"The Money Trust" Part 1. Chapter 9 from "Our Country, Then and Now"

"Overview," "The Second Boer War"

Serialization of selections from my book Our Country, Then and Now continues with the cooperation of my publisher, Clarity Press. Today we have the first installment of Chapter 9, “The Money Trust.”

The previous chapter, “Rule Britannia,” explained the 500-year rise of Great Britain, its ascent to world dominance by the 19th century, and its late-19th-century rivalry with the rising power of Germany. This lengthy process culminated in the decision by diamond/gold magnate Cecil Rhodes and his henchman Lord Nathaniel Rothschild to use the wealth of South Africa to create a “secret society” to “recover the United States of America for the British Empire.”

Next to come would be Britain’s project of launching a century of world wars, with US help, in order to annihilate Germany, then Russia, as the last standing opponents to British global power. Capturing of the US as accessory to the crime would be accomplished by financial means; namely by using the US Money Trust, headed by J.P. Morgan and the Rockefellers, to create the Federal Reserve. This would allow US banks, in conjunction with the Bank of England, to supply Britain with the immense monetary sums needed to launch and carry out World War I, then called “The Great War.”

To move ahead with its plans, Britain had to complete the conquest and takeover of South Africa. This was accomplished through the Second Boer War, which is the topic of today’s installment.

Overview

By the end of the 19^th century, many people in America and Europe had no doubt that humanity was facing a bright future. Much of this had to do with technology. In his publicity for the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris, French commercial artist Jean-Marc Côté predicted transatlantic air travel in balloon gondolas, flying automobiles with flapping wings, videoconferencing, robotic barbers and salon workers, and use of the newly-discovered radium to heat houses, among other future innovations.

While automation has come a long way since 1900, though maybe not as far as Côté predicted, our response today may be, “So what?” Has technology contributed to making people truly happier? Have material and medical advancement made up for over a century of the most devastating wars in history and continually rising environmental pollution, etc.— to say nothing of overwhelming personal anxiety?

These are some of the questions we’ll now be exploring.

By the first decade of the 1900s, the world had been neatly divided up among the European powers and their colonial empires. White Europeans seemed to be reigning supreme, though off in the jungles, while ransacking dark peoples’ resources, they often collided with each other.

By now, the US had gotten into the colonizing act. Soon the entire continental US would be divided into forty-eight states, with Indians, blacks, and most immigrants placed at the bottom. A brand-new central bank, the Federal Reserve, which bankers had been agitating about for decades and which should have ended those pesky financial panics, is soon to be created.

Life is good, right? The US was exploding economically, particularly its steel industry. The behemoth was US Steel, controlled by banker J.P. Morgan. The US government tried to break up US Steel at the same time it was going after Standard Oil, but failed. From 1899 to 1908, led by the big corporations and trusts, US economic growth averaged a staggering 14.2 percent per year.

The US was doing so well that it was becoming a creditor, rather than a debtor nation. One of its borrowers was Great Britain. The purpose of their borrowing? To prosecute the Second Boer War.

The Second Boer War

The governments of Europe were now preparing for the biggest war in history—World War I—in which forty million people would die over a four-year period. Every nation accepted war as a routine factor in how they did business. But an industrial-sized war would be somewhat novel.

Not only would the US become involved in the war, its intervention on the side of an exhausted British-led alliance against a just-as-exhausted Germany and its allies would prove decisive. Then, twenty years later, everyone would decide to do it again. Understanding that the Second Boer War was one of the preludes to World War I, then World War II, helps us to grasp the part played by Cecil Rhodes in his ambition to “recover” the US for the British Empire.

But now a decisive new element appeared on the scene: mechanized warfare. The first advanced manifestation of the application of modern industry to killing people was the invention of the machine gun. The premier example was the Maxim gun, invented in 1884 by an American, Hiram Stevens Maxim. How was its production financed?

Niall Ferguson writes:

“When the Maxim Gun Company was established in November 1884, Lord Rothschild was on its board. In 1888 his bank financed the 1.9 million-pound merger of the Maxim Company with the Nordenfelt Guns and Ammunition Company.” [i]

Thus, not only were the Rothschilds invested in diamonds and gold, they also financed the weaponry to allow the British to seize and profit from the potential wealth. We are also seeing, if not the birth, at least the infancy of the military industrial complex—and its connections with big finance.

With the Maxim gun, the Europeans had what they needed to subdue Africa, and the British were quick to put it to use. We have already seen how Cecil Rhodes, with Nathaniel Rothschild’s money, gained control of the South African diamond mining industry. In 1886, after the world’s largest deposit of gold was unearthed at Witwatersrand in the Transvaal, Rhodes and Rothschild moved quickly to dominate that too.

