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 veld. 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 a futile resistance at
Boomplaats, 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.
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