An African Adventure Part 2

"The war was just a phase of world convulsion. It made the first rent in the universal structure. For years the trend of civilization was toward a super-Nationalism. It is easy to trace the stages. The Holy Roman Empire was a phase of Nationalism. That was Catholic. Then came the development of Nationalism, beginning with Napoleon. That was Protestant. Now began the building of water-tight compartments, otherwise known as nations. Germany represented the most complete development.

"But that era of 'my country,' 'my power,'--it is all a form of national ego,--is gone. The four great empires,--Turkey, Germany, Russia and Austria,--have crumbled. The war jolted them from their high estate. It started the universal cataclysm. Centuries in the future some perspective can be had and the results appraised.

"Meanwhile, we can see the beginning. The world is one. Humanity is one and must be one. The war, at terrible cost, brought the peoples together. The League of Nations is a faint and far-away evidence of this solidarity. It merely points the way but it is something. It is not academic formulas that will unite the peoples of the world but intelligence."

s.m.u.ts now turned his thought to a subject not without interest for America, for he said:

"The world has been brought together by the press, by wireless, indeed by all communication which represents the last word in scientific development. Yet political inst.i.tutions cling to old and archaic traditions. Take the Presidency of the United States. A man waits for four months before he is inaugurated. The inc.u.mbent may work untold mischief in the meantime. It is all due to the fact that in the days when the American Const.i.tution was framed the stagecoach and the horse were the only means of conveyance. The world now travels by aeroplane and express train, yet the antiquated habits continue.

"So with political parties and peoples, the British Empire included.

They need to be brought abreast of the times. The old pre-war British Empire, for example, is gone in the sense of colonies or subordinate nations cl.u.s.tering around one master nation. The British Empire itself is developing into a real League of Nations,--a group of partner peoples."

"What of America and the future?" I asked him.

"America is the leaven of the future," answered s.m.u.ts. "She is the life-blood of the League of Nations. Without her the League is stifled.

America will give the League the peace temper. You Americans are a pacific people, slow to war but terrible and irresistible when you once get at it. The American is an individualist and in that new and inevitable internationalism the individual will stand out, the American pre-eminently."

Throughout this particular experience at _Groote Schuur_ I could not help marvelling on the contrast that the man and the moment presented.

We walked through a place of surpa.s.sing beauty. Ahead brooded the black mystery of the mountains and all around was a fragrant stillness broken only by the quick, almost pa.s.sionate speech of this seer and thinker, animate with an inspiring ideal of public service, whose mind leaped from the high places of poetry and philosophy on to the hiving battlefield of world event. It seemed almost impossible that nine miles away at Capetown raged the storm that almost within the hour would again claim him as its central figure.

The s.m.u.ts statements that I have quoted were made long before the Presidential election in America. I do not know just what s.m.u.ts thinks of the landslide that overwhelmed the Wilson administration and with it that well-known Article X, but I do know that he genuinely hopes that the United States somehow will have a share in the new international stewardship of the world. He would welcome any order that would enable us to play our part.

No one can have contact with s.m.u.ts without feeling at once his intense admiration for America. One of his ambitions is to come to the United States. It is characteristic of him that he has no desire to see skysc.r.a.pers and subways. His primary interest is in the great farms of the West. "Your people," he once said to me, "have made farming a science and I wish that South Africa could emulate them. We have farms in vast area but we have not yet attained an adequate development."

I was amazed at his knowledge of American literature. He knows Hamilton backwards, has read diligently about the life and times of Washington, and is familiar with Irving, Poe, Hawthorne and Emerson. One reason why he admires the first American President is because he was a farmer.

s.m.u.ts knows as much about rotation of crops and successful chicken raising as he does about law and politics. He said:

"I am an eighty per cent farmer and a Boer, and most people think a Boer is a barbarian."

Despite his scholarship he remains what he delights to call himself, "a Boer." He still likes the simple Boer things, as this story will show.

During the war, while he was a member of the British War Cabinet and when Lloyd George leaned on him so heavily for a mult.i.tude of services, a young South African Major, fresh from the Transvaal, brought him a box of home delicacies. The princ.i.p.al feature of this package was a piece of what the Boers call "biltong," which is dried venison. The Major gave the package to an imposing servant in livery at the Savoy Hotel, where the General lived, to be delivered to him. s.m.u.ts was just going out and encountered the man carrying it in. When he learned that it was from home, he grabbed the box, saying: "I'll take it up myself." Before he reached his apartment he was chewing away vigorously on a mouthful of "biltong" and having the time of his life.

