War of Words

Front matter

Soe sangeet Se: oe F =. CRISIS IN ZUID-AFRIKA

F Zuid-Alrikaansche _ VLUGSCHRIFTEN. | M. a.

p poor i Dr. A. KUYPER pb ) V. REITZ, | Zeit Afribaasache Uit de „Revne des denx Mondes”

Part I Principles Of Propaganda (1880-1899) 33

Chapter 1 ‘New Holland’ in South Africa? Building a bridgehead between the Netherlands and the Boer republics 35 Pro-Boers in the Netherlands 38 Hollanders in South Africa 46 The Jameson Raid: a catalyst for pro-Boer propaganda 56 Conclusion 62

Chapter 2 ‘Blacks, Boers, and British’: South Africa in Dutch literature 65 Adventurers and armchair scholars 69 The ambivalences of stamverwantschap 76 The language question 80 Dutch views on English Africana 86 The ‘native’ question 91 The Uitlander question 95 Conclusion 99

Part II War Of Words (1899-1902) 103

Chapter 3 A ‘factory of lies’? The lines of communication of the Boers and their supporters 105 Boer diplomats rog Fraying at the edges: the Dutch policy of neutrality 116 Repatriates and refugees 119 Evading censorship 128 Letters from the front line 135 Conclusion 139

Chapter 4 ‘A campaign of the pen’: the Dutch pro-Boer organisations 143 The NzAv from within 146 Pro-Boers and pillarisation 151 ‘A campaign of the pen’: the ANV press office 154 ‘Practical support’ or ‘impractical plans’: emigration schemes 164 Fundraising 169 Conclusion 176

Chapter 5 ‘Dum-dums of public opinion’: pro-Boer propaganda, October 1899-June 1900 179 ‘We know so well how you drifted into this war’ 181 ‘Afrika voor den Afrikaner’? 186 The Boer people’s army 192 Britain’s grave 199 From The Hague to Derdepoort: war atrocities 205 Conclusion 212

Chapter 6 ‘All will be well!’ Pro-Boer propaganda, June 1900-June 1902 215 After the British occupation 217 Bittereinders and Handsoppers 220 ‘Methods of barbarism’ 226

Table of contents

‘The English have a red haze before their eyes’: farm-burning 230 ‘That lethal idleness’ of being locked up: the treatment of Pows 233 A ‘policy of torturing women’: concentration camps 238

The Peace of Vereeniging 245

Conclusion 249

Part III The Aftermath Of Pro-boer Propaganda (post-1902) 253

Chapter 7 ‘Whoever wants to create a future for himself cannot lose sight of the past’: Willem Leyds and Afrikaner nationalism 255 (Re)building Afrikaner nationalism 257 Willem Leyds and Afrikaner historiography 264 From Dordrecht to Pretoria: the collection of the Zuid-Afrikaansch Museum 275 Conclusion 281

Chapter 8 From stamverwantschap to anti-apartheid: the significance of the pro-Boer movement in the Netherlands 285 Pro-Boers and public opinion in the Netherlands 287 Dutch views on Afrikaner nationalism 288 The cultural ties between the Netherlands and South Africa 292 Dutch-South African relations after the Second World War 295 General concluding remarks 300

Abbreviations 307 Notes 309 Bibliography 377 Index of names 395

Index of subjects 401

Introduction

It was already clear to contemporaries that the Dutch enthusiasm for the Boers during the South African War (1899-1902) was to be seen in the context of the history of modern imperialism. In his book The Psychology of Jingoism, the journalist J. A. Hobson drew a parallel between the Dutch depiction of the conflict and the situation in Great Britain, where he argued that the public had been manipulated by a small group of South African capitalists and mining magnates. Sneering at jingo propagandists, he wrote that:

[they] must admit that it is likely that the Dutch nation in Holland, drawing nearly all their information from Dutch South African sources, are animated by a bias similar to, though not so strong as, ours [the British], have received a mass of evidence directly contradictory to ours, and that their intellectual judgement has been formed in a fashion similar to ours."

