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 Emigres, 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 possession 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 had 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
sent 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 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.
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.
