WCP3623

Author’s draft (WCP3623.3524)

[1]1

No man less clever than Alfred Russell Wallace could have written so aggravating a reply as that with which he has fobbed me off in last week’s Clarion. I feel like the man wounded American in the civil war, who was asked by the pious man who [one word illegible] him whether he Was he Saved "Is this a time for conundrums?" as was the [word cross out illeg.] reply. Professor Wallace informs me tells me, in effect, that if I take independence & liberty in the sense [2] in which I dont mean them, and nobody means them — the sense in which I do mean them being all the time placed beyond all doubt or question by the context of events — then, if you please, my proposition is not true. It is like telling me that my dates are wrong according to the Julian calendar, or that my watch is wrong by the clock on Basle railway station. Surely it is a little late in the day, even if this were a suitable moment, to dispute about the definitions which have been correct & accepted among Socialists ever since Marx fixed them in his essay o half a century ago in his essays on the revolutions of 1848 & the [3] coup d’etat of 1851. When he pointed out that the republic, was the characteristic form of bourgeois government with its cults of the family, the nation, the safety of society (law & order) & so forth, was the characteristic form of bourgeois government, he was intelligible enough to everyone who wished to understand him, & who was intellectually capable of historical generalization who wished to understand him. I claim to be equally intelligible; and since Professor Wallace is beyond all doubt as capable of historical genera under no suspicion of intellectual incapacity, I ask him what he means in treating me in this fashion. Natural selection two times as ambiguous a term [4] on which a dozen different meanings might be forced without doing the English language any violence. Vaccination is an ambiguous word: for instance, it meant one thing to Jenner2 & means another to the Local Gov[ernment] Board today. What would Professor Wallace say to me if I met his essays on Natural Selection & vaccination by showing that it was possible to misunderstand them.

I repeat that the republicanism of President Kruger3, with its basis of individual liberty & national independence, is more so much more hostile to Socialism than the existing English forms of government, that if the reality of the will were simple enough to be the natural side of the Socialist is the [word crossed out illeg.] British side, and that [5] the Socialists who have raised the st anti-Socialist standard of middle Republicanism & Nationality we owe us an explanation instead of being, as they assume, in a position to demand an explanation from us. President Kruger has left them no excuse for misunderstanding him. In hie his Blo[e]mfontein Conference with Sir Alfred Milner4, he said & repeated that if we our demands seemed to him just as if the people such working on his farm had demanded that they should receive the title deeds (pre-Socialism; observe). Any Socialist would have [word illeg.] with him on that & told him that that[sic] transfer of title deeds from the owner to the worker was exactly what the twentieth century was going to mean, and that any [2 words crossed out illeg.] who ruler who thought he could treat a country as "my land" (President Kruger’s own [6] reiterated phrase) & its inhabitants as his farm servants, would go down before the march of social evolution; no matter how ungodly & capitalistic a form it might take. Por But poor Sir Alfred, whose part in the Conference was a miracle of folly, & incompetence, and Oxford donishness, quite agreed with the President in this, though whenever Uncle Paul said anything sensible, as he often did, our High Commissioner immediately began to exhausted himself in polite efforts to make the old gentleman understand how wrong & foolish he was, quite in the manner of Jowett scoring off an undergraduate. But it does [7] not follow, because Sir Alfred Milner can could not understand President Kruger or anybody or anything else, that we President Kruger was in the right from our point of view. It was just because Sir Alfred was as anti-Socialist as himself that the real issue between them never got raised.

The fact that with such a question bet in hand as this won, W. Hale5 spends a volume in mild speculations as to my state of mind, shows how little the Socialists have grasped the situation that is now unfolding itself all over the world; the question, that is, of Internationalism.

This is an author’s draft of the letter.
Edward Jenner (1749 — 1823), English physician, scientist and pioneer of the smallpox vaccine
Paul Kruger (1825 — 1904), State President of the South African Republic (Transvaal).
Alfred Milner (1854 — 1925), British statesman and colonial administrator.
William Bayard Hale[?] (1869 — 1924), American journalist.

Please cite as “WCP3623,” in Beccaloni, G. W. (ed.), Ɛpsilon: The Alfred Russel Wallace Collection accessed on 28 March 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/wallace/letters/WCP3623