AUTOBIOGRAPHY-Chesterton

all, perhaps, what began to repel me about the atmosphere of the adventure
was something insincere about the most normal part of the national claim; the
suggestion of something like a rescue of our exiled representatives, the
commercial citizens of Johannesburg, who were commonly called the
Outlanders. As this would have been the most sympathetic plea if it was
genuine, it was the more repulsive if it was hypocritical.
For this was the best case for the war; that if the Boers were fighting for
their country, the British were fighting for their countrymen. Only there was
rather a queer look about some of the portraits of their countrymen. It was
constantly asserted that an Englishman named Edgar had been murdered; but
no portrait of Edgar was published, because it happened that he was entirely
black. Other portraits were published; other Outlanders were paraded and they
were of other tints and shades. We began to guess that the people the Boers
called Outlanders were often people whom the British would call Outsiders.
Their names were symbolic as their noses. I remember waiting with a Pro-
Boer friend in the midst of a Jingo mob outside the celebrated Queen’s Hall
Meeting which ended in a free fight. My friend and I adopted a method of
patriotic parody or reductio ad absurdum. We first proposed three cheers for
Chamberlain, then three cheers for Rhodes, and then by degrees for more and
more dubious and demi-naturalised patriots. We actually did get an innocent
cheer for Beit. We got a more wavering cheer for Eckstein. But when it came
to our impulsive appeal to the universal popularity of Albu, the irony of our
intention was discovered; and the fight began. I found myself in a pugilistic
encounter with an Imperialistic clerk, whose pugilism was at least no more
scientific than my own. While this encounter (one of many other surrounding
conflicts) was proceeding, another Imperialist must have abstracted my watch;
the last I ever troubled to possess. He at any rate believed in the Policy of
Annexation.
I was called a Pro-Boer and, unlike some Pro-Boers, I was very proud of
the title. It expressed exactly what I meant much better than its idealistic
synonyms. Some intellectuals indignantly repudiated the term, and said they
were not Pro-Boers but only lovers of peace or pacifists. But I emphatically
was a Pro-Boer, and I emphatically was not a pacifist. My point was that the
Boers were right in fighting; not that anybody must be wrong in fighting. I
thought that their farmers were perfectly entitled to take to horse and rifle in
defence of their farms, and their little farming commonwealth, when it was
invaded by a more cosmopolitan empire at the command of very cosmopolitan
financiers. As no less an authority than Mr. Discobolus says in Lear’s
Nonsense Rhymes, I thought so then and I think so still. But this sort of
militant sympathy naturally separated those who thought as I did from our
colleagues who were mere anti-militarists. The consequence was not
unimportant to me personally. It was that I found I belonged to a minority of a