization as having been accomplished by a series of acts of aggression, solely inspired by the love of conquest and desire for increased territory. This is an error.

I would ask such friends to take a Map of Europe, or of the World, and steadily to regard it in connection with the following facts. Our people are among the most prolific,—if not the most prolific,—of all nations. Energy and enterprise are in their nature, together with a certain love of free-breathing, adventure and discovery. Now look at the map, and observe how small is the circumference of the British Isles. “Our Empire has no geographical continuity like the Russian Empire; it is that larger Venice with no narrow streets, but with the sea itself for a high-road. It is bound together by a moral continuity alone.” What are our Sons to do? Must our immense population be debarred from passing through these ocean tracts to lands where there are great uninhabited wastes capable of cultivation? What shall we do with our sons and our daughters innumerable, as the ways become overcrowded in the mother land, and energies have not the outlets needful to develop them. Shall we place legal restrictions on marriage, or on the birth of children, or prescribe that no family shall exceed a certain number? You are shocked, naturally. It follows then that some members of our large British families must cross the seas and seek work and bread elsewhere.

The highest and lowest, representing all ranks, engage in this kind of initial colonization. Our present Prime Minister, a “younger son,” went out in his youth, — as others of his class have done,—with his pickaxe, to Australia, to rank for a time among “diggers,” until called home by the death of the elder son, the heir to the title and estate. This necessity and this taste for wandering and exploring has helped in some degree to form the independence of character of our men, and also to strengthen rather than to weaken the ties of affection and kinship with the Motherland. Many men, “nobly born and gently nurtured,” have thus learned self-dependence, to endure hardships, and to share manual labour with the humblest; and such an experience Page 231 →does not work for evil. Then when communities have been formed, some sort of government has been necessitated. An appeal is made to the Mother Country, and her offspring have grown up more or less under her regard and care, until self-government has developed itself.

The great blot on this necessary and natural expansion is the record (from time to time) of the displacement of native tribes by force and violence, when their rights seemed to interfere with the interests of the white man. Of such action we have had to repent in the past, and we repent more deeply than ever now when our responsibilities towards native races have been brought with startling clearness before those among us who have been led to look back and to search deeply into the meanings of the present great “history-making war." ...

It can hardly be supposed that I underrate the horrors of war. I have imagination enough and sympathy enough to follow almost as if I beheld it with my eyes, the great tragedy which has been unfolded in South Africa. The spirit of Jingoism is an epidemic of which I await the passing away more earnestly than we do that of any other plague. I deprecate, as I have always done, and as strongly as anyone can do, rowdyism in the form of violent opposition to free speech and freedom of meeting. It is as wholly unjustifiable, as it is unwise. Nothing tends more to the elucidation of truth than evidence and freedom of speech from all sides. Good works on many hands are languishing for lack of the funds and zeal needful to carry them on. The Public Press, and especially the Pictorial Press, fosters a morbid sentiment in the public mind by needlessly vivid representations of mere slaughter; to all this may be added (that which some mourn over most of all) the drain upon our pockets,—upon the country's wealth. All these things are a part of the great tribulation which is upon us. They are inevitable ingredients of the chastisement by war.

I see frequent allusions to the “deplorable state of the public mind,” which is so fixed on this engrossing subject, the war, that its attention cannot be gained for any other. I hear our soldiers called “legalized murderers,” and the war spoken of as a “hellish panorama,” which is a blight even to look upon.

But,—I am impelled to say it at the risk of sacrificing the respect of certain friends,—there is to me another view of the matter. It is this. In this present woe, as in all other earthly events, God has something to say to us,—something which we cannot receive if we wilfully turn away the eye from seeing and the ear from hearing....

