Take a community of Dutchmen of the type of those who defended
themselves for fifty years against all the power of Spain at a time
when Spain was the greatest power in the world. Intermix with them a
strain of those inflexible French Huguenots who gave up home and
fortune and left their country for ever at the time of the revocation
of the Edict of Nantes. The product must obviously be one of the most
rugged, virile, unconquerable races ever seen upon earth.  Take this
formidable people and train them for seven generations in constant
warfare against savage men and ferocious beasts, in circumstances
under which no weakling could survive, place them so that they acquire
exceptional skill with weapons and in horsemanship, give them a
country which is eminently suited to the tactics of the huntsman, the
marksman, and the rider.  Then, finally, put a finer temper upon their
military qualities by a dour fatalistic Old Testament religion and an
ardent and consuming patriotism.  Combine all these qualities and all
these impulses in one individual, and you have the modern Boer -- the
most formidable antagonist who ever crossed the path of Imperial
Britain.  Our military history has largely consisted in our conflicts
with France, but Napoleon and all his veterans have never treated us
so roughly as these hard-bitten farmers with their ancient theology
and their inconveniently modern rifles.

Look at the map of South Africa, and there, in the very centre of the
British possessions, like the stone in a peach, lies the great stretch
of the two republics, a mighty domain for so small a people. How came
they there? Who are these Teutonic folk who have burrowed so deeply
into Africa? It is a twice-told tale, and yet it must be told once
again if this story is to have even the most superficial of
introductions. No one can know or appreciate the Boer who does not
know his past, for he is what his past has made him.

It was about the time when Oliver Cromwell was at his zenith -- in
1652, to be pedantically accurate -- that the Dutch made their first
lodgment at the Cape of Good Hope.  The Portuguese had been there
before them, but, repelled by the evil weather, and lured forwards by
rumours of gold, they had passed the true seat of empire and had
voyaged further to settle along the eastern coast.  Some gold there
was, but not much, and the Portuguese settlements have never been
sources of wealth to the mother country, and never will be until the
day when Great Britain signs her huge cheque for Delagoa Bay.  The
coast upon which they settled reeked with malaria.  A hundred miles of
poisonous marsh separated it from the healthy inland plateau.  For
centuries these pioneers of South African colonisation strove to
obtain some further footing, but save along the courses of the rivers
they made little progress. Fierce natives and an enervating climate
barred their way.

But it was different with the Dutch.  That very rudeness of climate
which had so impressed the Portuguese adventurer was the source of
their success. Cold and poverty and storm are the nurses of the
qualities which make for empire. It is the men from the bleak and
barren lands who master the children of the light and the heat. And so
the Dutchmen at the Cape prospered and grew stronger in that robust
climate. They did not penetrate far inland, for they were few in
number and all they wanted was to be found close at hand. But they
built themselves houses, and they supplied the Dutch East India
Company with food and water, gradually budding off little townlets,
Wynberg, Stellenbosch, and pushing their settlements up the long
slopes which lead to that great central plateau which extends for
fifteen hundred miles from the edge of the Karoo to the Valley of the
Zambesi.  Then came the additional Huguenot emigrants -- the best
blood of France three hundred of them, a handful of the choicest seed
thrown in to give a touch of grace and soul to the solid Teutonic
strain. Again and again in the course of history, with the Normans,
the Huguenots, the Emigrés, one can see the great hand dipping into
that storehouse and sprinkling the nations with the same splendid
seed. France has not founded other countries, like her great rival,
but she has made every other country the richer by the mixture with
her choicest and best.  The Rouxs, Du Toits, Jouberts, Du Plessis,
Villiers, and a score of other French names are among the most
familiar in South Africa.

For a hundred more years the history of the colony was a record of the
gradual spreading ,of the Afrikaners over the huge expanse of veld
which lay to the north of them. Cattle raising became an industry, but
in a country where six acres can hardly support a sheep, large farms
are necessary for even small herds.  Six thousand acres was the usual
size, and five pounds a year the rent payable to Government. The
diseases which follow the white man had in Africa, as in America and
Australia, been fatal to the natives, and an epidemic of smallpox
cleared the country for the newcomers. Further and further north they
pushed, founding little towns here and there, such as Graaf-Reinet and
Swellendam, where a Dutch Reformed Church and a store for the sale of
the bare necessaries of life formed a nucleus for a few scattered
dwellings. Already the settlers were showing that independence of
control and that detachment from Europe which has been their most
prominent characteristic.  Even the sway of the Dutch Company (an
older but weaker brother of John Company in India) had caused them to
revolt. The local rising, however, was hardly noticed in the universal
cataclysm which followed the French Revolution. After twenty years,
during which the world was shaken by the Titanic struggle between
England and France in the final counting up of the game and paying of
the stakes, the Cape Colony was added in 1814 to the British Empire.

In all our vast collection of States there is probably not one the
title-deeds to which are more incontestable than to this one. We had
it by two rights, the right of conquest and the right of purchase.  In
1806 our troops landed, defeated the local forces, and took p05session
of Cape Town.  In 1814 we paid the large sum of six million pounds to
the Stadholder for the transference of this and some South American
land. It was a bargain which was probably made rapidly and carelessly
in that general redistribution which was going on.  As a house of call
upon the way to India the place was seen to be of value, but the
country itself was looked upon as unprofitable and
desert. What would Castlereagh or Liverpool have thought could they
have seen the items which we were buying for our six million pounds?
The inventory would have been a mixed one of good and of evil; nine
fierce Kaffir wars, the greatest diamond mines in the world, the
wealthiest gold mines, two costly and humiliating campaigns with men
whom we respected even when we fought with them, and now at last, we
hope, a South Africa of peace and prosperity, with equal rights and
equal duties for all men.  The future should hold something very good
for us in that land, for if we merely count the past we should be
compelled to say that we should have been stronger, richer, and higher
in the world's esteem had our possessions there never passed beyond
the range of the guns of our men-of-war. But surely the most arduous
is the most honourable, and, looking back from the end of their
journey, our descendants may see that our long record of struggle,
with its mixture of disaster and success, its outpouring of blood and
of treasure, has always tended to some great and enduring goal.

The title-deeds to the estate are, as I have said, good ones, but
there is one singular and ominous flaw in their provisions.  The ocean
has marked three boundaries to it, but the fourth is undefined.  There
is no word of the `Hinterland;' for neither the term nor the idea had
then been thought of.  Had Great Britain bought those vast regions
which extended beyond the settlements? Or were the discontented Dutch
at liberty to pass onwards and found fresh nations to bar the path of
the Anglo-Celtic colonists? In that question lay the germ of all the
trouble to come. An American would realise the point at issue if he
could conceive that after the founding of the United States the Dutch
inhabitants of the State of New York had trekked to the westward and
established fresh communities under a new flag. Then, when the
American population overtook these western States, they would be face
to face with the problem which this country has had to solve. If they
found these new States fiercely anti-American and extremely
unprogressive, they would experience that aggravation of their
difficulties with which our statesmen have had to deal.

At the time of their transference to the British flag the colonists --
Dutch, French, and German -- numbered some thirty thousand.  They were
slaveholders, and the slaves were about as numerous as themselves. The
prospect of complete amalgamation between the British and the original
settlers would have seemed to be a good one, since they were of much
the same stock, and their creeds could only be distinguished by their
varying degrees of bigotry and intolerance.  Five thousand British
emigrants were landed in 1820, settling on the Eastern borders of the
colony, and from that time onwards there was a slow but steady influx
of English speaking colonists.  The Government had the historical
faults and the historical virtues of British rule. It was mild, clean,
honest, tactless, and inconsistent.  On the whole, it might have done
very well had it been content to leave things as it found them.  But
to change the habits of the most conservative of Teutonic races was a
dangerous venture, and one which has led to a long series of
complications, making up the troubled history of South Africa.  The
Imperial Government has always taken an honourable and philanthropic
view of the rights of the native and the claim which he has to the
protection of the law. We hold and rightly, that British justice, if
not blind, should at least be colour-blind.  The view is
irreproachable in theory and incontestable in argument, but it is apt
to be irritating when urged by a Boston moralist or a London
philanthropist upon men whose whole society has been built upon the
assumption that the black is the inferior race.  Such a people like to
find the higher morality for themselves, not to have it imposed upon
them by those who live under entirely different conditions.  They
feel -- and with some reason -- that it is a cheap form of virtue which,
from the serenity of a well-ordered household in Beacon Street or
Belgrave Square, prescribes what the relation shall be between a white
employer and his half-savage, half-childish retainers. Both branches
of the Anglo-Celtic race have grappled with the question, and in each
it has led to trouble.

The British Government in South Africa has always played the unpopular
part of the friend and protector of the native servants.  It was upon
this very point that the first friction appeared between the old
settlers and the new administration.  A rising with bloodshed followed
the arrest of a Dutch farmer who had maltreated his slave.  It was
suppressed, and five of the participants were hanged. This punishment
was unduly severe and exceedingly injudicious. A brave race can forget
the victims of the field of battle, but never those of the scaffold.
The making of political martyrs is the last insanity of statesmanship.
It is true that both the man who arrested and the judge who condemned
the prisoners were Dutch, and that the British Governor interfered on
the side of mercy; but all this was forgotten afterwards in the desire
to make racial capital out of the incident. It is typical of the
enduring resentment which was left behind that when, after the
Jameson raid, it seemed that the leaders of that ill-fated venture
might be hanged, the beam was actually brought from a farmhouse at
Cookhouse Drift to Pretoria, that the Englishmen might die as the
Dutchmen had died in 1816.  Slagter's Nek marked the dividing of the
ways between the British Government and the Afrikaners.