Despite Hobson’s dislike of the jingoist views on the South African War, he was certainly not of the opinion that propagandists who supported the Boer republics were any better. In another book, he described Willem Leyds, the most important diplomatic representative of the Transvaal in Europe, as an ‘evil genius’ behind ‘[t]he notion of an unqualified Dutch political supremacy, with a complete dominance of Dutch language and ideas [in South Africa]’.? Historians point out that Hobson’s ideas about the capitalist conspiracy behind the prejudiced press coverage of the South African question were biased themselves, based on his own ideas about Britain’s duty in the world and the role of the growing mass media. Still, his observations have shown their value for the historical study of the imperial press.3 If anything, Hobson’s writings show that contemporaries not only considered imperialism to be a process that only took place outside Europe, they also saw a close connection with public opinion in the metropole. His comparative remarks about the coverage of the South African War suggest that this was not only the case in

Io WAR OF WORDS

Britain but also in the Netherlands and that propaganda was seen as an important aspect of the struggle between the British Empire and the Boer republics. In later historiography about modern imperialism too, the South African War is considered to be an important topic. This book aims to examine contemporary notions about the concept of imperialism by taking the responses of Dutch propagandists to the South African question as a case study, comparing them with secondary literature about imperial culture in Britain.

Historical comparisons between the two countries on either side of the North Sea are nothing new. There is a series of conferences during which Dutch and British historians exchange views on different issues. The initiators of the first Anglo-Dutch historical conference emphasised that British history and Dutch history ‘are closely related’ and hoped that it would serve as a source of inspiration to scholars from both countries.4 In later years, the conferences focussed on specific topics such as Protestantism, Liberalism and mass society. The history of overseas expansion has been recognised as an important field too. In 1967, the editors of a volume of papers on Britain & the Netherlands in Europe and Asia expressed the wish that ‘English and Dutch historians will one day be able to confer on their cultural and institutional environments, so much akin as the world goes and yet so strangely and subtly diverse’ The Anglo-Dutch historical conference in 2000 focussed on aspects of the two colonial empires between 1750 and 1850. A broad comparison yielded that overseas ambitions of both countries focussed on Southeast Asia in that period, but that there were differences as well because of the fact that the Netherlands lost the dominant position that it had held in the seventeenth century, while Britain came to ‘rule the waves’ during that period.® In the 1980s, another series of conferences held in Leiden, Cambridge, Delhi and Yogyakarta brought together scholars to discuss aspects of the colonial state in India and the Indonesian archipelago in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many of the papers presented at these occasions explicitly aimed to draw comparisons between topics such as colonial administration, economic structures and the relationship with indigenous groups.”

Looking at these precedents, a comparison between the depictions of the British and Dutch empires in Asia might have been more straightforward, except that there are some differences that make such an exercise problematic. First of all, the Indian subcontinent is a single large landmass, while the Indonesian archipelago consists of a huge number of islands. Indian culture is therefore divided into much larger cultural groups than Indonesian culture, which made the colonial experience there inherently different. Another possi-

Introduction II bly more serious problem is the difference in chronology. British territorial expansion in India largely took place before 1860 while — except for Java — the extension of the Dutch sphere of influence in the Indonesian archipelago really took off in the 1870s.° This is a significant disparity, because the Western perspective on overseas expansion shifted considerably during the nineteenth century. After 1870, the universalistic belief in progress gave way to more rigid ideas about racial hierarchies, derived from Social Darwinism.? These intellectual shifts make a comparison between the British and Dutch debates about colonial expansion in Asia problematic, which is not the case with the respective depictions of the South African War because these took shape in response to the same events and at times even interacted with one another.

Of course there were significant differences between the Netherlands’ and Britain’s relations with South Africa. The most obvious of these is that the whole region eventually became part of the British Empire, while at the end of the nineteenth century the Netherlands was not in any position to make territorial claims on that part of the world. Also, the economic significance of South Africa to the British was far greater than to the Dutch. It can therefore be maintained that these relations cannot be called imperial.t° Nevertheless, it has been convincingly argued that the ties between the Netherlands and the Boer republics at the end of the nineteenth century were an ‘informal’ and ‘cultural’ form of imperialism because there was a structural attempt to gain influence in the region.** The most tangible result of the Dutch sympathy for the Boers was the emigration of several thousand Dutch to the republics (mainly the Transvaal) at the end of the nineteenth century, contributing to the development of modern state institutions in Southern Africa.

