The Southern Cross. PUBLISHED WEEKLY. INVERCARGILL: SATURDAY, JUNE 7 Declaration of Peace.

Southern Cross, Volume 10, Issue 10, 7 June 1902, Page 8

The Southern Cross. PUBLISHED WEEKLY. INVERCARGILL: SATURDAY, JUNE 7 Declaration of Peace.

The welcome tidings reached the colony on Monday last that the war in South Africa had ceased—that the great Empire of which we are a part was once more at peace. The news was received with demonstrations of delight from one end of New Zealand to the other. As we had helped the Motherland to the best of our ability in the hour of peril, so now we rejoiced with her people everywhere in the cessation of hostilities and the declaration of peace —a peace hardly won, a peace with honour. A summary of its terms has been cabled, and from this it will be seen Hhat Britain has played the part of a generous foe. The Dutch language, we are told, is to be used in the courts, arms may be retained by the Boers for protection, and military occupation is to cease when selfgovernment is substituted. No special tax will be levied on account of the war, but a loan of three millions sterling is to be raised for re-stocking farms. Rebels will be tried according to the laws of their respective colonies ; there will be no death, penalty, but rank and file will be subjected to life-long disfranchise-

ment. It is further stated that prisoners and burghers outside of Africa will, on declaring themselves the King’s subjects, be returned to South Africa as soon as transport can be provided and trieans of subsistence assured. They will not be deprived of liberty or property or be prosecuted, except for acts contrary to the usages of war, and those concerned in the latter offences will be courtmartialled. It is no wonder that even some of Britain’s hostile Continental critics are constrained to speak approvingly of the terms of peace. They almost disarm criticism, and will go far to re-assure our late foes that the sinister designs with which Britain was credited bad no foundation in fact. Many of them, it may be taken for granted, would never have taken up arras but for the misrepresentations so industriously circulated by the lying Leyds and his journalistic and other hirelings. So far as the British nation is concerned, t&ere is but one hope, and that is that out of the hideous welter there may rise a new and better South Africa —one in which the inhabitants, whatever their nationality, shall eventually possess that civil and religious liberty the maintenance of which is so dear to our hearts, and which has done so much to keep Britain’s sons in the van of progress. Mingled with the strain of exaltation and delight there has been a note of a different kind. This found apt expression in the address of Captain Watson, one of the speakers at the rotunda on Monday last, when he said —‘‘ Let us pray God that the peace may be a lasting, an endurinsr one, and that never again may Boer and Briton face one another with rifle and cannon, but unite in one long and sustained effort to blot out the memories of the pasL” The war was none of Britain’s seeking, however much the unfortunate Jamieson Raid may have told against that view, and now that it is happily ended her statesmen are evidently anxious to adopt the policy that Abraham Lincoln so nobly expressed in one of bis messages to Congress when referring to the rebellion in the Southern States “ With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for bis widow and his children —to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.