And the separation soon became more marked. There were injudicious
tamperings with the local government and the local ways, with a
substitution of English for Dutch in the law courts. With vicarious
generosity, the English Government gave very lenient terms to the
Kaffir tribes who in 1834 had raided the border farmers. And then,
finally, in this same year there came the emancipation of the slaves
throughout the British Empire, which fanned all smouldering
discontents into an active flame.

It must be confessed that on this occasion the British philanthropist
was willing to pay for what he thought was right.  It was a noble
national action, and one the morality of which was in advance of its
time, that the British Parliament should vote the enormous sum of
twenty million pounds to pay compensation to the slaveholders, and so
to remove an evil with which the mother country bad no immediate
connection. It was as well that the thing should have been done when
it was, for had we waited till the colonies affected had governments
of their own it could never have been done by constitutional methods.
With many a grumble the good British householder drew his purse from
his fob, and he paid for what he thought to be right.  If any special
grace attends the virtuous action which brings nothing but tribulation
in this world, then we may hope for it over this emancipation. We
spent our money, we ruined our West Indian colonies, and we started a
disaffection in South Africa, the end of which we have not seen.  Yet
if it were to be done again we should doubtless do it.  The highest
morality may prove also to be the highest wisdom when the half-told
story comes to be finished.

But the details of the measure were less honourable than the
principle.  It was carried out suddenly, so that the country had no
time to adjust itself to the new conditions.  Three million pounds
were ear-marked for South Africa, which gives a price per slave of
from sixty to seventy pounds, a sum considerably below the current
local rates. Finally, the compensation was made payable in London, so
that the farmers sold their claims at reduced prices to middlemen.
Indignation meetings were held in every little townlet and cattle camp
on the Karoo.  The old Dutch spirit was up -- the spirit of the men
who cut the dykes.  Rebellion was useless. But a vast untenanted land
stretched to the north of them. The nomad life was congenial to them,
and in their huge ox-drawn wagons -- like those bullock-carts in which
some of their old kinsmen came to Gaul -- they had vehicles and homes
and forts all in one. One by one they were loaded up, the huge teams
were inspanned, the women were seated inside, the men, with their
long-barrelled guns, walked alongside, and the great exodus was begun.
Their herds and flocks accompanied the migration, and the children
helped to round them in and drive them.  One tattered little boy of
ten cracked his sjambok whip behind the bullocks. He was a small item
in that singular crowd, but he was of interest to us, for his name was
Paul Stephanus Kruger.

It was a strange exodus, only comparable in modern times to the
sallying forth of the Mormons from Nauvoo upon their search for the
promised laud of Utah.  The country was known and sparsely settled as
far north as the Orange River, but beyond there was a great region
which had never been penetrated save by some daring hunter or
adventurous pioneer. It chanced -- if there be indeed such an element
as chance in the graver affairs of man -- that a Zulu conqueror had
swept over this land and left it untenanted, save by the dwarf
bushmen, the hideous aborigines, lowest of the human race.  There were
fine grazing and good soil for the emigrants.  They traveled in small
detached parties, but their total numbers were considerable, from six
to ten thousand according to their historian, or nearly a quarter of
the whole population of the colony.  Some of the early bands perished
miserably.  A large number made a trysting-place at a high peak to the
east of Bloemfontein in what was lately the Orange Free State. One
party of the emigrants was cut off by the formidable Matabeli, a
branch of the great Zulu nation.  The survivors declared war upon
them, and showed in this, their first campaign, the extraordinary
ingenuity in adapting their tactics to their adversary which has been
their greatest military characteristic.  The commando which rode out
to do battle with the Matabeli numbered, it is said, a hundred and
thirty-five farmers.  Their adversaries were twelve thousand spearmen.
They met at the Marico River, near Mafeking.  The Boers combined the
use of their horses and of their rifles so cleverly that they
slaughtered a third of their antagonists without any loss to
themselves.  Their tactics were to gallop up within range of the
enemy, to fire a volley, and then to ride away again before the
spearmen could reach them. When the savages pursued the Boers
fled. When the pursuit halted the Boers halted and the rifle fire
began anew. The strategy was simple but most effective. When one
remembers how often since then our own horsemen have been pitted
against savages in all parts of the world, one deplores that ignorance
of all military traditions save our own which is characteristic of our
service.

This victory of the `voortrekkers' cleared all the country between the
Orange River and the Limpopo, the sites of what has been known as the
Transvaal and the Orange Free State.  In the meantime another body of
the emigrants had descended into what is now known as Natal, and had
defeated Dingaan, the great Chief of the Zulus.  Being unable, owing
to the presence of their families, to employ the cavalry tactics which
had been so effective against the Matabeli, they again used their
ingenuity to meet this new situation, and received the Zulu warriors
in a square of laagered wagons, the men firing while the women
loaded. Six burghers were killed and three thousand Zulus.  Had such a
formation been used forty years afterwards against these very Zulus,
we should not have had to mourn the disaster of Isandhlwana.

And now at the end of their great journey, after overcoming the
difficulties of distance, of nature, and of savage enemies, the Boers
saw at the end of their travels the very thing which they desired
least -- that which they had come so far to avoid -- the flag of Great
Britain. The Boers had occupied Natal from within, but England had
previously done the same by sea, and a small colony of Englishmen had
settled at Port Natal, now known as Durban.  The home Government,
however, had acted in a vacillating way, and it was only the conquest
of Natal by the Boers which caused them to claim it as a British
colony.  At the same time they asserted the unwelcome doctrine that a
British subject could not at will throw off his allegiance, and that,
go where they might, the wandering farmers were still only the
pioneers of British colonies.  To emphasise the fact three companies
of soldiers were Bent in 1842 to what is now Durban -- the usual
Corporal's guard with which Great Britain starts a new empire.  This
handful of men was waylaid by the Boers and cut up, as their
successors have been so often since.  The survivors, however,
fortified themselves, and held a defensive position -- as also their
successors have done so many times since -- until reinforcements arrived
and the farmers dispersed. It is singular how in history the same
factors will always give the same result.  Here in this first skirmish
is an epitome of all our military relations with these people.  The
blundering headstrong attack, the defeat, the powerlessness of the
farmer against the weakest fortifications -- it is the same tale over and
over again in different scales of importance. Natal from this time
onward became a British colony, and the majority of the Boers trekked
north and east with bitter hearts to tell their wrongs to their
brethren of the Orange Free State and of the Transvaal.

Had they any wrongs to tell? It is difficult to reach that height of
philosophic detachment which enables the historian to deal absolutely
impartially where his own country is a party to the quarrel.  But at
least we may allow that there is a case for our adversary.  Our
annexation of Natal had been by no means definite, and it was they and
not we who first broke that bloodthirsty Zulu power which threw its
shadow across the country.  It was hard after such trials and such
exploits to turn their back upon the fertile land which they had
conquered, and to return to the bare pastures of the upland veldt.
They carried out of Natal a heavy sense of injury, which has helped to
poison our relations with them ever since. It was, in a way, a
momentous episode, this little skirmish of soldiers and emigrants, for
it was the heading off of the Boer from the sea and the confinement of
his ambition to the land.  Had it gone the other way, a new and
possibly formidable flag would have been added to the maritime
nations.

The emigrants who had settled in the huge tract of country between the
Orange River in the south and the Limpopo in the north had been
recruited by newcomers from the Cape Colony until they numbered some
fifteen thousand souls.  This population was scattered over a space as
large as Germany, and larger than Pennsylvania, New York, and New
England.  Their form of government was individualistic and democratic
to the last degree compatible with any sort of cohesion. Their wars
with the Kaffirs and their fear and dislike of the British Government
appear to have been the only ties which held them together.  They
divided and subdivided within their own borders, like a germinating
egg.  The Transvaal was full of lusty little high-mettled communities,
who quarreled among themselves as fiercely as they had done with the
authorities at the Cape.  Lydenburg, Zoutpansberg, and Potchefstroom
were on the point of turning their rifles against each other.  In the
south, between the Orange River and the Vaal, there was no form of
government at all, but a welter of Dutch farmers, Basutos, Hottentots,
and halfbreeds living in a chronic state of turbulence, recognising
neither the British authority to the south of them nor the Transvaal
republics to the north.  The chaos became at last unendurable, and in
1848 a garrison was placed in Bloemfontein and the district
incorporated in the British Empire.  The emigrants made ~ futile
resistance at Boomplats, and after a single defeat allowed themselves
to be drawn into the settled order of civilised rule.

At this period the Transvaal, where most of the Boers had settled,
desired a formal acknowledgment of their independence, which the
British authorities determined once and for all to give them.  The
great barren country, which produced little save marksmen, had no
attractions for a Colonial Office which was bent upon the limitation
of its liabilities. A Convention was concluded between the two
parties, known as the Sand River Convention, which is one of the fixed
points in South African history.  By it the British Government
guaranteed to the Boer farmers the right to manage their own affairs,
and to govern themselves by their own laws without any interference
upon the part of the British.  It stipulated that there should be no
slavery, and with that single reservation washed its hands finally, as
it imagined, of the whole question.  So the South African Republic
came formally into existence.

