On This Day
14 June 1901
Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman delivers his methods of barbarism speech
At a dinner given for him and Sir William Harcourt at the Holborn Restaurant by the National Reform Union, Liberal leader Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman delivers his methods of barbarism speech. ‘What is that policy? That now that we had got the men we had been fighting against down, we should punish them as severely as possible, devastate their country, burn their homes, break up their very instruments of agriculture…It is that we should sweep…the women and children into camps…in some of which the death rate has risen so high as 430 in the thousand…A phrase is often used that ‘war is war’, but when one comes to ask about it one is told that no war is going on, that it is not war. When is a war not a war? When it is carried out by methods of barbarism in South Africa’.