The Writings of Carl Schurz/To William Vocke, December 5th, 1901
TO WILLIAM VOCKE
I regret I cannot be present at the meeting[1] to which you invite me and must ask you to be content with a few words in writing. I am not an Anglophobe. On the contrary, I have always gratefully appreciated and admired the great things achieved by the English people for liberty and civilization. All the more do I deprecate and deplore, not only for the sake of the suffering victims of their power, but also for the sake of the English people themselves, the evil deeds with which the British Government is at present defying the judgment of mankind.
I shall not go into the history of the Boer war, but confine myself to what we now see before us. When the Spanish General Weyler cooped up the families of the insurgent Cubans in his reconcentrado camps and subjected them to indescribable miseries, a wave of hot indignation swept over our country at what we called a barbarous atrocity. When we now see the British engaged in inflicting like miseries upon the old men and the women and children of the Boers in a manner even more cruel and with results even more dreadful and revolting—can we, as just and humane men, call this by any other name?
We are told that the Boers in general are less civilized than many other people. Is that a justification of their treatment? The same might have been said of the Swiss when in olden times those rude mountaineers, the Boers of the Alps, valiantly defended their liberty and independence on the bloody fields of Morgarten, Sempach, Granson and Murten, against the superior civilization of Austria and Burgundy. But the world has long been agreed to call them heroes and to celebrate their deeds in legend and song. What is, morally, the difference between the heroic Swiss of old and the struggling Boers of to-day who are writhing under the heel of an oppressive and overwhelming Power?
But we are asked: “What are you going to do about it?” Whatever—speaking from the point of view of international policy—whatever we may be unable or unwilling to do, one thing, at least, we certainly may do. We may give voice to our sense of justice and our human sympathies. We may help in manifesting the judgment of civilized mankind upon what is going on so that those responsible for what is being done in South Africa as well as their apologists may understand it. They should be made to know that not only habitual adversaries of England but many of her friends who gladly testify to the true glories of her history, who want their own Governments to maintain with her relations of peace and hearty good-will, and who wish her the fullest measure of happiness and prosperity in all things righteous, witness with shame and abhorrence this spectacle of a great Power that claims to stand in the foremost rank of civilized and liberty-loving nations, slaughtering a little people, men, women and children, because they do what the best in the history of the world have done: hold fast with indomitable spirit to their national independence, and struggle on for the free possession of their homes.
I am one of those who heartily rejoiced at the subsidence in this country of the old and more or less unreasoning prejudice against England, and I have often publicly said so. I witnessed with sincerest satisfaction the disappearance from our popular oratory of the cheap trick of “twisting the British lion's tail,” and I hailed with joy the growth of a real friendship between the two nations. But Englishmen should not indulge in any delusion about this: deep down in their hearts the great masses of the American people cherish a profound sympathy for the Boers in their struggles and sufferings. What they condemned when done by the Spaniard in Cuba, they do not approve when done by the British in South Africa. And if there be anything apt to revive the old anti-British feeling in this Republic, it is the terrible spectacle presented by the Boer war.
- ↑ A pro-Boer mass-meeting in Chicago, Dec. 8, 1901.