In the very year after the Sand River Convention a second republic,
the Orange Free State, was created by the deliberate withdrawal of
Great Britain from the territory which she had for eight years
occupied.  The Eastern Question was already becoming acute, and the
cloud of a great war was drifting up, visible to all men. British
statesmen felt that their commitments were very heavy in every part of
the world, and the South African annexations had always been a
doubtful value and an undoubted trouble.  Against the will of a large
part of the inhabitants, whether a majority or not it is impossible to
say, we withdrew our troops as amicably as the Romans withdrew from
Britain, and the new republic was left with absolute and unfettered
independence. On a petition being presented against the withdrawal,
the Home Government actually voted forty-eight thousand pounds to
compensate those who had suffered from the change. Whatever historical
grievance the Transvaal may have against Great Britain, we can at
least, save perhaps in one matter, claim to have a very clear
conscience concerning our dealings with the Orange Free State.  Thus
in 1852 and in 1854 were born those sturdy States who were able for a
time to hold at bay the united forces of the empire.

In the meantime Cape Colony, in spite of these secessions, had
prospered exceedingly, and her population -- English, German, and
Dutch -- had grown by 1870 to over two hundred thousand souls, the
Dutch still slightly predominating.  According to the Liberal colonial
policy of Great Britain, the time had come to cut the cord and let the
young nation conduct its own affairs.  In 1872 complete
self-government was given to it, the Governor, as the representative
of the Queen, retaining a nominal unexercised veto upon
legislation. According to this system the Dutch majority of the colony
could, and did, put their own representatives into power and run the
government upon Dutch lines. Already Dutch law had been restored, and
Dutch put on the same footing as English as the official language of
the country.  The extreme liberality of such measures, and the
uncompromising way in which they have been carried out, however
distasteful the legislation might seem to English ideas, are among the
chief reasons which made the illiberal treatment of British settlers
in the Transvaal so keenly resented at the Cape. A Dutch Government
was ruling the British in a British colony, at a moment when the Boers
would not give an Englishman a vote upon a municipal council in a city
which he had built himself.  Unfortunately, however, 'the evil that
men do lives after them,' and the ignorant Boer farmer continued to
imagine that his southern relatives were in bondage, just as the
descendant of the Irish emigrant still pictures an Ireland of penal
laws and an alien Church.

For twenty-five years after the Sand River Convention the burghers of
the South African Republic had pursued a strenuous and violent
existence, fighting incessantly with the natives and sometimes with
each other, with an occasional fling at the little Dutch republic to
the south.  The semi-tropical sun was waking strange ferments in the
placid Friesland blood, and producing a race who added the turbulence
and restlessness of the south to the formidable tenacity of the north.
Strong vitality and violent ambitions produced feuds and rivalries
worthy of medieval Italy, and the story of the factious little
communities is like a chapter out of Guicciardini.  Disorganisation
ensued.  The burghers would not pay taxes and the treasury was empty.
One fierce Kaffir tribe threatened them from the north, and the Zulus
on the east.  It is an exaggeration of English partisans to pretend
that our intervention saved the Boers, for no one can read their
military history without seeing that they were a match for Zulus and
Sekukuni combined.  But certainly a formidable invasion was pending,
and the scattered farmhouses were as open to the Kaffirs as our
farmers' homesteads were in the American colonies when the Indians
were on the warpath.  Sir Theophilus Shepstone, the British
Commissioner, after an inquiry of three months, solved all questions
by the formal annexation of the country.  The fact that he took
possession of it with a force of some twenty-five men showed the
honesty of his belief that no armed resistance was to be feared. This,
then, in 1877 was a complete reversal of the Sand River Convention and
the opening of a new chapter in the history of South Africa.

There did not appear to be any strong feeling at the time against the
annexation. The people were depressed with their troubles and weary of
contention. Burgers, the President, put in a formal protest, and took
up his abode in Cape Colony, where he had a pension from the British
Government.  A memorial against the measure received the signatures of
a majority of the Boer inhabitants, but there was a fair minority who
took the other view.  Kruger himself accepted a paid office under
Government. There was every sign that the people, if judiciously
handled, would settle down under the British flag.  It is even
asserted that they would themselves have petitioned for annexation had
it been longer withheld.  With immediate constitutional government it
is possible that even the most recalcitrant of them might have been
induced to lodge their protests in the ballot boxes rather than in the
bodies of our soldiers.

But the empire has always had poor luck in South Africa, and never
worse than on that occasion.  Through no bad faith, but simply through
preoccupation and delay, the promises made were not instantly
fulfilled.  Simple primitive men do not understand the ways of our
circumlocution offices, and they ascribe to duplicity what is really
red tape and stupidity.  If the Transvaalers had waited they would
have had their Volksraad and all that they wanted. But the British
Government had some other local matters to set right, the rooting out
of Sekukuni and the breaking of the Zulus, before they would fulfill
their pledges.  The delay was keenly resented. And we were unfortunate
in our choice of Governor. The burghers are a homely folk, and they
like an occasional cup of coffee with the anxious man who tries to
rule them. The three hundred pounds a year of coffee money allowed by
the Transvaal to its President is by no means a mere form. A wise
administrator would fall into the sociable and democratic habits of
the people. Sir Theophilus Shepstone did so. Sir Owen Lanyon did
not. There was no Volksraad and no coffee, and the popular discontent
grew rapidly. In three years the British had broken up the two savage
hordes which had been threatening the land. The finances, too, had
been restored.  The reasons which had made so many favour the
annexation were weakened by the very power which had every interest in
preserving them.

It cannot be too often pointed out that in this annexation, the
starting-point of our troubles, Great Britain, however mistaken she
may have been, had no obvious selfish interest in view.  There were no
Rand mines in those days, nor was there anything in the country to
tempt the most covetous. An empty treasury and two native wars were
the reversion which we took over. It was honestly considered that the
country was in too distracted a state to govern itself, and had, by
its weakness, become a scandal and a danger to its neighbours. There
was nothing sordid in our action, though it may have been both
injudicious and high-handed.

In December 1880 the Boers rose. Every farmhouse sent out its
riflemen, and the trysting-place was the outside of the nearest
British fort. All through the country small detachments were
surrounded and besieged by the farmers.  Standerton, Pretoria,
Potchefstroom, Lydenburg, Wakkerstroom, Rustenberg, and Marabastad
were all invested and all held out until the end of the war.  In the
open country we were less fortunate. At Bronkhorst Spruit a small
British force was taken by surprise and shot down without harm to
their antagonists. The surgeon who treated them has left it on record
that the average number of wounds was five per man. At Laing's Nek an
inferior force of British endeavoured to rush a hill which was held by
Boer riflemen. Half of our men were killed and wounded.  Ingogo may be
called a drawn battle, though our loss was more heavy than that of the
enemy. Finally came the defeat of Majuba Hill, where four hundred
infantry upon a mountain were defeated and driven off by a swarm of
sharpshooters who advanced under the cover of boulders.  Of all these
actions there was not one which was more than a skirmish, and had they
been followed by a final British victory they would now be hardly
remembered. It is the fact that they were skirmishes which succeeded
in their object which has given them an importance which is
exaggerated. At the same time they may mark the beginning of a new
military era, for they drove home the fact -- only too badly learned
by us -- that it is the rifle and not the drill which makes the
soldier.  It is bewildering that after such an experience the British
military authorities continued to serve out only three hundred
cartridges a year for rifle practice, and that they still encouraged
that mechanical volley firing which destroys all individual aim. With
the experience of the first Boer war behind them, little was done,
either in tactics or in musketry, to prepare the soldier for the
second. The value of the mounted rifleman, the shooting with accuracy
at unknown ranges, the art of taking cover -- all were equally
neglected.

The defeat at Majuba Hill was followed by the complete surrender of
the Gladstonian Government, an act which was either the most
pusillanimous or the most magnanimous in recent history.  It is hard
for the big man to draw away from the small before blows are struck
but when the big man has been knocked down three times it is harder
still.  An overwhelming British force was in the field, and the
General declared that he held the enemy in the hollow of his hand.
Our military calculations have been falsified before now by these
farmers, and it may be that the task of Wood and Roberts would have
been harder than they imagined; but on paper, at least, it looked as
if the enemy could be crushed without difficulty. So the public
thought, and yet they consented to the upraised sword being stayed.
With them, as apart from the politicians, the motive was undoubtedly a
moral and Christian one.  They considered that the annexation of the
Transvaal had evidently been an injustice, that the farmers had a
right to the freedom for which they fought, and that it was an
unworthy thing for a great nation to continue an unjust war for the
sake of a military revenge.  It was the height of idealism, and the
result has not been such as to encourage its repetition.

An armistice was concluded on March 5th, 1881, which led up to a peace
on the 23rd of the same month. The Government, after yielding to force
what it had repeatedly refused to friendly representations, made a
clumsy compromise in their settlement.  A policy of idealism and
Christian morality should have been thorough if it were to be tried at
all.  It was obvious that if the annexation were unjust, then the
Transvaal should have reverted to the condition in which it was before
the annexation, as defined by the Sand River Convention.  But the
Government for some reason would not go so far as this.  They niggled
and quibbled and bargained until the State was left as a curious
hybrid thing such as the world has never seen. It was a republic which
was part of the system of a monarchy, dealt with by the Colonial
Office, and included under the heading of `Colonies' in the news
columns of the `Times.' It was autonomous, and yet subject to some
vague suzerainty, the limits of which no one has ever been able to
define. Altogether, in its provisions and in its omissions, the
Convention of Pretoria appears to prove that our political affairs
were as badly conducted as our military in this unfortunate year of
1881.

