Sir William Butler

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 43, 22 October 1903, Page 2

Sir William Butler

White men were engaged in three wars when Mark Twain, in January, 1901, published in an American magazine his witty and sarcastic ' Salutation of tho nineteenth century to the twentieth.' ' I bring) you,' said he, ' the stately matron named Christendom, returning bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored from the pirate raid in Kiao Chow, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Philippines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her soap and a towel, but hide the looking glass.' * Africa has been spoken of as the grave of military reputations. The saying has proved emphatically true in the case of the ill-starred campaign against the little Boer republics. But incapable as many officers proved themselves, the report of the War Commission seems to show, in the words of a Scottish contemporary, that 1 they were marvels of foresight and genius compared with the Cabinet at Home.' Perhaps the most remarkable figure that appeared before the Commission was the \etaran Catholic general, Sir William Butler. He was bullied, persecuted, calumniated, and forced to retire from South Africa because he was too manly a man to allow himself to become the puppet and tool of the capitalist ring that engineered the war. Sir William waited patiently—he lay to and rode out the gale. His justification has come in with a rush, and the War Inquiry has proved him to be the one man that was fitted to deal with the situation that was created by the Rhodesian plotters in South Africa. The London ' Star • has, in a recent issue, the following editorial note on the manly and patriotic action of Sir William Butler :— 'It is something like a shock to those who retain their faith in England's honor and the prevalent integrity of her statesmen to read that uncompromising indictment of the Ministry which General Sir , William Butler launched at the War Commission. Here are the words of a man who had grown grey in the harness of the State, a soldier who had known South Africa for twenty-five years : ' "My. position was this : ' Let my chief at the War Office tell me what I am to do and I will do it, but I cannot be dragged by syndicates in South Africa, and I will not obey them ; they are not my chiefs. They brought us into terrible trouble in 1895, and then left us in the lurch.' I refused to have anything to say or do with them, and they turned on me the press which they commanded " (Qi3,591). ' For England all ; for the syndicates nothing. That Avas the gallant soldier's determination, and unflinchingly he carried it through. Silenced by Mr. Chamberlain, forced to resign by Sir A. Milner, boycotted by the Cabinet, bowed out by Lord Lansdowne, slandered by

the " kept " press of the syndicate, hooted by the mob at Bristol, publicly attacked in his Edinburgh speech by Mr. Chamberlain, refused permission to defend himself by Mr. Brodrick, this old hero has won a moral triumph greater than all the SpionTCops and Paardebergs could give him. It was his sin that he warned his country of the pitfalls before her, of the vultures waiting her loved ones, and for this England allowed him to be hunted down to obloquy.'