05 AUGUST 1899
Mr. Timothy Healy, M.P., is at present grievously agitated over the woes of the uitlanders of the Transvaal and the suggested opening of Mountjoy-square to the people of Dublin. Everyone in the metropolis knows why the Daily Nation wants to uitlanderise the Dublin people in perpetuity, but possibly they are unable to account for Mr. Healy’s appearance as a British Jingo. The explanation is simple. There exists a gentleman named John Morrogh, sometime a member of the Irish Parliamentary Party and one of the African crowd euphemistically termed ‘speculators.’ Mr. Morrogh is a devoted Britisher and a Healyite. The Irishmen of the Rand have conferred on him the title of Union-Jack Morrogh. He pulls the strings and the figure at Westminster works.
There are, of course, some slight grievances in South Africa outside the Transvaal, but these have no concern for Mr. Healy. Cecil Rhodes is alleged to have boasted that he bought the Irish Parliamentary Party for £10,000. I don’t know whether he did or did not, but I know that every British Africander believes he did. The I.P.P. voted for the Charter, anyhow, and the slaughter of the Matabili and the peaceful, industrious, inoffensive Mashonas they are partly responsible for. However, the Irish members can say that the interests of those eminent sympathisers with Irish Nationality, Rhodes, Beit, and Rochfort Maguire, were well served.
But, as I said, there are a few grievances in Africa which any one of the gentlemen who suffer for Ireland night after night in the British House of Commons might raise without doing himself any moral or intellectual damage. It is astonishing, when I come to think of it, how fairly the Transvaal compares with the Cape Colony and Rhodesia. There is, for instance, no slavery in Oom Paul’s country. Will any doughty Irish member of the British Parliament kill an idle moment by inquiring from the Colonial Secretary whether British humanity did not abolish slavery (black) sixty years ago; whether British justice did not defraud the Dutch farmers out of their compensation-money; whether British hypocrisy did not re-erect slavery in Griqualand West under the name of ‘The Compound System’; and whether British civilisation does not maintain and defend that system as just and necessary? I do not doubt the Colonial Secretary’s reply when it would appear in cold type in the South African papers would astonish the natives.
I do not say any Irish member will be so impolite to the British Government as to compel one of its Ministers to lie for the good of his country; but were there such a person he might inquire further the number of natives done to death yearly under this system and the precise meaning of the Glen Grey Act. And when the Colonial Secretary had, in the manner of British statesmen, answered these questions, this remarkable Irish member might further question him, Whether there is a large number of white persons employed in Kimberley, under the British flag; whether these persons have any civil rights and franchises, and if so what they are and under what circumstances are they exercised? It is really time something was done for the oppressed uitlanders of Kimberley
If my Irish member were not tired by this time I would suggest to him to seek for information about the I.B.D. (illicit diamond buying) Law, Whether there is any more infamous law in existence in any part of the world; whether it has been used for the stamping-out of political opponents by the De Beers Company; whether there are not at the present moment white men working out sentences of penal servitude on the Breakwater at Capetown on whose persons or in whose houses diamonds were planted by the secret-service agents of Rhodes and his co-directors.
I have grown tired of reading the hoary-headed falsehoods about the Transvaal which are dished up every morning in the Press. Once I used to smile at them, but now they make me yawn. The only time I smiled at an item of Transvaal news recently was when I read the names of the speakers at the ‘great uitlanders’ meeting’ in Johannesburg. There were eleven orators and six of them were Jews. Now the Jew may be a very decent person in other lands, but in the Transvaal he lives by murder, robbery, swindling, amalgam-buying and illicit drink-selling. Three-fifths of the crime of Johannesburg are committed by Jews, but they are banded there, from the highest to the lowest, in a secret organisation which the police are almost powerless against. ‘I would believe the word of a savage kafir before I would the oath of a Jew,’ declared the Chief Magistrate of Johannesburg from the Bench last year. It is impossible for innocent people like the Irish to understand what Jewish dominance means.
But what member of the British Parliament will speak up for the oppressed white men of Kimberley—British Kimberley—where every man fears his fellow and no man dare speak his thoughts?
IER.