It was evident from the first that so illogical and contentious an
agreement could not possibly prove to be a final settlement, and
indeed the ink of the signatures was hardly dry before an agitation
was on foot for its revision.  The Boers considered, and with justice,
that if they were to be left as undisputed victors in the war then
they should have the full fruits of victory.  On the other hand, the
English-speaking colonies had their allegiance tested to the
uttermost.  The proud Anglo-Celtic stock is not accustomed to be
humbled, and yet they found themselves through the action of the home
Government converted into members of a beaten race. It was very well
for the citizen of London to console his wounded pride by the thought
that he had done a magnanimous action, but it was different with the
British colonist of Durban or Cape Town, who by no act of his own, and
without any voice in the settlement, found himself humiliated before
his Dutch neighbour. An ugly feeling of resentment was left behind,
which might perhaps have passed away had the Transvaal accepted the
settlement in the spirit in which it was meant, but which grew more
and more dangerous as during eighteen years our people saw, or thought
that they saw, that one concession led always to a fresh demand, and
that the Dutch republics aimed not merely at equality, but at
dominance in South Africa.  Professor Bryce, a friendly critic, after
a personal examination of the country and the question, has left it
upon record that the Boers saw neither generosity nor humanity in our
conduct, but only fear. An outspoken race, they conveyed their
feelings to their neighbours.  Can it be wondered at that South Africa
has been in a ferment ever since, and that the British Africander has
yearned with an intensity of feeling unknown in England for the hour
of revenge?

The Government of the Transvaal after the war was left in the hands of
a triumvirate, but after one year Kruger became President, an office
which he continued to hold for eighteen years.  His career as ruler
vindicates the wisdom of that wise but unwritten provision of the
American Constitution by which there is a limit to the tenure of this
office.  Continued rule for half a generation must turn a man into an
autocrat.  The old President has said himself, in his homely but
shrewd way, that when one gets a good ox to lead the team it is a pity
to change him. If a good ox, however, is left to choose his own
direction without guidance, he may draw his wagon into trouble.

During three years the little State showed signs of a tumultuous
activity.  Considering that it was as large as France and that the
population could not have been more than 50,000, one would have
thought that they might have found room without any inconvenient
crowding.  But the burghers passed beyond their borders in every
direction.  The President cried aloud that he had been shut up in a
kraal, and he proceeded to find ways out of it.  A great trek was
projected for the north, but fortunately it miscarried.  To the east
they raided Zululand, and succeeded, in defiance of the British
settlement of that country, in tearing away one third of it and adding
it to the Transvaal.  To the west, with no regard to the
three-year-old treaty, they invaded Bechuanaland, and set up the two
new republics of Goshen and Stellaland. So outrageous were these
proceedings that Great Britain was forced to fit out in 1884 a new
expedition under Sir Charles Warren for the purpose of turning these
freebooters out of the country. It may be asked, why should these men
be called freebooters if the founders of Rhodesia were pioneers? The
answer is that the Transvaal was limited by treaty to certain
boundaries which these men transgressed, while no pledges were broken
when the British power expanded to the north.  The upshot of these
trespasses was the scene upon which every drama of South Africa rings
down. Once more the purse was drawn from the pocket of the unhappy
taxpayer, and a million or so was paid out to defray the expenses of
the police force necessary to keep these treaty-breakers in order. Let
this be borne in mind when we assess the moral and material damage
done to the Transvaal by that ill-conceived and foolish enterprise, the
Jameson Raid.

In 1884 a deputation from the Transvaal visited England, and at their
solicitation the clumsy Treaty of Pretoria was altered into the still
more clumsy Convention of London.  The changes in the provisions were
all in favour of the Boers, and a second successful war could hardly
have given them more than Lord Derby handed them in time of
peace. Their style was altered from the Transvaal to the South African
Republic, a change which was ominously suggestive of expansion in the
future. The control of Great Britain over their foreign policy was
also relaxed, though a power of veto was retained. But the most
important thing of all, and the fruitful cause of future trouble, lay
in an omission.  A suzerainty is a vague term, but in politics, as in
theology, the more nebulous a thing is the more does it excite the
imagination and the passions of men. This suzerainty was declared in
the preamble of the first treaty, and no mention of it was made in the
second.  Was it thereby abrogated or was it not? The British
contention was that only the articles were changed, and that the
preamble continued to hold good for both treaties.  They pointed out
that not only the suzerainty, but also the independence, of the
Transvaal was proclaimed in that preamble, and that if one lapsed the
other must do so also.  On the other hand, the Boers pointed to the
fact that there was actually a preamble to the second Convention,
which would seem, therefore, to have taken the place of the first. The
point is so technical that it appears to be eminently one of those
questions which might with propriety have been submitted to the
decision of a board of foreign jurists -- or possibly to the Supreme
Court of the United States. If the decision had been given against
Great Britain, we might have accepted it in a chastened spirit as a
fitting punishment for the carelessness of the representative who
failed to make our meaning intelligible.  Carlyle has said that a
political mistake always ends in a broken head for somebody.
Unfortunately the somebody is usually somebody else. We have read the
story of the political mistakes.  Only too soon we shall come to the
broken heads.

This, then, is a synopsis of what had occurred up to the signing of
the Convention, which finally established, or failed to establish, the
position of the South African Republic. We must now leave the larger
questions, and descend to the internal affairs of that small State,
and especially to that train of events which has stirred the mind of
our people more than anything since the Indian Mutiny.

There might almost seem to be some subtle connection between the
barrenness and worthlessness of a surface and the value of the
minerals which lie beneath it. The craggy mountains of Western
America, the arid plains of West Australia, the ice-bound gorges of
the Klondyke, and the bare slopes of the Witwatersrand veldt -- these
are the lids which cover the great treasure chests of the world.

Gold had been known to exist in the Transvaal before, but it was only
in 1886 that it was realised that the deposits which lie some thirty
miles south of the capital are of a very extraordinary and valuable
nature. The proportion of gold in the quartz is not particularly high,
nor are the veins of a remarkable thickness, but the peculiarity of
the Rand mines lies in the fact that throughout this 'banket'
formation the metal is so uniformly distributed that the enterprise
can claim a certainty which is not usually associated with the
industry.  It is quarrying rather than mining.  Add to this that the
reefs which were originally worked as outcrops have now been traced to
enormous depths, and present the same features as those at the
surface. A conservative estimate of the value of the gold has placed
it at seven hundred millions of pounds.

Such a discovery produced the inevitable effect. A great number of
adventurers flocked into the country, some desirable and some very
much the reverse.  There were circumstances, however, which kept away
the rowdy and desperado element who usually make for a newly opened
goldfield.  It was not a class of mining which encouraged the
individual adventurer.  There were none of those nuggets which gleamed
through the mud of the dollies at Ballarat, or recompensed the
forty-niners in California for all their travels and their toils.  It
was a field for elaborate machinery, which could only be provided by
capital. Managers, engineers, miners, technical experts, and the
tradesmen and middlemen who live upon them, these were the Uitlanders,
drawn from all the races under the sun, but with the Anglo-Celtic
vastly predominant.  The best engineers were American, the best miners
were Cornish, the best managers were English, the money to run the
mines was largely subscribed in England. As time went on, however, the
German and French interests became more extensive, until their joint
holdings are now probably as heavy as those of the British.  Soon the
population of the mining centres became greater than that of the whole
Boer community, and consisted mainly of men in the prime of life-men,
too, of exceptional intelligence and energy.

The situation was an extraordinary one.  I have already attempted to
bring the problem home to an American by suggesting that the Dutch of
New York had trekked west and founded an anti-American and highly
unprogressive State.  To carry out the analogy we will now suppose
that that State was California, that the gold of that State attracted
a large inrush of American citizens, who came to outnumber the
original inhabitants, that these citizens were heavily taxed and badly
used, and that they deafened Washington with their outcry about their
injuries.  That would be a fair parallel to the relations between the
Transvaal, the Uitlanders, and the British Government.

That these Uitlanders had very real and pressing grievances no one
could possibly deny.  To recount them all would be a formidable task,
for their whole lives were darkened by injustice. There was not a
wrong which had driven the Boer from Gape Colony which he did not now
practise himself upon others -- and a wrong may be excusable in 1885
which is monstrous in 1895.  The primitive virtue which had
characterised the farmers broke down in the face of temptation. The
country Boers were little affected, some of them not at all, but the
Pretoria Government became a most corrupt oligarchy, venal and
incompetent to the last degree. Officials and imported Hollanders
handled the stream of gold which came in from the mines, while the
unfortunate Uitlander who paid nine-tenths of the taxation was fleeced
at every turn, and met with laughter and taunts when he endeavoured to
win the franchise by which he might peaceably set right the wrongs
from which he suffered.  He was not an unreasonable person. On the
contrary, he was patient to the verge of meekness, as capital is
likely to be when it is surrounded by rifles. But his situation was
intolerable, and after successive attempts at peaceful agitation, and
numerous humble petitions to the Volksraad, lie began at last to
realise that he would never obtain redress unless he could find some
way of winning it for himself.

Without attempting to enumerate all the wrongs which embittered the
Uitlanders, the more serious of them may be summed up in this way.

1. That they were heavily taxed and provided about seven-eighths of
the revenue of the country. The revenue of the South African
Republic-which had been 154,000l. in 1886, when the gold fields were
opened-had grown in 1899 to four million pounds, and the country
through the industry of the newcomers had changed from one of the
poorest to the richest in the whole world (per head of population).

2. That in spite of this prosperity which they had brought, they, the
majority of the inhabitants of the country, were left without a vote,
and could by no means influence the disposal of the great sums which
they were providing.  Such a case of taxation without representation
has never been known.

3. That they had no voice in the choice or payment of officials.  Men
of the worst private character might be placed with complete authority
over valuable interests. Upon one occasion the Minister of Mines
attempted himself to jump a mine, having officially learned some flaw
in its title.  The total official salaries had risen in 1899 to a sum
sufficient to pay 40l. per head to the entire male Boer population.