In secondary literature, it has been shown that British contemporaries also considered such issues to be important because they believed their dominance in South Africa to be far from self-evident, even after the whole region had officially been incorporated into the British Empire. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, colonial administrators considered the region a weak spot in the imperial system because of the presence of a distinctive group of colonial competitors — the Dutch-speaking Afrikaners. In order to improve their grip, they set out to ‘Anglicise’ the white population after 1902, but these attempts failed.'* In the light of this cultural struggle, the pro-Boer propaganda campaign in Europe can be characterised as nothing less than a war of words. The question is, however, how one should assess the historical significance of this phenomenon. The following review of historiography will explore how this complex question can be approached.

I2 WAR OF WORDS

Historiography: Britain

In recent decades, historians who study British imperialism have engaged in a debate about the extent to which the imperial experience shaped the ways in which people in Britain viewed the world and viewed themselves. In the 1980s, John MacKenzie put forward that the empire had a great impact on popular culture on the British Isles, which from the 1870s onwards led to the emergence of an ‘ideological cluster of monarchism, militarism and Social Darwinism’ that captured all social classes.'3 A different group of scholars, including Antoinette Burton and Catherine Hall, has mainly been influenced by the work of post-colonial authors. They argue that the imperial experience inspired specific views on gender and race, forging a set of hierarchies that shaped British society to a large extent. '4

There are academics like Bernard Porter who reject the claims of these so-called ‘new imperial histories’. He argues that the British Empire only attracted the attention of a small elite that benefited directly from imperial expansion and were simply interested in firm control and effective exploitation of overseas dependencies.‘ It has been pointed out, however, that this narrow definition fails to grasp the full complexity of the concept of ‘Empire’, which was already a hotly debated issue amongst contemporaries.'® Therefore, a number of historians, despite their critical stance towards claims that Britain itself was deeply influenced by the process of overseas expansion, have been attempting to put imperial culture into firm historical context in order to investigate the meaning (or meanings) of the concept of imperialism.

One of the most fruitful exercises in this sense has been a new approach to what can be called the ‘geographies of the British Empire’.'7 From the onset of the imperialism debate, concepts of space have played an important role, highlighting differences between the ‘periphery’ and the imperial ‘core’. In their classic theory of expansion, which held sway between the 1950s and 1980s, Ronald Robinson and Jack Gallagher argued that, although the government in London preferred informal means of control, the British had no other option but to expand formal rule in response to crises taking place on the fringes of their sphere of influence. As such, imperialism can be seen as an ‘excentric’ process because the initiative for expansion came from the peripheries rather than from the centre. In this model, ‘men on the spot’ and local ‘collaborators’ were important intermediaries who influenced the ‘official mind’ of decision-makers in London." In the early 1990s, another model for British imperialism was presented by P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, who coined the concept of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’. They argue that territorial expansion was driven by a group of aristocratic financiers in London who were in search of new opportunities for investments. In this view, the incentive for expansion was clearly ‘metropolitan’ .‘9

A few years before Cain and Hopkins presented their theory, David Fieldhouse already argued for a more middle-of-the-road approach. He emphasised the ‘interactions’ between the core and its peripheries, whereby Britain was affected in the fields of economy, foreign policy and armed forces, while the (former) colonies inherited, amongst other things, administrative systems, commodity structures and state boundaries.*° This premise was further elaborated on in an important article by John Darwin, in which he presents the concept of ‘bridgeheads’ to explain ‘the dynamics of territorial expansion’. According to Darwin, earlier models tended to overlook the diversity of both British society and the regions where expansion took place as a result of the fixed focus on either the ‘periphery’ or the ‘core’. Instead, he argues that it was the ‘bridgehead [...] the hinge or “interface” between the metrople and a local periphery’ that determined ‘[w]hether British influence grew, or was transformed into formal or informal empire’.*! Viewed in this way, the Victorian Empire was not a monolithic entity but a complex hotchpotch of different territories around the world, ranging from tropical dependencies to self-governing dominions in the temperate climate zones, all with their own relationship to the metropole. This ‘webbed conception of imperial space’, argues Alan Lester, narrows the gap between the ‘traditional’ empirical approach to imperialism as presented in the integrated models of expansion and the ‘new imperial histories’ that focus on the cultural aspects of empire.?? If anything, the idea of bridgeheads recognises the importance of domestic public opinion in addition to high politics and economics as a factor that played into the process of expansion.”3

