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.
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