4. That they had no control over education.  Mr. John Robinson, the
Director General of the Johannesburg Educational Council, has reckoned
the sum spent on Uitlander schools as 6501. out of 63,0001. allotted
for education, making one shilling and tenpence per head per annum on
Uitlander children, and eight pounds six shillings per head on Boer
children-the Uitlander, as always, paying seven-eighths of the
original sum.

5. No power of municipal government.  Watercarts instead of pipes,
filthy buckets instead of drains, a corrupt and violent police, a high
death~rate in what should be a health resort -- all this in a city
which they had built themselves.

6. Despotic government in the matter of the press and of the right of
public meeting.

7. Disability from service upon a jury.

8. Continual harassing of the mining interest by vexatious
legislation.  Under this head came many grievances, some special to
the mines and some affecting all Uitlanders.  The dynamite monopoly,
by which the miners had to pay 600,0001. extra per annum in order to
get a worse quality of dynamite; the liquor laws, by which one-third
of the Kaffirs were allowed to be habitually drunk; the incompetence
and extortions of the State-owned railway; the granting of concessions
for numerous articles of ordinary consumption to individuals, by which
high prices were maintained; the surrounding of Johannesburg by tolls
from which the town had no profit -- these were among the economical
grievances, some large, some petty, which ramified through every
transaction of life.

And outside and beyond all these definite wrongs imagine to a free
born progressive man, an American or a Briton, the constant irritation
of being absolutely ruled by a body of twenty-five men, twenty-one of
whom had in the case of the Selati Railway Company been publicly and
circumstantially accused of bribery, with full details of the bribes
received, while to their corruption they added such crass ignorance
that they argue in the published reports of the Volksraad debates that
using dynamite bombs to bring down rain was firing at God, that it is
impious to destroy locusts, that the word 'participate' should not be
used because it is not in the Bible, and that postal pillar boxes are
extravagant and effeminate.  Such OBITER DICTA may be amusing at a
distance, but they are less entertaining when they come from an
autocrat who has complete power over the conditions of your life.

From the fact that they were a community extremely preoccupied by
their own business, it followed that the Uitlanders were not ardent
politicians, and that they desired to have a share in the government
of the State for the purpose of making the conditions of their own
industry and of their own daily lives more endurable. How far there
was need of such an interference may be judged by any fair-minded man
who reads the list of their complaints. A superficial view may
recognise the Boers as the champions of liberty, but a deeper insight
must see that they (as represented by their elected rulers) have in
truth stood for all that history has shown to be odious in the form of
exclusiveness and oppression. Their conception of liberty has been a
selfish one, and they have consistently inflicted upon others far
heavier wrongs than those against which they had themselves rebelled.

As the mines increased in importance and the miners in numbers, it was
found that these political disabilities affected some of that
cosmopolitan crowd far more than others, in proportion to the amount
of freedom to which their home institutions had made them
accustomed. The continental Uitlanders were more patient of that which
was unendurable to the American and the Briton. The Americans,
however, were in so great a minority that it was upon the British that
the brunt of the struggle for freedom fell.  Apart from the fact that
the British were more numerous than all the other Uitlanders combined,
there were special reasons why they should feel their humiliating
position more than the members of any other race.  In the first place,
many of the British were British South Africans, who knew that in the
neighbouring countries which gave them birth the most liberal possible
institutions had been given to the kinsmen of these very Boers who
were refusing them the management of their own drains and water
supply. And again, every Briton knew that Great Britain claimed to be
the paramount power in South Africa, and so he felt as if his own
land, to which he might have looked for protection, was conniving at
and acquiescing in his ill treatment. As citizens of the paramount
power, it was peculiarly galling that they should be held in political
subjection.  The British, therefore, were the most persistent and
energetic of the agitators.

But it is a poor cause which cannot bear to fairly state and honestly
consider the case of its opponents. The Boers had made, as has been
briefly shown, great efforts to establish a country of their own.
They had travelled far, worked hard, and fought bravely. After all
their efforts they were fated to see an influx of strangers into their
country, some of them men of questionable character, who outnumbered
the original inhabitants.  If the franchise were granted to these,
there could be no doubt that though at first the Boers might control a
majority of the votes, it was only a question of time before the
newcomers would dominate the Raad and elect their own President, who
might adopt a policy abhorrent to the original owners of the
land. Were the Boers to lose by the ballot-box the victory which they
had won by their rifles? Was it fair to expect it?  These newcomers
came for gold.  They got their gold.  Their companies paid a hundred
per cent. Was not that enough to satisfy them? If they did not like
the country why did they not leave it? No one compelled them to stay
there. But if they stayed, let them be thankful that they were
tolerated at all, and not presume to interfere with the laws of those
by whose courtesy they were allowed to enter the country.

That is a fair statement of the Boer position, and at first sight an
impartial man might say that there was a good deal to say for it; but
a closer examination would show that, though it might be tenable in
theory, it is unjust and impossible in practice.

In the present crowded state of the world a policy of Thibet may be
carried out in some obscure corner, but it cannot be done in a great
tract. of country which lies right across the main line of industrial
progress. The position is too absolutely artificial. A handful of
people by the right of conquest take possession of an enormous country
over which they are dotted at such intervals that it is their boast
that one farmhouse cannot see the smoke of another, and yet, though
their numbers are so disproportionate to the area which they cover,
they refuse to admit any other people upon equal terms, but claim to
be a privileged class who shall dominate the newcomers completely.
They are outnumbered in their own land by immigrants who are far more
highly educated and progressive, and yet they hold them down in a way
which exists nowhere else upon earth. What is their right? The right
of conquest.  Then the same right may be justly invoked to reverse so
intolerable a situation.  This they would themselves acknowledge.
'Come on and fight ! Come on!' cried a member of the Volksraad when
the franchise petition of the Uitlanders was presented.  'Protest!
Protest! What is the good of protesting?' said Kruger to
Mr. W. Y. Campbell; 'you have not got the guns, I have.' There was
always the final court of appeal. Judge Creusot and Judge Mauser were
always behind the President.

Again, the argument of the Boers would be more valid had they received
no benefit from these immigrants. If they had ignored them they might
fairly have stated that they did not desire their presence. But even
while they protested they grew rich at the Uitlander's expense. They
could not have it both ways. It would be consistent to discourage him
and not profit by him, or to make him comfortable and build the State
upon his money; but to ill-treat him and at the same time to grow
strong by his taxation must surely be an injustice.

And again, the whole argument is based upon the narrow racial
supposition that every naturalised citizen not of Boer extraction must
necessarily be unpatriotic. This is not borne out by the examples of
history. The newcomer soon becomes 'as proud of his country and as
jealous of her liberty as the old. Had President Kruger given the
franchise generously to the Uitlander, his pyramid would have been
firm upon its base and not balanced upon its apex.  It is true that
the corrupt oligarchy would have vanished, and the spirit of a broader
more tolerant freedom influenced the counsels of the State. But the
republic would have become stronger and more permanent, with a
population who, if they differed in details, were united in
essentials. Whether such a solution would have been to the advantage
of British interests in South Africa is quite another question. In
more ways than one President Kruger has been a good friend to the
empire.

So much upon the general question of the reason why the Uitlander
should agitate and why the Boer was obdurate. The details of the long
struggle between the seekers for the franchise and the refusers of it
may be quickly sketched, but they cannot be entirely ignored by any
one who desires to understand the inception of that great contest
which was the outcome of the dispute.

At the time of the Convention of Pretoria (1881) the rights of
burghership might be obtained by one year's residence. In 1882 it was
raised to five years, the reasonable limit which obtains both in Great
Britain and in the United States. Had it remained so, it is safe to
say that there would never have been either an Uitlander question or a
great Boer war. Grievances would have been righted from the inside
without external interference.

In 1890 the inrush of outsiders alarmed the Boers, and the franchise
was raised so as to be only attainable by those who had lived fourteen
years in the country. The Uitlanders, who were increasing rapidly in
numbers and were suffering from the formidable list of grievances
already enumerated, perceived that their wrongs were so numerous that
it was hopeless to have them set right seriatim, and that only by
obtaining the leverage of the franchise could they hope to move the
heavy burden which weighed them down. In 1893 a petition of 13,000
Uitlanders, couched in most respectful terms, was submitted to the
Raad, but met with contemptuous neglect. Undeterred, however, by this
failure, the National Reform Union, an association which organised the
agitation, came back to the attack in 1894. They drew up a petition
which was signed by 35,000 adult male Uitlanders, a greater number
than the total Boer male population of the country. A small liberal
body in the Raad supported this memorial and endeavoured in vain to
obtain some justice for the newcomers. Mr. Jeppe was the mouthpiece of
this select band. 'They own half the soil, they pay at least three
quarters of the taxes,' said he. 'They are men who in capital, energy,
and education are at least our equals.