Following similar lines of argument, an ongoing series of international conferences under the heading of the ‘British World’ investigates issues concerning the imperial diaspora such as culture and identity. Mapping out this transnational space, the main focus has been on emigration to the so-called ‘white’ parts of the British Empire: the dominions. There, inhabitants recreated institutions of the motherland and retained a sense of belonging, which can be called ‘Britishness’.*4 Although it can be argued that the focus on the ‘white’ character of dominions ignores issues of exploitation and suppression of the indigenous populations, studies presented at these conferences have yielded important insights into identity formation in different parts of the

I4 WAR OF WORDS

British Empire. The swift process of decolonisation after the Second World War led to the commonly held view amongst academics that imperialism and nationalism were two opposite and contradictory concepts. As a result, the histories of the British nation-state and those of the countries that emerged out of its colonies were made into separate fields of study.*® Looking at the British world, however, a more complex picture emerges: despite obvious tensions, ‘colonial nationalities’ and ‘imperial Britishness’ did not rule each other out but complemented each other and at times even overlapped.*7 Such feelings were supported by multiple overarching institutions and networks that survived two World Wars, although they were fatally weakened by the second, and have left a cultural legacy that survives even today in some parts of the world.?®

One way in which historians have attempted to put notions of British identity into a global context is to investigate how information travelled around the empire. Lester shows how during the first half of the nineteenth century, different groups of British settlers in the Eastern Cape actively lobbied in the metropole to promote their particular views on colonial rule.* Zoë Laidlaw argues that during the same period, patronage relations between local administrators and politicians in London greatly determined how policy took shape.3° In his study of the imperial press system, Simon Potter analyses how such networks developed during the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. Great technological and social change such as the advent of intercontinental underwater telegraph cables and the rise of mass media increased the exchange between the metropolitan press and newspapers throughout the empire, particularly in the white settler colonies. Fleet Street in London became the undisputed centre of journalism in the British world from which news was distributed. At the same time, it provided a model for colonial editors, which led to a homogenisation of the imperial press.3*

More recently, Potter has published an interesting essay in which he warns against the pitfalls of anachronism in this ‘webbed’ notion of the British Empire as an interlinked set of networks. He takes issue with scholars who put the developments at the end of the nineteenth century on a par with the digital revolution a century later, for example by branding telegraph cables as a ‘Victorian internet’. It should not be forgotten that contemporaries ran into technological and commercial problems that limited the flow of free information because institutions were needed to manage the infrastructure of the imperial mass media. Potter therefore distinguishes between ‘networks’ — which can be characterised as ‘informal, open, multiple, competing and dynamic’ — and

Introduction I5

‘systems’ that were ‘dominated by a restricted number of powerful organisations, whose interest together dictate more formal, entrenched, and limited patterns of interconnection’. Throughout the history of the British Empire, Potter argues, informal networks continued to exist, but imperial connections must be interpreted in the light of their institutional framework — in other words as a system — in order to properly assess their historical meaning.3”

What, then, was the impact of such imperial hardware on British society? Andrew Thompson has done thorough research in this field. In his study of imperial lobby groups, he shows that such organisations were able to put imperial issues on the political agenda by mobilising public opinion and as such contributed to metropolitan political culture. In line with the notion of the British World, he argues that the ‘white’ dominions, at that time known as ‘Greater Britain’, attracted most of the public’s attention, more so than the tropical dependencies or even India.33 In more recent work, Thompson attempts to assess the wider impact of the empire on British culture. Although it is very difficult to gather a set of quantitative data in order to come up witha foolproof answer to this question, he investigates a range of social groups in Britain and comes to the conclusion that they all had some sort of interest in one part of the empire or another. Exactly because of this great diversity, both in the metropole and in the peripheries, the imperial experience was far from univocal: imperialism meant different things to different people.34 Following a similar line of argument, Potter argues against sweeping generalisations by both the ‘new imperial histories’ and their critics who claim that imperialism either completely formed British society or did not at all. In order to get a better understanding of the centripetal effects of imperialism, he calls for ‘detailed research into particular examples’ that are nonetheless ‘part of a broader, collective endeavour’. He concludes that ‘the work of different historians on different parts of the canvas can, when viewed at a distance, help us to see the outlines of what the painting might eventually look like’.35

