Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/304

280 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.