It is good and necessary to protest against War; but at the same time, reason and experience teach that we must, with equal zeal, protest against other great evils, the accumulation of which makes for war and not for peace. War in another sense—moral and spiritual war —must be doubled, trebled, quadrupled, in the future, in order that material war may come to an end. We all wish for peace; every reasonable person desires it, every anxious and bereaved family longs for it, every Christian prays for it. But what Peace? [Is it] the Peace of God which we pray for? the Peace on Earth, which He alone can bring about? His hand alone, which corrects, can also heal. We do not and cannot desire the peace which some of those are calling for who dare not face the open book of present day judgment, or who do not wish to read its lessons! Such a peace would be a mere plastering over of an unhealed wound, which would break out again before many years were over....

My last word must be on behalf of the Natives. When, thirty years ago, a few among us were impelled to take up the cause of the victims of the modern white slavery in Europe, we were told that in our pleadings for principles of justice and for personal rights, we ought not to have selected a subject in which are concerned persons who may deserve pity, but who, in fact, are not so important a part of the human family as to merit such active and passionate sympathy as that which moved our group. To this our reply was: “We did not choose this question, we did not ourselves deliberately elect to plead for these persons. The question was imposed upon us, and once so imposed, we could not escape from the claims of the oppressed class whose cause we had been called to take up. And generally, (we replied,) the work of human progress has not consisted in protecting and supporting any outward forms of government, or the noble or privileged classes, but in undertaking the defence of the weak, the humble, of beings devoted to degradation and contempt, or brought under any oppression or servitude.”

It is the same now. My father was one of the energetic promoters of the Abolition of Slavery in the years before 1834, a friend of Clarkson and Wilberforce. The horror of slavery in every form, and under whatever name, which I have probably partly inherited, has been intensified as life went on. It is my deep conviction that Great Britain will in future be judged, condemned or justified, according to her treatment of those innumerable coloured races, heathen or partly Christianized, over whom her rule extends, or who, beyond the sphere of her rule, claim her sympathy and help as a Christian and civilizing power to whom a great trust has been committed.

It grieves me to observe that (so far as I am able to judge) our politicians, public men, and editors, (with the exception of the editors of the “religious press,”) Page 232 →appear to a great extent unaware of the immense imortance of this subject, even for the future peace and stability of our Empire, apart from higher interests. It will be “imposed upon them,” I do not doubt, sooner or later, as it has been imposed upon certain missionaries and others who regard the Divine command as practical and sensible men should do: “Go ye and teach all nations.” All cannot go to the ends of the earth; but all might cease to hinder by the dead weight of their indifference, and their contempt of all men of colour. Dr. Livingstone rebuked the Boers for contemptuously calling all coloured men Kaffirs, to whatever race they belonged. Englishmen deserve still more such a rebuke for their habit of including all the inhabitants of India, East and West, and of Africa, who have not European complexions, under the contemptuous title of “niggers.” Race prejudice is a poison which will have to be cast out if the world is ever to be Christianized, and if Great Britain is to maintain the high and responsible place among the nations which has been given to her.

“It may be that the Kaffir is sometimes cruel,” says one who has seen and known him,—“he certainly requires supervision. But he was bred in cruelty and reared in oppression—the child of injustice and hate. As the springbok is to the lion, as the locust is to the hen, so is the Kaffir to the Boer; a subject of plunder and leaven of greed. But the Kaffir is capable of courage and also of the most enduring affection. He has been known to risk his life for the welfare of his master’s family. He has worked without hope of reward. He has laboured in the expectation of pain. He has toiled in the snare of the fowler. Yet shy a brickbat at him!—for he is only a Kaffir!” However much the Native may excel in certain qualities of the heart, still, until purged of the poison of racial contempt, that will be the expression of the practical conclusion of the white man regarding him; “Shy a brickbat at him. He is only a nigger.”

A merely theoretical acknowledgment of the vital nature of this question,—of the future of the Native races and of Missionary work will not suffice. The Father of the great human family demands more than this.

“Is not this the fast that I have chosen?

To loose the bands of wickedness,

To undo the heavy burdens,

To let the oppressed go free,

And that ye break every yoke?”

(Isaiah lviii.6.)