Excerpt from Imperialism in South Africa, Vol. 4
The following papers were written before in England we had begun to think much about the Boers, when we were preparing to crush Cetewayo and his people, and when the general opinion appeared to be that it was a great and blessed work to promote Christianity and civilisation by shooting down the uncivilised and heathen Kaffirs - that is, such as our traders bad not killed off with Cape smoke, the most infamous liquor under the sun. We succeeded. We crushed the Zulus, and, flushed with glory - that peculiar glory which results from a strong man knocking down a weak one - our gallant troops returned home, leaving behind them desolation and death. The bill of costs was rather heavy, but that is paid, not by the men who make the wars, nor by the men who are so ready to fight in them, but chiefly by poor writers like myself, farmers ruined by bad weather and American competition, small shopkeepers, clerks with limited incomes and unlimited families, country parsons who find it exceedingly difficult to bring up their children in the way of life in which Providence has been pleased to place them, widows who have known better days, and that enormous section of the middle class who in these happy times find themselves being ground to dust like wheat in a flour-mill, between the British artizan on one side and the great capitalist on the other, and who cling to what they call respectability as passionately as any ancient spinster to the love souvenirs of a gay and giddy youth. It is upon these and such as these falls the burden of a glory of which they know nothing but the cost. Of course I pleaded in vain.
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