ART. IX.-The Transvaal Trouble; how it arose. Being an Extract from the Biography of the late Sir Bartle Frere. By John Martineau. London, 1896.

THE

HERE is, or ought to be, a Statute of Limitations for all political controversies. The controversy as to the rights or wrongs of Uitlanders and Boers belongs emphatically to the category of questions which cannot be discussed ab initio. To do so would require a discussion at length of the first British occupation of the Cape; of our subsequent withdrawal and our final annexation; of the abolition of slavery, of the great Boer Treck, of the establishment of the British colony in Natal, of the Sand River Convention, of the creation of the Orange Free State, of the endless wars between the white settlers and the native tribes, of the constitution granted to the Cape Colony, of the discovery of the diamond fields, of the various economical and industrial revolutions which have altered the whole conditions of South African life, and of the personal characters of the men who have played leading parts in its development. In the present article we do not propose, even if the limits of space allowed, to make any attempt to discuss the moot question whether the Boers or the British are most to blame for the unfortunate antagonism which has arisen between the two races. All we want to do is to deal with facts as they are, to explain the relative attitudes of the two rival competitors for ascendancy in South Africa, and to point out what, in our judgment, is likely to result from the present embroglio.

In order, however, to render our meaning clear, it is absolutely essential to say something concerning the events which took place between our retrocession of the Transvaal and the abortive insurrection of Johannesburg. The root of our present and future troubles in the Transvaal is to be found in the Treaty of Pretoria, concluded as it was on the morrow of our defeat at Majuba. It is not our wish to enter into any party discussions on this subject. The simple truth is, that Mr. Gladstone's Government failed entirely to realize the point of view from which our surrender would be, and must be, regarded in South Africa. To us, conscious of our strength, of our overwhelming superiority to the Boers in military, financial, and intellectual capacity, it seemed well-nigh incredible that our abandonment of the Transvaal of our own free will and pleasure could be attributed to any other cause than a generous, if a Quixotic, impulse. Mr. Gladstone, then at the height of his popular influence, had no difficulty in persuading his countrymen that the display of magnanimity, evinced by our

handing

handing back the Transvaal to the Boers, would confer upon this country a moral authority far exceeding any material loss we might sustain by the cession.

In South Africa, however, the surrender of Majuba was regarded from a very different point of view. The facts of the campaign were patent to men on the spot in a way they could not possibly be patent to Englishmen at home. Το speak the plain truth, the ignominious disaster of Majuba had been only the last and greatest of a long series of discreditable reverses. In every engagement of any importance throughout the campaign the British troops, possessing as they did superior numbers, superior armaments, and superior military training, had been defeated by volunteer levies of Boer farmers. Immediately after the crowning disaster of Majuba, when British troops had sustained the most signal repulse they have suffered within the present century, our Government had purchased peace by practically conceding everything to obtain which their victorious enemies had taken up arms. Where in such circumstances, it might reasonably be asked, as indeed it was asked, throughout the length and breadth of South Africa, did magnanimity come in?

To the Transvaal Boers there seemed to be only one possible explanation of our surrender, and that was that we were either unable or unwilling to prosecute the war. The Boer David, it was believed all over the Veldt, had smitten the British Goliath hip and thigh, and had reduced him to such straits that he was afraid to continue the contest. Up to the present day the vast majority of the Transvaal Boers are firmly convinced that, if the English should be mad enough to go to war again, they would get the worst of the battle. The conviction may be, and indeed is, utterly irrational; but it is based on a fanatical belief and on an ignorant conceit, both of which are scarcely intelligible to men belonging to a higher order of intellectual development. We grant that Boer statesmen, such as President Krüger, who know something of the world outside the narrow limits of the South African Republic, do not altogether share the popular delusion, that the Boers are invincible in the event of their coming into collision again with the forces of the British Empire. But at the same time our surrender after our defeat at Majuba has left an indelible conviction on the minds of Boer statesmen that Great Britain will never again go to war in earnest with the Transvaal; England, they hold, may bluster and menace, but England will not fight; and till this belief is shaken no threat of war will deter the Boers from taking any action on which their hearts

are

are set, even if this action assails British interests and encounters British opposition.

The unfortunate results of our surrender were not confined to the Boers of the Transvaal. In this country all South African settlers of Dutch race are known under the generic name of Boers; but, as a matter of fact, there is all the difference in the world between the Boers of Cape Colony, of Natal, and, in a less marked degree, of the Orange Free State. The Cape, Natal, and Free State Boers may not like the English, but they realize the strength and power of the dominant British element; they are well aware that if it ever comes to a serious conflict it is they, and not the British, who must go to the wall. Indeed up to the period of Majuba the Dutch in South Africa had made up their minds, however reluctantly, that it was their manifest destiny to pass under the supremacy of Great Britain. But our acquiescence in the defeats inflicted on our armies throughout the Transvaal campaign led the Boers outside the Transvaal to come to much the same conclusion as that entertained by President Krüger and his colleagues. In other words, the British Empire was credited with being practically indifferent to its South African possessions. Granted this assumption, the Dutch had, to say the least, a chance of again becoming the paramount race throughout the country which they had been the first to colonize. It was only after Majuba that the Afrikander Bond became a formidable political organization; and the avowed object of this league was to render the Dutch element supreme in any South African confederacy of the future.

