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.
CHAPTER 2.
THE CAUSE OF QUARREL.
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 veld - 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.
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