What will become of us or our children on that day when we may find
ourselves in a minority of one in twenty without a single friend among
the other nineteen, among those who will then tell us that they wished
to be brothers, but that we by our own act have made them strangers to
the republic?' Such reasonable and liberal sentiments were combated by
members who asserted that the signatures could not belong to
law-abiding citizens, since they were actually agitating against the
law of the franchise, and others whose intolerance was expressed by
the defiance of the member already quoted, who challenged the
Uitlanders to come out and fight. The champions of exclusiveness and
racial hatred won the day.  The memorial was rejected by sixteen votes
to eight, and the franchise law was, on the initiative of the
President, actually made more stringent than ever, being framed in
such a way that during the fourteen years of probation the applicant
should give up his previous nationality, so that for that period he
would really belong to no country at all.  No hopes were held out that
any possible attitude upon the part of the Uitlanders would soften the
determination of the President and his burghers.  One who remonstrated
was led outside the State buildings by the President, who pointed up
at the national flag. 'You see that flag?' said he. 'If I grant the
franchise, I may as well pull it down.' His animosity against the
immigrants was bitter. 'Burghers, friends, thieves, murderers,
newcomers, and others,' is the conciliatory opening of one of his
public addresses.  Though Johannesburg is only thirty-two miles from
Pretoria, and though the State of which he was the head depended for
its revenue upon the gold fields, he paid it only three visits in nine
years.

This settled animosity was deplorable, but not unnatural. A man imbued
with the idea of a chosen people, and unread in any book save the one
which cultivates this very idea, could not be expected to have learned
the historical lessons of the advantages which a State reaps from a
liberal policy. To him it was as if the Ammonites and Moabites had
demanded admission into the twelve tribes. He mistook an agitation
against the exclusive policy of the State for one against the
existence of the State itself. A wide franchise would have made his
republic firm-based and permanent. It was a small minority of the
Uitlanders who had any desire to come into the British system. They
were a cosmopolitan crowd, only united by the bond of a common
injustice. But when every other method had failed, and their petition
for the rights of freemen had been flung back at them, it was natural
that their eyes should turn to that flag which waved to the north, the
west, and the south of them -- the flag which means purity of government
with equal rights and equal duties for all men. Constitutional
agitation was laid aside, arms were smuggled in, and everything
prepared for an organised rising.

The events which followed at the beginning of 1896 have been so
thrashed out that there is, perhaps, nothing left to tell -- except
the truth. So far as the Uitlanders themselves are concerned, their
action was most natural and justifiable, and they have no reason to
exculpate themselves for rising against such oppression as no men of
our race have ever been submitted to. Had they trusted only to
themselves and the justice of their cause, their moral and even their
material position would have been infinitely stronger. But
unfortunately there were forces behind them which were more
questionable, the nature and extent of which have never yet, in spite
of two commissions of investigation, been properly revealed.  That
there should have been any attempt at misleading inquiry, or
suppressing documents in order to shelter individuals, is deplorable,
for the impression left -- I believe an entirely false one -- must be
that the British Government connived at an expedition which was as
immoral as it was disastrous.

It had been arranged that the town was to rise upon a certain night,
that Pretoria should be attacked, the fort seized, and the rifles and
ammunition used to arm the Uitlanders. It was a feasible device,
though it must seem to us, who have had such an experience of the
military virtues of the burghers, a very desperate one. But it is
conceivable that the rebels might have held Johannesburg until the
universal sympathy which their cause excited throughout South Africa
would have caused Great Britain to intervene.  Unfortunately they had
complicated matters by asking for outside help. Mr. Cecil Rhodes was
Premier of the Cape, a man of immense energy, and one who had rendered
great services to the empire.  The motives of his action are obscure
-- certainly, we may say that they were not sordid, for he has always
been a man whose thoughts were large and whose habits were simple. But
whatever they may have been -- whether an ill-regulated desire to
consolidate South Africa under British rule, or a burning sympathy
with the Uitlanders in their fight against injustice -- it is certain
that he allowed his lieutenant, Dr. Jameson, to assemble the mounted
police of the Chartered Company, of which Rhodes was founder and
director, for the purpose of co-operating with the rebels at
Johannesburg.  Moreover, when the revolt at Johannesburg was
postponed, on account of a disagreement as to which flag they were to
rise under, it appears that Jameson (with or without the orders of
Rhodes) forced the hand of the conspirators by invading the country
with a force absurdly inadequate to the work which he had taken in
hand.  Five hundred policemen and three field guns made up the forlorn
hope who started from near Mafeking and crossed the Transvaal border
upon December 29th, 1895.  On January 2nd they were surrounded by the
Boers amid the broken country near Dornkop, and after losing many of
their number killed and wounded, without food and with spent horses,
they were compelled to lay down their arms.  Six burghers lost their
lives in the skirmish.

The Uitlanders have been severely criticised for not having sent out a
force to help Jameson in his difficulties, but it is impossible to see
how they could have acted in any other manner.  They had done all they
could to prevent Jameson coming to their relief, and now it was rather
unreasonable to suppose that they should relieve their reliever.
Indeed, they had an entirely exaggerated idea of the strength of the
force which he was bringing, and received the news of his capture with
incredulity. When it became confirmed they rose, but in a halfhearted
fashion which was not due to want of courage, but to the difficulties
of their position.  On the one hand, the British Government disowned
Jameson entirely, and did all it could to discourage the rising; on
the other, the President had the raiders in his keeping at Pretoria,
and let it be understood that their fate depended upon the behaviour
of the Uitlanders.  They were led to believe that Jameson would be
shot unless they laid down their arms, though, as a matter of fact,
Jameson and his people had surrendered upon a promise of quarter.  So
skillfully did Kruger use his hostages that he succeeded, with the help
of the British Commissioner, in getting the thousands of excited
Johannesburgers to lay down their arms without bloodshed. Completely
out-manoeuvred by the astute old President, the leaders of the reform
movement used all their influence in the direction of peace, thinking
that a general amnesty would follow; but the moment that they and
their people were helpless the detectives and armed burghers occupied
the town, and sixty of their number were hurried to Pretoria Gaol.

To the raiders themselves the President behaved with great generosity.
Perhaps he could not find it in his heart to be harsh to the men who
had managed to put him in the right and won for him the sympathy of
the world. His own illiberal and oppressive treatment of the newcomers
was forgotten in the face of this illegal inroad of filibusters.  The
true issues were so obscured by this intrusion that it has taken years
to clear them, and perhaps they will never be wholly cleared.  It was
forgotten that it was the bad government of the country which was the
real cause of the unfortunate raid. From then onwards the government
might grow worse and worse, but it was always possible to point to the
raid as justifying everything.  Were the Uitlanders to have the
franchise? How could they expect it after the raid? Would Britain
object to the enormous importation of arms and obvious preparations
for war? They were only precautions against a second raid. For years
the raid stood in the way, not only of all progress, but of all
remonstrance.  Through an action over which they had no control, and
which they had done their best to prevent, the British Government was
left with a bad case and a weakened moral authority.

The raiders were sent home, where the rank and file were very properly
released, and the chief officers were condemned to terms of
imprisonment which certainly did not err upon the side of
severity. Cecil Rhodes was left unpunished, he retained his place in
the Privy Council, and his Chartered Company continued to have a
corporate existence. This was illogical and inconclusive. As Kruger
said, 'It is not the dog which should be beaten, but the man who set
him on to me.' Public opinion -- in spite of, or on account of, a
crowd of witnesses -- was ill informed upon the exact bearings of the
question, and it was obvious that as Dutch sentiment at the Cape
appeared already to be thoroughly hostile to us, it would be dangerous
to alienate the British Africanders also by making a martyr of their
favourite leader. But whatever arguments may be founded upon
expediency, it is clear that the Boers bitterly resented, and with
justice, the immunity of Rhodes.

In the meantime, both President Kruger and his burghers had shown a
greater severity to the political prisoners from Johannesburg than to
the armed followers of Jameson.  The nationality of these prisoners is
interesting and suggestive.  There were twenty-three Englishmen,
sixteen South Africans, nine Scotchmen, six Americans, two Welshmen,
one Irishman, one Australian, one Hollander, one Bavarian, one
Canadian, one Swiss, and one Turk. The prisoners were arrested in
January, but the trial did not take place until the end of April. All
were found guilty of high treason. Mr. Lionel Phillips, Colonel Rhodes
(brother of Mr. Cecil Rhodes), George Farrar, and Mr. Hammond, the
American engineer, were condemned to death, a sentence which was
afterwards commuted to the payment of an enormous fine.  The other
prisoners were condemned to two years' imprisonment, with a fine of
2,OOOL. each. The imprisonment was of the most arduous and trying
sort, and was embittered by the harshness of the gaoler, Du
Plessis. One of the unfortunate men cut his throat, and several fell
seriously ill, the diet and the sanitary conditions being equally
unhealthy. At last at the end of May all the prisoners but six were
released. Four of the six soon followed, two stalwarts, Sampson and
Davies, refusing to sign any petition and remaining in prison until
they were set free in 1897. Altogether the Transvaal Government
received in fines from the reform prisoners the enormous sum of
212,000L. A certain comic relief was immediately afterwards given to
so grave an episode by the presentation of a bill to Great Britain for
1,677,938L. 3s. 3d.-- the greater part of which was under the heading
of moral and intellectual damage.

The raid was past and the reform movement was past, but the causes
which produced them both remained. It is hardly conceivable that a
statesman who loved his country would have refrained from making
some effort to remove a state of things which had already caused such
grave dangers, and which must obviously become more serious with every
year that passed. But Paul Kruger had hardened his heart, and was not
to be moved. The grievances of the Uitlanders became heavier than
ever. The one power in the land to which they had been able to appeal
for some sort of redress amid their grievances was the law courts. Now
it was decreed that the courts should be dependent on the
Volksraad. The Chief Justice protested against such a degradation of
his high office, and he was dismissed in consequence without a
pension. The judge who had condemned the reformers was chosen to fill
the vacancy, and the protection of a fixed law was withdrawn from the
Uitlanders.

