The Feilding Star. Oroua & Kiwitea Counties Gazette WEDNESDAY, MAY 22, 1907. Boer Loyalty.

Feilding Star, Volume I, Issue 272, 22 May 1907, Page 2

The Feilding Star. Oroua & Kiwitea Counties Gazette WEDNESDAY, MAY 22, 1907. Boer Loyalty.

Some surprise has been expressed in ill-informed circles at the declarations of loyalty to the Empire by the new Transvaal Government, who again possess a monopoly of political power over one of the most prolific gold-producing districts of the world, evidently caused by the notion that the only people who possess a monopoly of that virtue are the descendants of men and women who 1 have belonged to England for hundreds of years. Such a narrow view is ridiculous, for history has taught us that most men worth their salt exhibit the greatest loyalty to the country of their adoption, and that, given the rights and privileges of the land they have made homes for their families in, there is no greater advocate of the rule of order and no stronger supporter of wise administration than he who has made ' his own the citizenship of another ' nation. With one exception, and that is the man who goes to a coun- ; try merely to exploit it for moneymaking purposes, so that he can return to a land he is more fond of, and live there in luxury. From that , point of view, it is the mine-owning capitalist who is the alien in South Africa, and who is more likely, to exploit the Transvaal purely with an eye to his own pecuniary profit, regardless of the consequences to the land or the people who have the best right to it. For that reason the Boer war was condemned by everyone who had studied the subject deeply, with an unbiassed mind, as ' an outrage on modern civilised meth- ! ods, but as the ignorant and those who had their own little games to , serve outnumbered these by ten thousand to one, blood was shed, homes were decimated, ruin was scattered \ broadcast and money was wasted like water — to enable the country to be handed back to Boer rule, the only possible course, having the interests ' of the Empire, the settlers, and the Transvaal in view. That there was a medium course possible between a continuance of the old Boer rule and war is undoubtedly the fact, and the greatest blots on the British administration undoubtedly is — as it was at the time of the American war — that 4he statesmen in the Homeland possess too small an outlook, too circumscribed a vision, where Britain's great colonial possessions are concerned.