We cannot hold ourselves blameless in the matter. 'The evil
that men do lives after them,' and it has been told in this small
superficial sketch where we have erred in the past in South Africa.
On our hands, too, is the Jameson raid, carried out by Englishmen
and led by officers who held the Queen's Commission; to us, also,
the blame of the shuffling, half-hearted inquiry into that most
unjustifiable business. These are matches which helped to set the
great blaze alight, and it is we who held them. But the fagots
which proved to be so inflammable, they were not of our setting.
They were the wrongs done to half the community, the settled
resolution of the minority to tax and vex the majority, the
determination of a people who had lived two generations in a
country to claim that country entirely for themselves. Behind them
all there may have been the Dutch ambition to dominate South
Africa. It was no petty object for which Britain fought. When a
nation struggles uncomplainingly through months of disaster she may
claim to have proved her conviction of the justice and necessity of
the struggle.
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