A commission appointed by the State was sent to examine into the
condition of the mining industry and the grievances from which the
newcomers suffered. The chairman was Mr. Schalk Burger, one of the
most liberal of the Boers, and the proceedings were thorough and
impartial. The result was a report which amply vindicated the
reformers, and suggested remedies which would have gone a long way
towards satisfying the Uitlanders.  With such enlightened legislation
their motives for seeking the franchise would have been less
pressing. But the President and his Raad would have none of the
recommendations of the commission. The rugged old autocrat declared
that Schalk Burger was a traitor to his country for having signed such
a document, and a new reactionary committee was chosen to report upon
the report. Words and papers were the only outcome of the affair. No
amelioration came to the newcomers. But at least they had again put
their case publicly upon record, and it had been endorsed by the most
respected of the burghers. Gradually in the press of the
English-speaking countries the raid was ceasing to obscure the
issue. More and more clearly it was coming out that no permanent
settlement was possible where the majority of the population was
oppressed by the minority. They had tried peaceful means and failed.
They had tried warlike means and failed. What was there left for them
to do? Their own country, the paramount power of South Africa, had
never helped them. Perhaps if it were directly appealed to it might do
so. It could not, if only for the sake of its own imperial prestige,
leave its children for ever in a state of subjection. The Uitlanders
determined upon a petition to the Queen, and in doing so they brought
their grievances out of the limits of a local controversy into the
broader field of international politics. Great Britain must either
protect them or acknowledge that their protection was beyond her
power. A direct petition to the Queen praying for protection was
signed in April 1899 by twenty-one thousand Uitlanders. From that time
events moved inevitably towards the one end. Sometimes the surface was
troubled and sometimes smooth, but the stream always ran swiftly and
the roar of the fall sounded ever louder in the ears.

The British Government and the British people do not desire any direct
authority in South Africa.  Their one supreme interest is that the
various States there should live in concord and prosperity, and that
there should be no need for the presence of a British redcoat within
the whole great peninsula.  Our foreign critics, with their
misapprehension of the British colonial system, can never realise that
whether the four-coloured flag of the Transvaal or the Union Jack of a
self-governing colony waved over the gold mines would not make the
difference of one shilling to the revenue of Great Britain.  The
Transvaal as a British province would have its own legislature, its
own revenue, its own expenditure, and its own tariff against the
mother country, as well as against the rest of the world, and England
be none the richer for the change.  This is so obvious to a Briton
that he has ceased to insist upon it, and it is for that reason
perhaps that it is so universally misunderstood abroad. On the other
hand, while she is no gainer by the change, most of the expense of it
in blood and in money falls upon the home country.  On the face of it,
therefore, Great Britain had every reason to avoid so formidable a
task as the conquest of the South African Republic.  At the best she
had nothing to gain, and at the worst she had an immense deal to lose.
There was no room for ambition or aggression. It was a case of
shirking or fulfilling a most arduous duty.

There could be no question of a plot for the annexation of the
Transvaal. In a free country the Government cannot move in advance of
public opinion, and public opinion is influenced by and reflected in
the newspapers. One may examine the files of the press during all the
months of negotiations and never find one reputable opinion in favour
of such a course, nor did one in society ever meet an advocate of such
a measure.  But a great wrong was being done, and all that was asked
was the minimum change which would set it right, and restore equality
between the white races in Africa.  'Let Kruger only be liberal in the
extension of the franchise,' said the paper which is most
representative of the sanest British opinion, 'and he will find that
the power of the republic will become not weaker, but infinitely more
secure.  Let him once give the majority of the resident males of full
age the full vote, and he will have given the republic a stability and
power which nothing else can. If he rejects all pleas of this kind,
and persists in his present policy, he may possibly stave off the evil
day, and preserve his cherished oligarchy for another few years; but
the end will be the same.'  The extract reflects the tone of all of
the British press, with the exception of one or two papers which
considered that even the persistent ill usage of our people, and the
fact that we were peculiarly responsible for them in this State, did
not justify us in interfering in the internal affairs of the republic.
It cannot be denied that the Jameson raid and the incomplete manner in
which the circumstances connected with it had been investigated had
weakened the force of those who wished to interfere energetically on
behalf of British subjects.  There was a vague but widespread feeling
that perhaps the capitalists were engineering the situation for their
own ends.  It is difficult to imagine how a state of unrest and
insecurity, to say nothing of a state of war, can ever be to the
advantage of capital, and surely it is obvious that if some
arch-schemer were using the grievances of the Uitlanders for his own
ends the best way to checkmate him would be to remove those
grievances.  The suspicion, however, did exist among those who like to
ignore the obvious and magnify the remote, and throughout the
negotiations the hand of Great Britain was weakened, as her adversary
had doubtless calculated that it would be, by an earnest but fussy and
faddy minority.  Idealism and a morbid, restless conscientiousness are
two of the most dangerous evils from which a modern progressive State
has to suffer.

It was in April 1899 that the British Uitlanders sent their petition
praying for protection to their native country. Since the April
previous a correspondence had been going on between Dr. Leyds,
Secretary of State for the South African Republic, and
Mr. Chamberlain, Colonial Secretary, upon the existence or
non-existence of the suzerainty. On the one hand, it was contended
that the substitution of a second convention had entirely annulled the
first; on the other, that the preamble of the first applied also to
the second. If the Transvaal contention were correct it is clear that
Great Britain had been tricked and jockeyed into such a position,
since she had received no quid pro quo in the second convention, and
even the most careless of Colonial Secretaries could hardly have been
expected to give away a very substantial something for nothing. But
the contention throws us back upon the academic question of what a
suzerainty is. The Transvaal admitted a power of veto over their
foreign policy, and this admission in itself, unless they openly tore
up the convention, must deprive them of the position of a sovereign
State. On the whole, the question must be acknowledged to have been
one which might very well have been referred to trustworthy
arbitration.

But now to this debate, which had so little of urgency in it that
seven months intervened between statement and reply, there came the
bitterly vital question of the wrongs and appeal of the
Uitlanders. Sir Alfred Milner, the British Commissioner in South
Africa, a man of liberal views who had been appointed by a
Conservative Government, commanded the respect and confidence of all
parties. His record was that of an able, clear-headed man, too just to
be either guilty of or tolerant of injustice. To him the matter was
referred, and a conference was arranged between President Kruger and
him at Bloemfontein, the capital of the Orange Free State. They met on
May 30th.  Kruger had declared that all questions might be discussed
except the independence of the Transvaal.  'All, all, all!' he cried
emphatically. But in practice it was found that the parties could not
agree as to what did or what did not threaten this independence.  What
was essential to one was inadmissible to the other.  Milner contended
for a five years' retroactive franchise, with provisions to secure
adequate representation for the mining districts.  Kruger offered a
seven years' franchise, coupled with numerous conditions which
whittled down its value very much, promised five members out of
thirty-one to represent a majority of the male population, and added a
provision that all differences should be subject to arbitration by
foreign powers, a condition which is incompatible with any claim to
suzerainty. The proposals of each were impossible to the other, and
early in June Sir Alfred Milner was back in Cape Town and President
Kruger in Pretoria, with nothing settled except the extreme difficulty
of a settlement.  The current was running swift, and the roar of the
fall was already sounding louder in the ear.

On June 12th Sir Alfred Milner received a deputation at Cape Town and
reviewed the situation.  'The principle of equality of races was,' he
said, essential for South Africa.  The one State where inequality
existed kept all the others in a fever. Our policy was one not of
aggression, but of singular patience, which could not, however, lapse
into indifference.' Two days later Kruger addressed the Raad. 'The
other side had not conceded one tittle, and I could not give more. God
has always stood by us. I do not want war, but I will not give more
away. Although our independence has once been taken away, God had
restored it.' He spoke with sincerity no doubt, but it is hard to hear
God invoked with such confidence for the system which encouraged the
liquor traffic to the natives, and bred the most corrupt set of
officials that the modern world has seen.

A dispatch from Sir Alfred Milner, giving his views upon the
situation, made the British public recognise, as nothing else had
done, how serious the position was, and how essential it was that an
earnest national effort should be made to set it right.  In it he
said:

'The case for intervention is overwhelming. The only attempted answer
is that things will right themselves if left alone. But, in fact, the
policy of leaving things alone has been tried for years, and it has
led to their going from bad to worse. It is not true that this is
owing to the raid. They were going from bad to worse before the
raid. We were on the verge of war before the raid, and the Transvaal
was on the verge of revolution.  The effect of the raid has been to
give the policy of leaving things alone a new lease of life, and with
the old consequences.

'The spectacle of thousands of British subjects kept permanently in
the position of helots, constantly chafing under undoubted grievances,
and calling vainly to her Majesty's Government for redress, does
steadily undermine the influence and reputation of Great Britain
within the Queen's dominions.  A section of the press, not in the
Transvaal only, preaches openly and constantly the doctrine of a
republic embracing all South Africa, and supports it by menacing
references to the armaments of the Transvaal, its alliance with the
Orange Free State, and the active sympathy which, in case of war, it
would receive from a section of her Majesty's subjects.  I regret to
say that this doctrine, supported as it is by a ceaseless stream of
malignant lies about the intentions of her Majesty's Government, is
producing a great effect on a large number of our Dutch fellow
colonists.  Language is frequently used which seems to imply that the
Dutch have some superior right, even in this colony, to their
fellow-citizens of British birth. Thousands of men peaceably disposed,
and if left alone perfectly satisfied with their position as British
subjects, are being drawn into disaffection, and there is a
corresponding exasperation upon the part of the British.

'I can see nothing which will put a stop to this mischievous
propaganda but some striking proof of the intention of her Majesty's
Government not to be ousted from its position in South Africa.'

