1884), I am reminded by a leading member of the Cape Parliament-was defeated by the action of the late Cape Ministry.

The annexation of the Diamond Fields of Kimberley figures as another and the greatest item in the Boer accusations of rapacity and bad faith against the Imperial Government. It is said that on titles granted by Griqua chiefs, subsequently held invalid by a British High Court, the diamond fields of Kimberley were declared a British possession. This argument was one with which, at one time, I was considerably impressed; but the case on the other side has now proved to be much stronger than at one time it seemed, when it was based merely on the cession of the Diamond Fields, negotiated with Sir John Brand, the President of the Orange Free State, and the payment to the Orange Free State of a sum in compensation of £90,000. When we have witnessed the use to which the possession and control of the Gold Fields of the Witwatersrand has been put by the Boer Republics-how gold has been transmuted into artillery and rifles and the services of skilled generals from Algiers, such as the late Comte de Villebois-Mareuil-one cannot say that the sole justification of the Imperial annexing of the Diamond Fields is to be found in the difficulties which a small pastoral state would find in policing the cosmopolitan population of Du Toit's Pan.

Among the purely fictitious injuries of the past in the relations of the Boer and Imperial Governments must be counted the famous executions of Slachter's Nek in 1815. Certain farmers, who had resisted arrest, and fired on and killed officers of the law, were tried for murder and rebellion, and were executed under a combination of singularly cruel and pathetic circumstances, including that of ropes breaking at the first attempt at their execution. One could hardly admit that even real harshness attributable to the Imperial British authorities of such a far-off time, if fully established, could militate against or outweigh the accumulation of British rights in South Africa for the last

century. Not so long before in Newgate, in London, an Englishwoman, whose husband was seized by the press-gang of the Naval authorities, and who, to save herself from starvation, stole a loaf of bread, was hanged, an act denounced in the House of Commons as a foul judicial murder. Such were the manners of the age; and not in British territory alone, as Victor Hugo's story of Jean Valjean sufficiently shows. But the utter injustice of citing the execution of Slachter's Nek as a proof of British cruelty or of British tyranny over the Dutch, is rendered manifest by the single consideration that the trial was held, the sentence delivered and the sentence executed by Dutch officials-judge, jury, and executive officials being all Dutch. Many more examples of high-handed administration could be cited from the records of the Dutch Administration of the Cape during the hundred and fifty years of Dutch rule in the Peninsula. Revolt of Dutch farmers and trek into the wilderness were by no means unknown during the rule of the Dutch East India Company, nor yet appeal and remonstrance to the States-General at the Hague.

CHAPTER VIII.

BOER DEPRECIATION OF BRITISH CHARACTER AND POWER.

The Boer depreciation of British character as exhibited by both the Imperial Government and the British colonist springs from quite a combination of causes, some of which have already been referred to. For Imperial indecision in the past nothing but contempt is felt by the stubborn Hollander and Huguenot race, which knows its own mind. Anything but respect has been the result of the spectacles they witnessed of Imperial ingratitude to public servants, and to British and Dutch loyalists in the Orange River Sovereignty in 1854, and in the Transvaal Province in 1885.*

The Boers, people and Government, well remember that the Imperial Government threw over Sir George Grey, recalled Sir Bartle Frere, and dismissed Sir Theophilus Shepstone. There is nothing very astonishing, therefore, in the fact that they expected that the British Parliament would also abandon Sir Alfred Milner.

The effect on the Boer mind of the plentiful lack of information on the part of the British Government of facts of life and of the world, palpable to all who have lived in South Africa, for instance, that the position to which Kaffirs are entitled in justice is not one of equality, has not raised their estimate of British intelligence. Ignorance of fact

In January 1897 I had an interesting conversation at his farm in the Conquered Territory, a district of the Free State, with a son of the last British resident of Bloemfontein who had settled down as a burgher of the Orange Free State, and who had become in every respect a typical burgher,

they interpret as lack of intellectual acumen. The humanitarian wave of sentiment, which for the last hundred years has so dominated British home opinion, they do not share in the least, no more than the English of the eighteenth or of the seventeenth or the sixteenth century. In fact, counsellors are not wanted to tell them that the spirit, which dates from the French Encyclopædists and from Bentham and Wilberforce and McKenzie in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century, is only affectation of superior virtue at the expense of other people; and that, like the Cromwellian Puritan's interference with bear-baiting, which was prompted by the desire not to save pain to the bear, but to prevent the man being amused, so British interference with the domestic discipline of the Kaffir was intended rather, under the pretext of virtue, to annoy the Boer and to weaken his power in the land.

Again, the non-expansionist theories affected by various parties in succession in England, prompting Imperial Governments in one generation after another to declare their unalterable resolve not to move further into the interior, have not greatly impressed the Boer with respect for British intelligence and consistency-theories expounded first by missionaries, who tried to build up independent Kaffir "sovereignties," later on by Manchester School economists, who had not yet realised that trade follows the flag; and, last of all, by the so-called Little Englanders, whose theory that the Empire must always be wrong no Boer thinks of reciprocating by a contention that the Republics must always be in error. The Boer, however, is furnished with various explanations of these theories, all of them very unflattering to British intelligence. A high Imperial administrator was the first to point out to me that the Boers regard the missionary's interference as due to the missionary's perception of his private pecuniary interest. Where the Kaffir tribe was left undisturbed, and the Kaffir chief ruled as king, the missionary sat by his side, sharing his authority and emoluments as mayor of the palace. The Manchester School economist they regarded as an example of the painful

effects of want of intelligence and of rash dealing with facts 6,000 miles away, beyond the ken of the distant experimenter. Little Englanderism they regard as either lack of patriotism-for every Boer believes himself bound to take the side of his own people-or else fear of expense and increase of taxation; or else party interest seeking a highminded excuse to turn the other political party out of office; or else what our Continental cousins believe to be our national weakness-the affectation of superior virtue.

Much has been said in South Africa, of recent years, of the advantages and of the dangers of magnanimity. The High Commissioner in a recent speech in Capetown has vindicated the wisdom and the statesmanship of exhibiting, during and after the war, the British quality of magnanimity. That quality is genuine as we know. The British are one of the very few peoples who do not personally hate their enemies in war or their rivals in commerce. They have adopted and fully exercise the precept of their greatest predecessors in the political organisation of the European race. No Roman administrator has more fully acted on the precept-Parcere subjectis, et debellare superbos. Now, the Boer way of regarding actions of the Imperial Government claimed as exhibitions of magnanimity is very instructive. It is quite untrue that they do not appreciate magnanimity. But, as lawyers say, they join issue on the facts. What has been represented as magnanimity they do not regard as magnanimity at all. For instance, take the retrocession of the Transvaal after the British defeat at Majuba Hill. They regarded it, and still regard it, as Lord Randolph Churchill held in his book on South Africa, as a measure adopted after full consideration of political and economical advantages. They remind you that no gold reefs had been discovered in the Transvaal at that time; that Prime Minister Gladstone had cited the official description twenty-six years previously of the British Commissioner who negotiated the Sand River Convention, that the Transvaal was a howling wilderness. The Imperial Government knew that President Brand had intimated that he would be unable to restrain his burghers