leyds-70-7138.pdf created from original pamphlet in the WJ Leyds Collection held in the Africana Section of the Stellenbosch University Library and Information Service.Statement submitted by Mr. C.A.V. Conybeare regarding Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary, whom he believes is a traitor to the best interests of this Country and that the dishonesty, duplicity, and chicanery of his conduct throughout makes him mainly and directly responsible for the Anglo-Boer War

Conybeare, C. A. V. (Charles Augustus Vansittart), 1853-1919

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CHAMBERLAIN'S WAR, By C. A . V . CONYBEARE. BELIEVING that all War, not absolutely and without any alternative necessary, is a crime, and that any State man who can be proYed to have brought so great an evil upon his Country by unworthy or dishonest methods, by reckless and inflammatory language or by blundering incompetence, de erves the severest punishment which can be meted out to him by his fellow citizens, I submit the following statement regarding Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary, for which I challenge contradiction and disproof. I belieYe every count in the indictment to be capable of the cleare t proof. On some points indeed, " there is suspicion which amounts to knowledge but not to proof that you can bring forward in a Court of Law "-to adopt Mr. Chamberlain's own words respecting the alleged Boer Conspiracy. Bu; there is this difference between his case and theirs ; that while his suspicion against the Boers has been dispelled by facts, the suspicion against himself rests upon documentary evidence, which is known to exist, which he ha caused to be suppressed, and which he refuses to produce. And this suspicion is deepened and confirmed by the letters presently referred to (see Note). Mr. Chamberlain is mainly and directly responsible !or the War; for the horrible suffering and slaughter it is causing; for the disasters and loss of prestige which it has already brought upon the Empire; for the vas financial and military burdens which it will impose npon the taxpayers of this Country; and for the well-nigh insoluble problems, that any scheme for the restoration of order out of the weltering chaos into which he has wantonly plunged South Africa, mu t involve. The lo s of prestige already sustained may be guaged by the following from the Paris correspondent of the Time , January 17th. "Whatever happens henceforth, the prestige of England abroad is undergoing a fearful crisis, and it will not be long before the attitude of an important portion of Europe will prove to England how serious this loss of prestige is." Mr. Chamberlain was implicated in and assisted the Rbodes-Jameson Conspiracy of 1895. He conspired with the Chartered Company to pack the South African Committee appointed by the House of Commons "to enquire into the origin and circumstances" of the Raid ; and joined in hushing up the most vital point in the inquiry, viz., the Complicity of the Colonial Office, and in suppressing the Evidence tending to incriminate himself. Mr. Chamberlain signed the report of the Committee condemning Mr. Rhodes for" subsidising or organising and stimulating an armed insurrection" in the Transvaal. He afterwards lavished upon him in the House of Commons a fulsome eulogy in which he declared " there existed nothing which affected Mr, Rhodes' personal character as a man of honor." On the 19th October, 1899, he stated a deliberate falsehood to the House of Commons when he said " I presented myself for examination to that Com-mittee. I told them what I kneu!' The fact being that he twice entered the witness box, on each occasion merely to explain away the evidence of Mr. Rhodes' emissaries ; and that he said never a word about the correspondence which had passed between his office and Mr. Hawkesley (Mr. Rhodes' solicitor); or of the cablegrams between Mr. Rhodes and his London agents, which had been submitt~d to him by Mr. Hawkesley. Mr. Labouchere states in Truth (January 18th):-" It is no secret that Mr. Ha.wkesley had placed the correspondence in the hands of an 1\I.P., who was pledged to read it to the House of Commons if Mr. Chamberlain said one word against Mr. Rhodes. Nothing in all the Dreyfus trials was so sea.ndalous." Recently a further batch of letters, all tending to corroborate the " suspicion amounting to knowledge " that Mr. Chamberlain was incriminated, has been published by a Belgian newspaper. These have not been disavowed or denied. And by an almost universal conspiracy of silence on the part of the English