The Great Boer War | Page 7

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