But first they had to deal with the Matabele Kingdom, whose land lay beyond the Limpopo River, where more gold fields would be found. Rhodes had gained mining rights for his Rothschild-financed United Concessions Company, but hostilities broke out when the Matabele king, Lobengula, balked at what seemed to be a complete British takeover. At the Battle of Shangani River in 1893, Lobengula’s force of 1,500 warriors was wiped out. It was the Maxim gun that did the dirty work. An eyewitness wrote:

“The Matabele never got nearer than 100 yards led by the Nubuzu regiment, the king’s bodyguard who came on yelling like fiends and rushing on to certain death, for the Maxims far exceeded all expectations and mowed them down literally like grass. I never saw anything like these Maxim guns, nor dreamed that such things could be.” [ii]

Meanwhile, the Boers continued their own resistance to British power by refusing to grant voting rights to British prospectors, the Uitlanders, in the newly-discovered gold fields. Four years later, the Second Boer War broke out as British citizens continued to migrate to the Boer republics. By now, a new face had appeared on the scene in South Africa: Alfred (later “Lord”) Milner (1854-1925), who in 1897 was appointed Governor of the Cape Colony and High Commissioner for South Africa.

Milner had Anglo-German roots and had been a brilliant student at Oxford who qualified to practice law, but instead became a journalist, working as executive assistant to W.T Stead. An advocate of “imperial idealism” as editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, Stead was the founder of British tabloid journalism—and a close friend of Cecil Rhodes. Stead later died on the Titanic in 1912. His protégé, Milner, chose a career in government administration, starting with the post of assistant secretary of finance in Egypt. Back in England, he became chairman of the Board of Inland Revenue, Britain’s tax collection agency, and during his tenure he inaugurated Britain’s inheritance tax. He was also inducted into the prestigious Most Honourable Order of the Bath.

By now regarded as one of the most clear-headed and competent civil servants in Britain, Milner began his term as head of the British colonial government in South Africa by traveling through the disputed regions held by the Boer republics and the most heavily-populated native regions to study the crisis. He even learned Dutch and the Boers’ Afrikaans language. He determined that only complete submission by the Boers to British imperial policy would secure and stabilize South Africa. The Boers refused to submit, so the war began.

The Second Boer War was a bitterly-fought series of bloody battles by two determined foes. The Boers also had Maxim guns, along with German-made Mauser rifles. Following a military standoff, the Boers resorted to guerrilla warfare. The British responded by rounding up Boer civilians and interning them in what historians agree were the world’s first “concentration camps.” In fact, the British invented the term. They set up forty-five tented camps for Boer internees and sixty-four for the black Africans who fought with them. Most of the Boers in the concentration camps were women and children, with most of the 28,000 captured Boer men sent overseas to prisoner-of-war camps, where 26,370 died from starvation, disease, or neglect. Of the blacks, around 20,000 died. The British deliberately created deadly conditions in order to force the Boer fighters to surrender.

The British also engaged in scorched-earth warfare against Boer farms, burning crops and killing livestock. The strategy worked. The last of the Boers surrendered in May 1902, and the war ended with the Treaty of Vereeniging on May 31, 1902. Having won the war, the British now offered generous terms to regain the support of the now-subdued Boer people. In order to win, the British had countenanced losing over 125,000 men killed, missing, or wounded. Boer losses were around 30,000, with over 46,000 civilians dead.

The war was so expensive that for the first time in over a century the British government had to borrow from abroad to fight a war in its own empire. This was a harbinger of things to come. Half of the new war bonds were sold in the US, with J.P. Morgan handling the sale to American investors. The war saw a substantial jump in the British national debt.

The British populace largely supported the war, with newspaper propaganda playing a heavy role, emphasizing Boer mistreatment of the maltreated British men who had innocently flocked to the Boer republics to earn a living and raise their families. In addition to troops from the British Isles, thousands of Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, and Asian Indian soldiers traveled to South Africa to fight for the Empire. On returning home, these troops were hailed as heroes.

The Boer War evoked much criticism of British imperialism in Europe. In Belgium, fifteen-year-old Jean-Baptiste Sipido, a tinsmith's apprentice, fired shots at the Prince of Wales, the future George V, who was passing through Brussels. Sipido accused the prince of causing the slaughter of thousands during the Boer War. A Belgian jury found Sipido not guilty, provoking outrage in London.

After the war, Alfred Milner spent three years as governor of the new Transvaal and Orange River colonies, working on the rebuilding of the regions that had been devastated. In March 1902, having always suffered from poor health, Cecil Rhodes died at the age of forty-eight at the seaside town of Muizenberg.

The cost of rebuilding the former Boer republics was enormous. Milner began by levying a ten percent tax on the annual production of the gold mines, and gave attention to the repatriation of the Boers, organizing land settlement by British colonists, building schools and court systems, hiring police, and constructing railways. But the Boers lived on. Today, there are more people in South Africa who speak the Afrikaans language than English, though a majority of the population speak native African languages.

Milner also recruited a team of young lawyers and administrators, most of them Oxford graduates, who became known as “Milner’s Kindergarten.” Thus began a cadre of disciples who would follow Milner back to England and form the core of Cecil Rhodes’s “secret society” for the elevation of the British Empire to world dominance and the “recovery” of the US. This was the origin of the Round Table and its spinoff, the Pilgrims Society.

Coming Next: “The Russo-Japanese War,” “The ‘Great Rapprochement’ Between Britain and the US”

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[i] Ferguson, Empire, p.227.

[ii] Ibid, p.224.