The contrast between s.m.u.ts and his predecessor Botha is striking. These two men, with the possible exception of Kruger, stand out in the annals of the Boer. Kruger was the dour, stolid, canny, provincial trader. The only time that his interest ever left the confines of the Transvaal was when he sought an alliance with William Hohenzollern, and that person, I might add, failed him at the critical moment.

Botha was the George Washington of South Africa,--the farmer who became Premier. He was big of body and of soul,--big enough to know when he was beaten and to rebuild out of the ruins. Even the Nationalists trusted him and they do not trust s.m.u.ts. It is the old story of the prophet in his own country. There are many people in South Africa today who believe that if Botha were alive there would be no secession movement.

The Boers who oppose him politically call s.m.u.ts "Slim Jannie." The Dutch word "slim" means tricky and evasive. Not so very long ago s.m.u.ts was in a conference with some of his countrymen who were not altogether friendly to him. He had just remarked on the long drought that was prevailing. One of the men present went to the window and looked out.

When asked the reason for this action he replied:

"s.m.u.ts says that there's a drought. I looked out to see if it was raining."

When you come to s.m.u.ts in this a.n.a.logy you behold the Alexander Hamilton of his nation, the brilliant student, soldier, and advocate. Of all his Boer contemporaries he is the most cosmopolitan. Nor is this due entirely to the fact that he went to Cambridge where he left a record for scholarship, and speaks English with a decided accent. It is because he has what might be called world sense. His career, and more especially his part at the Peace Conference and since, is a dramatization of it.

To the student of human interest s.m.u.ts is a fertile subject. His life has been a cinema romance shot through with sharp contrasts. Here is one of them. When leaders of the shattered Boer forces gathered in _Vereeniging_ to discuss the Peace Terms with Kitchener in 1902, s.m.u.ts, who commanded a flying guerilla column, was besieging the little mining town of O'okiep. He received a summons from Botha to attend. It was accompanied by a safe-conduct pa.s.s signed "D. Haig, Colonel." Later Haig and s.m.u.ts stood shoulder to shoulder in a common cause and helped to save civilization.

s.m.u.ts is more many-sided than any other contemporary Prime Minister and for that matter, those that have gone into retirement, that is, men like Asquith in England and Clemenceau in France. Among world statesmen the only mind comparable to his is that of Woodrow Wilson. They have in common a high intellectuality. But Wilson in his prime lacked the hard sense and the accurate knowledge of men and practical affairs which are among the chief s.m.u.ts a.s.sets.

Speaking of Premiers brings me to the inevitable comparison between s.m.u.ts and Lloyd George. I have seen them both in varying circ.u.mstances, both in public and in private and can attempt some appraisal.

Each has been, and remains, a pillar of Empire. Each has emulated the Admirable Crichton in the variety and multiplicity of public posts.

Lloyd George has held five Cabinet posts in England and s.m.u.ts has duplicated the record in South Africa. Each man is an inspired orator who owes much of his advancement to eloquent tongue. Their platform manner is totally different. Lloyd George is fascinatingly magnetic in and out of the spotlight while s.m.u.ts is more coldly logical. When you hear Lloyd George you are stirred and even exalted by his golden imagery. The sound of his voice falls on the ear like music. You admire the daring of his utterance but you do not always remember everything he says.

With s.m.u.ts you listen and you remember. He has no tricks of the spellbinder's trade. He is forceful, convincing, persuasive, and what is more important, has the quality of permanency. Long after you have left his presence the words remain in your memory. If I had a case in court I would like to have s.m.u.ts try it. His specialty is pleading.

Lloyd George seldom reads a book. The only volumes I ever heard him say that he had read were Mr. Dooley and a collection of the Speeches of Abraham Lincoln. He has books read for him and with a Roosevelt faculty for a.s.similation, gives you the impression that he has spent his life in a library.

s.m.u.ts is one of the best-read men I have met. He seems to know something about everything. He ranges from Joseph Conrad to Kant, from Booker Washington to Tolstoi. History, fiction, travel, biography, have all come within his ken. I told him I proposed to go from Capetown to the Congo and possibly to Angola. His face lighted up. "Ah, yes," he said, "I have read all about those countries. I can see them before me in my mind's eye."

One night at dinner at _Groote Schuur_ we had sweet potatoes. He asked me if they were common in America. I replied that down in Kentucky where I was born one of the favorite negro dishes was "'possum and sweet potatoes." He took me up at once saying:

"Oh, yes, I have read about ''possum pie' in Joel Chandler Harris'

books." Then he proceeded to tell me what a great inst.i.tution "Br'er Rabbit" was.

