The Cost of War by L. A. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Jul 21, 1904

The Cost of War

By L. A. S.

WAR is always the most expensive way of attaining the end sought by the successful party, and not always does it happen that the anticipated result is realized after the awful cost of war has been paid. The recent South African War may be cited as an illustration. At the time of that war it was commonly said, both in England and in Cape Colony that it would result in making South Africa a “white man’s country.” But we are now told that “the census which has just been completed does not bear out this expectation. In Cape Colony, Natal, the Orange River Colony, and the Transvaal, there are one million one hundred and fifteen thousand whites, a little more than four million native blacks and one hundred and one thousand East Indians. Compared with the census of 1891, this shows an increase for the blacks of nearly eighty per cent, while the whites in the same period have increased only about sixty per cent. In Cape Colony, where the actual number of whites is largest, the blacks outnumber them by more than three to one.”

Another and more surprising result of the war, if we may credit figures and statements given by the well-known English writer, W. T. Stead, in an article contributed to the Saturday Evening Post (Philadelphia), is that British supremacy in South Africa is no nearer to being established than before the war was begun. “The net result of the three years’ war” says this authority, “has been to establish beyond all gainsaying the fact that, in the contest between British South Africans and Dutch South Africans, the balance of strength is so overwhelmingly on the side of the latter, that if they were left to themselves the Boer supremacy would not be challenged.” The Uitlanders, who, under the Boer republic, complained that they were deprived of the franchise, are still waiting for the franchise. Attempts to settle the country with English colonists fail, because farming in South Africa is a laborious occupation, beset by such drawbacks as locusts and drouths. “The English will be, as they have been, mostly dwellers in towns, speculators in mines, tradesmen and managers of transport. The immense preponderance of the white men on the land will be in the future, as in the past, men of Dutch descent. The Boer cradle is constantly refilled. The old Continental sneer at the dimensions of English families has lost its point. It is the Boer, not the Britain, who has his quiver full of children.”

How much better in any case to settle international differences by arbitration, but especially when the fearful price of war is paid without securing the end that is sought. L. A. S.