Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/303

Rh 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