We touched on German poetry and I quoted two lines that I considered beautiful. When I remarked that I thought Heine was the author he corrected me by proving that they were written by Schiller.

Lloyd George could never carry on a conversation like this for the simple reason that he lacks familiarity with literature. He feels perhaps like the late Charles Frohman who, on being asked if he read the dramatic papers said: "Why should I read about the theatre. I _make_ dramatic history."

I asked s.m.u.ts what he was reading at the moment. He looked at me with some astonishment and answered, "Nothing except public doc.u.ments. It's a good thing that I was able to do some reading before I became Prime Minister. I certainly have no time now."

Take the matter of languages. Lloyd George has always professed that he did not know French, and on all his trips to France both during and since the war he carried a staff of interpreters. He understands a good deal more French than he professes. His widely proclaimed ignorance of the language has stood him in good stead because it has enabled him to hear a great many things that were not intended for his ears. It is part of his political astuteness. s.m.u.ts is an accomplished linguist. It has been said of him that he "can be silent in more languages than any man in South Africa."

Lloyd George is a clever politician with occasional inspired moments but he is not exactly a statesman as Disraeli and Gladstone were. s.m.u.ts has the unusual combination of statesmanship with a knowledge of every wrinkle in the political game.

Take his experience at the Paris Peace Conference. He was distinguished not so much for what he did, (and that was considerable), but for what he opposed. No man was better qualified to voice the sentiment of the "small nation." Born of proud and liberty-loving people,--an infant among the giants--he was attuned to every aspiration of an hour that realized many a one-time forlorn national hope. Yet his statesmanship tempered sentimental impulse.

In that gallery of treaty-makers Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and Wilson focussed the "fierce light" that beat about the proceedings. But it was s.m.u.ts, in the shadow, who contributed largely to the mental power-plant that drove the work. Lloyd George had to consider the chapter he wrote in the great instrument as something in the nature of a campaign doc.u.ment to be employed at home, while Clemenceau guided a steamroller that stooped for nothing but France. The more or less unsophisticated idealism of Woodrow Wilson foundered on these obstacles.

s.m.u.ts, with his uncanny sense of prophecy, foretold the economic consequences of the peace. Looking ahead he visualized a surly and unrepentant Germany, unwilling to pay the price of folly; a bitter and disappointed Austria gasping for economic breath; an aroused and indignant Italy raging with revolt--all the chaos that spells "peace"

today. He saw the Treaty as a new declaration of war instead of an antidote for discord. His judgment, sadly enough, has been confirmed. A deranged universe shot through with reaction and confusion, and with half a dozen wars sputtering on the horizon, is the answer. The sob and surge of tempest-born nations in the making are lost in the din of older ones threatened with decay and disintegration. It is not a pleasing spectacle.

s.m.u.ts signed the Treaty but, as most people know, he filed a memorandum of protest and explanation. He believed the terms uneconomic and therefore unsound, but it was worth taking a chance on interpretation, a desperate venture perhaps, but anything to stop the blare and bicker of the council table and start the work of reconstruction.

At Capetown he told me that for days he wrestled with the problem "to sign or not to sign." Finally, on the day before the Day of Days in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, he took a long solitary walk in the Champs Elysee, loveliest of Paris parades. Returning to his hotel he said to his secretary, Captain E. F. C. Lane, "I have decided to sign, but I will tell the reason why." He immediately sat down at his desk and in a handwriting noted for its illegibility wrote the famous memorandum.

III

What of the personal side of s.m.u.ts? While he is intensely human it is difficult to connect anecdote with him. I heard one at Capetown, however, that I do not think has seen the light of print. It reveals his methods, too.

When the Germans ran amuck in 1914 s.m.u.ts was Minister of Defense of the Union of South Africa. The Nationalists immediately began to make life uncomfortable for him. Balked in their attempt to keep the Union out of the struggle they took another tack. After the Botha campaign in German South-West Africa was well under way, a member of the Opposition asked the Minister of Defense the following question in Parliament: "How much has South Africa paid for horses in the field and the Nationalists sought to make some political capital out of an expenditure that they remounts?" The Union forces employed thousands of called "waste."

s.m.u.ts sent over to Army Headquarters to get the figures. He was told that it would take twenty clerks at least four weeks to compile the data.

"Never mind," was his laconic comment. The next day happened to be Question Day in the House. As soon as the query about the remount charge came up s.m.u.ts calmly rose in his seat and replied:

"It was exactly eight million one hundred and sixty-nine thousand pounds, ten shillings and sixpence." He then sat down without any further remark.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Photograph Copyright by Harris & Ewing_