Page:The Annual Register 1899.djvu/162

 154] ENGLISH HISTORY. [july

more easy, and Mr. Chamberlain's speech had been taken rather as a provocation than a warning. The Boers' fear of the Out- landers, moreover, was regarded as perfectly natural and well- founded, and the argument that a general admission of the Outlanders to the franchise would strengthen the republic could not be seriously accepted, for it implied that the Boer Republic would in a few years be supplanted by an Outlanders' Republic, and the Boers would have once again to submit to a form of Government which sixty years before tbey had " trekked " beyond the Vaal River to avoid. They valued their inde- pendence then above all other considerations, and it would be unwise, said the more guarded spokesmen of British policy, to take count of these feelings in our dealings with the Govern- ment at Pretoria.

It was important that opportunity should be found to discuss the situation openly before Parliament adjourned, and the publication (July 20) of a blue book relating to South African affairs placed the debate upon a clearer footing. The question of the conduct of the business was raised simul- taneously in both Houses (July 28), and the outcome was practically the same in each, the opinions of ministers and opponents differing in expression rather than in fact. In the House of Lords the discussion was opened by the Earl of Camperdown, who said it appeared to him the duty of the Government to prepare for any eventuality, and never to cease urging the just and reasonable claims of the Outlanders, and this view was supported by Lords Dunraven and Windsor. The Earl of Selborne, who represented the Colonial Office in the Upper House, pointed out that the relations between her Majesty and dwellers beyond the Vaal River had always been regulated by conventions, and not by treaties of the form common between equal sovereign States. These were the Sand River Convention of 1852, which was superseded by the annexa- tion, and the Pretoria Convention of 1881 and the London Convention of 1884. The retrocession of the Transvaal had been made with the intention of winning the affections of the Dutch in South Africa, yet at no time had the relations between this country and the Transvaal been satisfactory, and over and over again they had been strained almost to the verge of war. Notwithstanding all that was said by Lord Kimberley and Lord Derby as to the terms of the suzerainty in 1881, the South African Republic had in a recent despatch been describing them- selves as a sovereign international State. Then came the question of the Outlander population. It had been said that these Outlanders were a few millionaires and German Jews. But even millionaires and German Jews had rights of citizen- ship. The fact was that the mining community had made the country what it was. They found it poor and made it rich, ancl they were entitled to all the rights given everywhere else to ait industrial community. The majority of these men had come