In order to investigate the wider meaning of imperialism, much attention has been given to the South African question, which from the end of the nineteenth century has been an important topic in the debate about the British Empire. Some argue that the South African War — which was the largest of all colonial wars Britain ever fought and, indeed, the largest conflict the world had seen since the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) — was the first sign that Britain’s international dominance was waning.3° The costs to Britain were certainly high, both in human lives and in money, and several academics have argued that this was the reason that support for the empire amongst the public evaporated, if it had previously existed in the first place. In this view, the outbursts of public enthusiasm during the earlier stages of the conflict, such as the famous celebrations after the relief of Mafeking (May 1900), were only superficial bouts of mass hysteria.37 In the light of the historiographical developments mentioned above, however, historians have come up with other ideas on the matter. One of the first to do so was MacKenzie, who asserts that the South African War did not break the imperial spirit. In his view, imperialism remained deeply entrenched in popular culture up until the 19 sos, which demonstrates its long ‘shelf life’.3® Significantly, several studies that investigate the ‘British World’ adhere to a similar chronology and argue that the influence of imperialism reached far into the twentieth century.3? Although the South African War was a serious challenge, provoking many questions about how the British Empire functioned, it was certainly not the beginning of decolonisation. “The old order had bent a little: it had not broken.’4°

This, however, does not answer the question regarding the extent to which the South African War affected the British Empire as a whole. Although some advocates of imperial reform in Britain took the opportunity to put forward their plans, the tangible results of this campaign were rather limited. On the other hand, it can be argued that the wider effects of such lobby groups on public opinion and political culture were significant.+* Moreover, in some specific areas the conflict clearly did act as a catalyst. The coverage of events in South Africa, for example, raised fundamental issues concerning the functioning of the press, which were related to the rise of modern communication technology and mass media.*? In this sense, the South African War was a ‘media war’.43 No less than two hundred correspondents working for British newspapers were present when the war started, and although media attention did decline after June 1900, popular writers such as Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle continued to publish about the conflict. Jacqueline Beaumont shows that the war had an important influence on the careers of several journalists.44 Focussing on the authorities, she points out how the significant media attention was also noticed by prominent figures in the military high command and civil administration, who tried to enlarge their control over the coverage of events taking place in South Africa. The South African War was therefore an important phase in the development of modern censorship.45 Looking at the institutional aspects, Potter identifies the conflict as a watershed in the transference of information throughout the British Empire. Faced with the shortcomings of the existing institutions, reformers sought to improve the imperial press system — with considerable success, he argues.4°

The South African question also had more diffuse effects like its effect on the thinking about British identity. Shortly after his appointment as high commissioner of the Cape in 1897, Alfred Milner lamented that South Africa was the ‘weakest link in the imperial chain’. With this remark he did not refer to shortcomings in infrastructure but mainly to the presence of a group of colonial rivals that threatened British dominance in the region — the Dutch-speaking Afrikaners. In order to secure the region for the British Empire, the self-confessed ‘race patriot’ and his supporters attempted to break down not only the political and military might of the Boer republics but also their cultural influence so that English would prevail as the dominant language used.47 In Britain, there was a group of outspoken critics of this onslaught who opposed the war because they thought that the Boers, as white settlers, were entitled to an independent existence. Paula Krebs points out that the fact that their views conflicted with the advocates of expansion did not mean that these Liberal authors challenged the ideological presumptions of their adversaries. Looking at the writings from both parties, she concludes that the public discourse about the South African War in Britain was greatly influenced by common notions of gender and race.48

One noticeable feature of the use of the term ‘race’ in this context was that it not only referred to differences between black and white people but also to differences between English-speaking and Dutch-speaking colonists. To contemporaries, language and heritage were the two most important markers that distinguished the two so-called ‘white races’ in South Africa.49 This polarisation was not absolute, Thompson argues, referring to the ‘languages of loyalism’ that were prevalent amongst certain groups of Afrikaners.5° Also on the British side, the divide was not experienced as sharply as might seem at first sight. Many British officers had genuine admiration for their adversaries, who they considered to be ideal soldiers. Others disliked the harsh methods that were used against the Boers.5* Even the Milner administration not only used sticks to ensure British sovereignty but also held out carrots to the Dutch-speaking population. One of the most significant compromises he made during the peace negotiation in 1902 was the suspension of the vote for black people, which was a demand of the Boers and which ensured white political supremacy in the region for decades to come. This shows that the ‘race question’ in all its facets was a central theme in the contemporary debate about South Africa and touched upon the fundamental question of how — using the terminology of the time — one might ‘civilise’ that part of the world. Bill Nasson has therefore argued that the South African War was in essence ‘a

European war fought in Africa over how best to get on with the colonial order, and what its dominant terms of reproduction should be’.5?

