'A Miners' War'

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIII, Issue 12, 23 March 1905, Page 2

'A Miners' War'

'Way back in 1856 Disraeli damned the authors of the bungling Crimean campaign by indirectly labelling them with an epithet that will endure. In a snmewhat roundabout way he hinted that, instead of being the vindicators of international order, they had degraded themsel-

ves into becoming the gladiators of history. John Bright was hooted off platforms and pelted as a ' traitor ' because he raised his voice against that wretched campaign of the thousand blunders. Well, time has amply justified him. And he lived to see the day when the jingoes who hosed him with journalistic \itriol in 1554 would not dare) to set up a defence of the Crimean war A similar fate befel the jingo fury that danced its wild and insane carmagnole around the bh.ndering three years' war in South Africa. Mr. Chamberlain voiced the jingo pretence of the time when, at Cannodk Chase, in October, 1900, he declared : • This is a miners' war.' The worl. 1 knows better now. It knows that the South Afiican war was fought chiefly in the interests of the hook-nosed foreign magnates of the Stock Exchange, and that the good red English and Irish and Scottish amd Colonial blood that dyed the veldt was no more shed for uhe working miner tnan for the mam in the moon. The London ' Morning Leader ' of a recent date, in republisihing an old cartoon, shows that the situation o n the Rand has in no way improved for the white man during the past twelve months. The Government Emigrants' Information Office (Lonfdon) has just issued a circular which says : ' There is a considerable amount of distress in the Trans v a al. There is no demand for white miners, of whom there are large numbers on the spot without work.' Well, 'no white man need supply ' while there are 30,000 imported Ch ! nese seifs to do the work. The 'N.Z. Tablet' was, perhaps, the only newspaper in New Zealand that, amidst the rushing folly of the jingo fever, kept its feet warm and its head cool and reatt aright the purpose of the war and tore the mask off the thin pretence that the sword was drawn to enable sundry British subjects to expedite the transference of their allegiance from Queen Victoria to Oom Pail. The sword was scarcely sheathed when events that more than filly justified our contention, came pouring in at the rate of a mile a minute. Some of our erstwhile Australasian jingo journals have come at last to frankly see and say the ob\ious truth regarding the Transv.aal. The Melbourne ' Age,' for instance, was one of the journals that helped to raise tlhe warheat to tihe temperature of an electric furnace. Yet, enly a few weeks ago, it took heart to say :— ' Theie is very little more freedom to-day in the TransA aal for an unattached son of the British Empire than there was when Kruger played the tyrant in Pretoria. If true liberty consists in that condition of society in which a man, before being a foe, has lea\e to speak the thing he will, there is no freedom under Lord Milner's rule in the Transvaal. . . But that the national honor and interests were imolved in preserving South Africa under the British -flag, the Transvaal and the Orange River State were really better oti under Dutch rule than they are now under British. This is a hard saying. It is one which raises a blush on the cheek of a citizen of the Empire. But it it? absolutely true.' The Melbourne 'Ad\ccate' is right when it says: 'We are all pro-Boers now.' And in the front-rank are some of the very journals that, in the wild days of the war, ' potired out execrations without stint upon all those who sought to allay the blood-thirst ' which they did .their best to foster.