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"To measure the South African War of 1899-1900 merely by the population of the two Boer Republics, would necessitate its consideration as an unimportant contest in comparison with the great international conflicts of the century. To measure it by the real power of the Dutch in South Africa, under present conditions, and by the principles involved in its inception and prosecution, makes it a struggle which rivals in importance the Crimean War, the American Civil War or the Franco-Prussian conflict. In the first of these, Great Britain, France and Sardinia united to resist the dangerous designs and aggressive policy of Russia which threatened their power in the Mediterranean and the British route to India through its intended seizure or acquisition of Constantinople. In the second, the United States was fighting a great conflict for national unity. In the third, Prussia averted a campaign of "On to Berlin" by speedy and successful military action.
All of these elements find a place in the South African War. The policy of President Kruger, President Steyn and the Afrikander Bund, of Cape Colony, has been developing for years into a dangerous and combined effort for the creation of a United Dutch South Africa and the seizure of Cape Town—one of the chief stations of British commercial and maritime power. Mr. Chamberlain precipitated matters, so far as the Cape Colony Dutch were concerned, by a policy of firmness to which they were unaccustomed at the hands of the Colonial Office and which, cautious and conciliatory as it was, forced the hand of the Transvaal President before his general policy was quite matured. As the diplomatic negotiations proceeded and the war itself developed it became a struggle for Imperial unity as truly and fully as was the American Civil War. Two great Colonies of the Empire were threatened, the principles of equal right and equal liberty upon which its entire self-governing portions have been built up and maintained were spurned, and the feeling of unity which has latterly grown so amazingly amongst its various countries was openly flouted by the treatment of the Uitlanders and the attack upon Cape Colony and Natal. Backed by the undoubted ability of President Kruger, the sentiment of racial unity amongst the Dutch of all South Africa, the swords and science of European officers and experts, the immense sums drawn from the Uitlanders and possibly from Europe, the armaments prepared during a long term of years with skill and knowledge, the characteristics of a people admirably adapted through both knowledge and experience for warfare on South African soil, the Boer cry of "On to Durban" was really more menacing to British interests and conditions of unpreparedness than was the cry of the Parisian populace, in 1870, to the Kingdom of Prussia. A war with France might not have been nearly as difficult or as serious a matter to Great Britain under existing conditions as the war with the Boer Republics has turned out to be.
The loss of South Africa, or the failure to assert British supremacy as the Paramount Power in that region, would not only have humiliated Great Britain in the eyes of rival nations everywhere and precipitated peril wherever aggressive foreign ambition could find a desirable opening, but it would have lost her the respect, the admiration or the loyalty of rising British nations in Australia and Canada; of lesser Colonies all over the world; of swarming millions of uncivilized races in Hindostan, China and Northern Africa. Its influence would have been a shock to the commercial and financial nerves of the world; a blow to the independence and liberties of the "little peoples" who now rest securely under the real or nominal guarantee of British power. In the Persian Gulf and on the borders of Afghanistan, upon the frontiers of Siam and the shores of the Bosphorus, in the waters of Australasia and on the coasts of Newfoundland, upon the banks of the mighty Nile and along the borders of Canada, the result would have come as the most menacing storm-cloud of modern history. The power of a great race to continue its mission of colonization, civilization and construction was involved; and would be again involved if any future and serious European intervention were threatened…"
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Amicalement
Armand