press, they have been ignored, and scarcely a word has been allowed to filter through of the sensation which their publication has caused on the Continent. If public policy in 1897 necessitated (as the conspirators pleaded) the suppression of the Hawkesley correspondence-public policy and the National Honor to-day call yet more loudly for a thorough investigation. Mr. Chamberlain in October, 1897, gratuitously and recklessly revived the Suzerainty Controversy 13 years after it had been disposed of by a deli-berate bargain between this Country and the Transvaal, in which, to quote Lord Salisbury, " in order to get that hated word Suzerainty out of his Convention, President Kruger made considerable Territorial and other Concessions." And in the words of Sir Edward Clarke, Lord Salisbury's late Solicit<>r-General, "For any British minister since 1884, to assert that this Country had a Suzerainty over the Transvaal, is not only a statement made in defiance of fact, but also a breach of National Faith." Yet this dishonest and fraudulent claim Mr. Chamberlain again insisted upon, in order to force War upon the Boers, in his dispatch of the 28th August last, when he found that President Kruger had practically conceded all the .Franchise demands, which he had hitherto been putting forward as a blind to conceal his ulterior designs ; and when be found that the remaining s difference between President Kruger and himself was so infinitesimal (in his own words " we accepted at least nine-tenths of the whole . • . I do not think the remaining one-tenth was worth War") that even with his chicanery and duplicity he could not have forced on the War, upon so flimsy and frivolous a. pretence. During the prolonged diplomatic controversy with President Kruger last Summer, Mr. Chamberlain misled the House of Commons and duped the Country, by deliberate misrepresentation of facts, by suppression and garbling of important Dispatches, and by inflaming the Jingo spirit on both sides with abusive speeches in denunciation of President Kruger. And yet he assured the House of Commons in October that he had all along been most sincerely anxious for peace. Having thus gained his object-which was War-he now sets up a justification for his crime in the pretended discovery of a vast Conspiracy on the part of the Cape Dutc~ (embracing our own Colonists and the Orange Free State as well as the Boers) to oust the British from South Africa--a Mare's-nest for which there is not a shred of evidence or an atom of foundation; any more than for that other fabrication, to which the Rev. Hugh Price Hughes hns lent the sanction of his world-wide authority, and which is echoed in the speeches of Mr. Chamberlain's Colleagues, Lord Salisbury and Sir M. Hicks-Beach, that the Transvaal had been arming to attack our Colonies for years before the Raid. Mr. Chamberlain is further directly responsible for all our disaster in the Field. For having been advised long before the outbreak of hostiliti s by Sir Wm. Butler, the Commander-in-Chief at the Cape, that in the event of war 100,000 troops would be required for the Invasion of the Transvaal and 20,000 to hold the line of the Tugela. River, he recalled that gallant officer under circumstances which exposed him to the most violent and unfair attacks by the Yellow press (from which, needless to say, Mr. Cham-berlain took no steps to shield him), rejected his advice, and endeavoured to get Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman and the Liberal Opposition in the House of Commons to assent to the dispatch of a. handful of 10,000 men to Natal avowedly to bluff the Boers, who (as Mr. Balfour has informed u ') the Government, in their childlike ignorance, had no~ the least idea wouhi face them in the field. For the above reasons (amongst others) I charge against Mr. Cham-berlain that he is a. Traitor to the best interests of this Country, that the dishonesty, duplicity, and chicanery of his conduct throughout make him unworthy of the confidence of the Country and that he ha.s disgraced the fair name or England. And I hold that it is the duty of every Patriotic Citizen to demand a. full and thorough investiga,ion into his alleged complicity with the Rhodes-Jameson Conspiracy. OTB JU: • BJiilt.-i1Wr ., .. 1818 • ... .... ..... ,....., - ........ DoiDr all poBble k) _... M ...U M fJhadilnll DGIDIIMIIIo BA.WDSLB'r '10 J'.AJBI'niLD.-..f.,.., 111, 1898. 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Chamberlain's war

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Chamberlain's war

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