In this sense, the conflict had a distinct international component too. Several groups in other parts of the British Empire expressed their sympathy for either one of the sides. For example, the authorities in Canada and Australia sent troops to a war outside their own region for the first time in their history, which should be seen as an important precedent for their support of Britain during the two World Wars. By contrast, dissident groups such as Frenchspeaking Quebecois in Canada and republicans in Ireland admired the Boers for their plucky fight for independence. Likewise, there was much sympathy for the Boer republics amongst the public on the European continent.53 Although some of these sentiments were a source of concern for the British government — such as the proposal by several hotheads in Russia to invade northern India in retaliation — public agitation in favour of the Boers did not have serious diplomatic consequences because all the great powers remained neutral.54 We must therefore ask ourselves whether the pro-Boer propaganda campaign had any effect. This is something that has occupied historians in the Netherlands, the country where sympathy for the Boers was most widespread because of feelings of racial kinship. The following section will describe how they have written about Dutch imperialism, the ties between the Netherlands and South Africa and how this work relates to British historiography.

Historiography: the Netherlands

The word ‘imperialism’ has only been introduced into the historical debate about Dutch overseas history relatively recently.55 One of the first to do so was Maarten Kuitenbrouwer in his 1985 thesis on colonial policy in the Netherlands. Comparing his findings to the work of R. F. Betts, he argues that despite its smaller size, Dutch territorial expansion (which mainly took place in the Indonesian archipelago) resembled British imperialism in several important ways.°° In his later work, he embraces the ‘metropolitan’ model of Cain and Hopkins and argues that the initiative for expansion came from wealthy financiers that belonged to the civic elites, the so-called ‘regents’ .57 Other authors writing about the Dutch East Indies also refer to British models of expansion. Both Cees Fasseur and Hendrik Wesseling adopt the peripheral models of John Galbraith and Robinson and Gallagher respectively, emphasising that Dutch officials were even more reluctant than their British counterparts to expand the formal empire.5® Elsbeth Locher-Scholten explicitly refers to Fieldhouse’s work in her thorough case study on the annexation of a sultanate on Sumatra.5? Drawing from these examples, it is safe to say that there is a respectable tradition in historiography about Dutch imperialism which seeks to link in with the debate about British imperial history.

It is therefore quite remarkable that there has been no serious attempt by Dutch historians to join the debate about the cultural aspects of the British Empire. The most significant study of Dutch imperial culture, by Martin Bossenbroek, contains only a few references to the work of MacKenzie in some footnotes, even as he provides conclusions that merit comparison: he argues that events taking place in Indonesia and South Africa at the end of the nineteenth century were depicted in a wide range of genres, attracted attention from virtually all social classes and had a marked influence on Dutch national identity.°° Also studies about more detailed aspects of imperial culture in the Netherlands — such as colonial lobby groups and the work of ethnographers — contain no references to other countries.°t Others such as Susan Legéne and Marieke Bloembergen do consider the international context. They both discuss the work of Edward Said in their books about the cultural aspects of Dutch imperialism.** But they, too, do not provide a profound reflection on the large body of secondary literature in Britain that is available on this topic and its possible relevance to the debate in the Netherlands.

Such an exercise can have significance for the historical understanding of imperialism — on both sides of the North Sea. The historical debate about the culture of the British Empire has brought up fundamental questions about the meaning of the concept of imperialism, which puts it into firm historical context by taking into account contemporary ideas on the matter. This book aims to contribute to this debate with a case study of Dutch-South African relations before, during and after the South African War, which will be compared with the historiography about the ‘British World’. A further review of existing secondary literature on this topic shows that there are some interesting parallels that make such a comparison worthwhile.