Such were the grave and measured words with which the British
pro-consul warned his countrymen of what was to come.  He saw the
storm-cloud piling in the north, but even his eyes had not yet
discerned how near and how terrible was the tempest.

Throughout the end of June and the early part of July much was hoped
from the mediation of the heads of the Afrikander Bond, the political
union of the Dutch Cape colonists.  On the one hand, they were the
kinsmen of the Boers; on the other, they were British subjects, and
were enjoying the blessings of those liberal institutions which we
were anxious to see extended to the Transvaal.  'Only treat our folk as
we treat yours! Our whole contention was compressed into that
prayer. But nothing came of the mission, though a scheme endorsed by
Mr. Hofmeyer and Mr. Herholdt, of the Bond, with Mr. Fischer of the
Free State, was introduced into the Raad and applauded by
Mr. Schreiner, the Africander Premier of Cape Colony. In its original
form the provisions were obscure and complicated, the franchise
varying from nine years to seven under different conditions.  In
debate, however, the terms were amended until the time was reduced to
seven years, and the proposed representation of the gold fields placed
at five.  The concession was not a great one, nor could the
representation, five out of thirty-one, be considered a generous
provision for the majority of the population; but the reduction of the
years of residence was eagerly hailed in England as a sign that a
compromise might be effected. A sigh of relief went up from the
country. 'If,' said the Colonial Secretary, 'this report is confirmed,
this important change in the proposals of President Kruger, coupled
with previous amendments, leads Government to hope that the new law
may prove to be the basis of a settlement on the lines laid down by
Sir Alfred Milner in the Bloemfontein Conference.'  He added that
there were some vexatious conditions attached, but concluded, 'Her
Majesty's Government feel assured that the President, having accepted
the principle for which they have contended, will be prepared to
reconsider any detail of his scheme which can be shown to be a
possible hindrance to the full accomplishment of the object in view,
and that he will not allow them to be nullified or reduced in value by
any subsequent alterations of the law or acts of administration.'  At
the same time, the 'Times' declared the crisis to be at an end.  'If
the Dutch statesmen of the Cape have induced their brethren in the
Transvaal to carry such a Bill, they will have deserved the lasting
gratitude, not only of their own countrymen and of the English
colonists in South Africa, but of the British Empire and of the
civilised world.'

But this fair prospect was soon destined to be overcast.  Questions of
detail arose which, when closely examined, proved to be matters of
very essential importance.  The Uitlanders and British South Africans,
who had experienced in the past how illusory the promises of the
President might be, insisted upon guarantees.  The seven years offered
were two years more than that which Sir Alfred Milner had declared to
be an irreducible minimum.  The difference of two years would not have
hindered their acceptance, even at the expense of some humiliation to
our representative. But there were conditions which excited distrust
when drawn up by so wily a diplomatist. One was that the alien who
aspired to burghership had to produce a certificate of continuous
registration for a certain time. But the law of registration had
fallen into disuse in the Transvaal, and consequently this provision
might render the whole Bill valueless.  Since it was carefully
retained, it was certainly meant for use.  The door had been opened,
but a stone was placed to block it. Again, the continued burghership
of the newcomers was made to depend upon the resolution of the first
Raad, so that should the mining members propose any measure of reform,
not only their Bill but they also might be swept out of the house by a
Boer majority.  What could an Opposition do if a vote of the
Government might at any moment unseat them all? It was clear that a
measure which contained such provisions must be very carefully sifted
before a British Government could accept it as a final settlement and
a complete concession of justice to its subjects.  On the other hand,
it naturally felt loth to refuse those clauses which offered some
prospect of an amelioration in their condition. It took the course,
therefore, of suggesting that each Government should appoint delegates
to form a joint commission which should inquire into the working of
the proposed Bill before it was put into a final form. The proposal
was submitted to the Raad upon August 7th, with the addition that when
this was done Sir Alfred Milner was prepared to discuss anything else,
including arbitration without the interference of foreign powers.

The suggestion of this joint commission has been criticised as an
unwarrantable intrusion into the internal affairs of another
country. But then the whole question from the beginning was about the
internal affairs of another country, since the internal equality of
the white inhabitants was the condition upon which self-government was
restored to the Transvaal.  It is futile to suggest analogies, and to
imagine what France would do if Germany were to interfere in a
question of French franchise.  Supposing that France contained as many
Germans as Frenchmen, and that they were ill-treated, Germany would
interfere quickly enough and continue to do so until some fair MODUS
VIVENDI was established. The fact is that the case of the Transvaal
stands alone, that such a condition of things has never been known,
and that no previous precedent can apply to it, save the general rule
that a minority of white men cannot continue indefinitely to tax and
govern a majority. Sentiment inclines to the smaller nation, but
reason and justice are all on the side of England.

A long delay followed upon the proposal of the Secretary of the
Colonies. No reply was forthcoming from Pretoria.  But on all sides
there came evidence that those preparations for war which had been
quietly going on even before the Jameson raid were now being hurriedly
perfected.  For so small a State enormous sums were being spent upon
military equipment.  Cases of rifles and boxes of cartridges streamed
into the arsenal, not only from Delagoa Bay, but even, to the
indignation of the English colonists, through Cape Town and Port
Elizabeth. Huge packing-cases, marked 'Agricultural Instruments' and
'Mining Machinery,' arrived from Germany and France, to find their
places in the forts of Johannesburg or Pretoria.  Men of many nations
but of a similar type showed their martial faces in the Boer
towns. The CONDOTTIERI of Europe were as ready as ever to sell their
blood for gold, and nobly in the end did they fulfill their share of
the bargain.  For three weeks and more during which Mr. Kruger was
silent these eloquent preparations went on. But beyond them, and of
infinitely more importance, there was one fact which dominated the
situation. A burgher cannot go to war without his horse, his horse
cannot move without grass, grass will not come until after rain, and it
was still some weeks before the rain would be due.  Negotiations,
then, must not be unduly hurried while the veldt was a bare
russet-coloured dust-swept plain.  Mr. Chamberlain and the British
public waited week after week for their answer. But there was a limit
to their patience, and it was reached on August 26th, when the
Colonial Secretary showed, with a plainness of speech which is as
unusual as it is welcome in diplomacy, that the question could not be
hung up for ever.  'The sands are running down in the glass,' said he.
'If they run out, we shall not hold ourselves limited by that which we
have already offered, but, having taken the matter in hand, we will
not let it go until we have secured conditions which once for all
shall establish which is the paramount power in South Africa, and
shall secure for our fellow-subjects there those equal rights and
equal privileges which were promised them by President Kruger when the
independence of the Transvaal was granted by the Queen, and which is
the least that in justice ought to be accorded them.' Lord Salisbury,
a little time before, had been equally emphatic. 'No one in this
country wishes to disturb the conventions so long as it is recognised
that while they guarantee the independence of the Transvaal on the one
side, they guarantee equal political and civil rights for settlers of
all nationalities upon the other. But these conventions are not like
the laws of the Medes and the Persians. They are mortal, they can be
destroyed... and once destroyed they can never be reconstructed in
the same shape.' The long-enduring patience of Great Britain was
beginning to show signs of giving way.

In the meantime a fresh dispatch had arrived from the Transvaal which
offered as an alternative proposal to the joint commission that the
Boer Government should grant the franchise proposals of Sir Alfred
Milner on condition that Great Britain withdrew or dropped her claim
to a suzerainty, agreed to arbitration, and promised never again to
interfere in the internal affairs of the republic. To this Great
Britain answered that she would agree to arbitration, that she hoped
never again to have occasion to interfere for the protection of her
own subjects, but that with the grant of the franchise all occasion
for such interference would pass away, and, finally, that she would
never consent to abandon her position as suzerain
power. Mr. Chamberlain's dispatch ended by reminding the Government of
the Transvaal that there were other matters of dispute open between
the two Governments apart from the franchise, and that it would be as
well to have them settled at the same time.  By these he meant such
questions as the position of the native races and the treatment of
Anglo-Indians.

On September 2nd the answer of the Transvaal Government was returned.
It was short and uncompromising.  They withdrew their offer of the
franchise. They re-asserted the non-existence of the suzerainty. The
negotiations were at a deadlock.  It was difficult to see how they
could be re-opened. In view of the arming of the burghers, the small
garrison of Natal had been taking up positions to cover the frontier.
The Transvaal asked for an explanation of their presence. Sir Alfred
Milner answered that they were guarding British interests, and
preparing against contingencies. The roar of the fall was sounding
loud and near.

On September 8th there was held a Cabinet Council -- one of the most
important in recent years. A message was sent to Pretoria, which even
the opponents of the Government have acknowledged to be temperate, and
offering the basis for a peaceful settlement.  It begins by
repudiating emphatically the claim of the Transvaal to be a sovereign
international State in the same sense in which the Orange Free State
is one. Any proposal made conditional upon such an acknowledgment
could not be entertained.

The British Government, however, was prepared to accept the five
years' 'franchise' as stated in the note of August 19th, assuming at
the same time that in the Raad each member might talk his own
language.

'Acceptance of these terms by the South African Republic would at once
remove tension between the two Governments, and would in all
probability render unnecessary any future intervention to secure
redress for grievances which the Uitlanders themselves would be able
to bring to the notice of the Executive Council and the Volksraad.

'Her Majesty's Government are increasingly impressed with the danger
of further delay in relieving the strain which has already caused so
much injury to the interests of South Africa, and they earnestly press
for an immediate and definite reply to the present proposal. If it is
acceded to they will be ready to make immediate arrangements... to
settle all details