In the case of the British colonists in South Africa, the result of our capitulation on the morrow of a disastrous rout was even more detrimental to the promotion of good-will and amity between Boers and Uitlanders. Nobody who is not personally acquainted with South Africa can realize the intensity of the irritation caused by the surrender of 1881. The English settlers, proud of their race, their country, and their masterful energy, felt themselves degraded and humiliated in the presence of their Boer neighbours. What was even more important, their faith in the readiness of the Mother Country to stand by them in case of need was rudely shaken. Supposing that the Home Government intended to continue the policy which dictated the surrender of the Transvaal, the idea of the permanent presence of the Imperial factor,' to use the unfortunate phrase employed by the then Sir Hercules Robinson, on his retirement from his first Cape governorship, was simply an absurdity.' In the opinion of the British community in the

Cape,

Cape, the logical deduction from the proposition thus laid down was, that in some form or other South Africa was destined to become at no distant date an independent commonwealth. In such a commonwealth either the Boer or the British element must necessarily be supreme. In order, therefore, for supremacy to be retained in the hands of the British it was necessary for them to oppose all further aggrandizement of Boer influence and authority. The net outcome, therefore, of the Majuba capitulation was to revive the declining animosity between the Dutch and the English colonists, and to render them more suspicious of, and hostile to, each other than they had been in former days, when the predominance of Great Britain in South Africa had been regarded alike by Dutch and British as an accomplished fact.

Still it is only fair to acknowledge that the evacuation of the Transvaal and the restoration of its independence would not have produced anything approaching to the same disastrous results but for an event which Mr. Gladstone's Government did not foresee when the Treaty of Pretoria was concluded, and which they could not possibly have foreseen. At that period the Transvaal was a very poor and a very thinly-populated country, almost exclusively occupied, so far as it was occupied at all, by Boer farmers. During the period when it was under British rule there had been no considerable British immigration into the territory. There was little or no trade between the British possessions and the Transvaal. The Boers only cultivated a sufficient quantity of land to supply the food they required for their own use. Their chief desire was to keep their land as little cultivated and as little occupied as possible, so as to provide huge grazing-grounds for their flocks and herds. Even if there had been any great demand for Transvaal products, the markets of the Cape and of Natal were too distant and too inaccessible, owing to the utter absence of railways at this period, to permit of any important trade between the Boer producer and the British consumer. Indeed, the dislike of the British colonists to the abandonment of the Transvaal was mitigated by the belief that, at no distant date, the Transvaal must necessarily revert to British rule, owing to the inability of the country to provide the revenue requisite for maintaining its independence.

Moreover, there was no great apprehension in 1881 of any serious conflict of interests between the Boers and the Uitlanders in the Transvaal. The Treaty of Pretoria had stipulated that the English settlers should enjoy the same civil and legal privileges as the native Boer citizens of the Republic. When our troops were withdrawn, the bulk of our fellow-countrymen

who

who had taken up their abode in the Transvaal while under British rule, quitted the country. The result of the war had given the Boers all they required or wished for. They had recovered their political independence; they were free to administer their own affairs in accordance with Boer ideas, customs, and prejudices; they were at liberty, notwithstanding the nominal restrictions imposed by the Treaty of Pretoria, to deal with the Kaffir natives according to their own will and pleasure, and to lead the solitary semi-patriarchal lives on which their hearts were set. Their wants, in the matter of clothes, powder, guns, seed, and spirits, were extremely simple and very limited in amount. The Boers had no objection to the small number of foreigners who came into the Transvaal to start taverns and stores. In the first years which followed the re-establishment of the South African Republic, neither the Government nor the people of the Transvaal displayed any particular hostility to the entry of newcomers from the British possessions. In fact, if the economical conditions of the Transvaal had not undergone a sudden and unforeseen revolution, the probability is that in a few years the relations between Boers and Uitlanders in the Transvaal would have approximated to those existing in the Orange Free State, where the Uitlander population, forming as it does a small minority in numbers, constitutes the trading class in the Republic, and is allowed to live side by side with the Boer farmers, enjoying much the same rights, both legally and politically. In this connexion it is worth recording the fact that within two years of the British evacuation the Volksraad passed of their own free will a law according the rights of burghers to all new settlers of white race after two years' residence. This Act, which was repealed a few years later, had for its avowed object the promotion of foreign immigration into the territories of the Republic.

It was the discovery of gold, the aurum irrepertum et sic melius situm, which convulsed the whole fabric of the Transvaal, as has been the case in many other States, nations, and communities. It would be most unjust to blame Mr. Gladstone and his colleagues for not having foreseen the discovery of the Witwatersrandt reefs. It is also fair to assume on their behalf, that if this discovery had been made before Majuba, they would never have dreamed of surrendering the Transvaal, even if the Boer claim to independence had been ten times as potent as it appeared to be. Financially speaking, this surrender was a colossal blunder, but its authors cannot reasonably be held responsible for the financial results of the blunder. The

peculiar