Page:The Annual Register 1899.djvu/189

 1899.] Mr. Chamberlains Highbury Speech. [181

graphed from Ottawa (Aug. 24) that the Hon. David Mills, Minister of Justice, and Professor of International Law at Toronto University, in a widely circulated review of the Trans- vaal situation, had said : "It is to be hoped that there will be no hesitation and no backing down, and no compromise of the rights of British subjects. The loss of South Africa means the disruption of the empire altogether beyond the loss of the colonies on the continent, and so the undisputed supremacy of British authority in that quarter of the globe is bound up with the unity of the empire itself." A telegram from Melbourne (Aug. 22) gave not less emphatic indications of the manner in which Australian feeling was ranging itself behind the mother country, with a view to possible eventualities. " Sir George Turner, the Victorian Premier,' ' ran the message, "has con- curred with the suggestion of the Hon. Charles Kingston, Premier of South Australia, that the colonies should offer Great Britain the use of the Australian squadron in the event of war with the Transvaal." And on the same day it was telegraphed from the capital of Jamaica that the whole of the militia of that colony had to a man volunteered for service in the Transvaal.

Such was the situation in respect of public information at home as to the general course of recent negotiations with the Transvaal, and of evidences of a remarkable convergence of colonial feeling as to the necessity of a strong and resolute policy, when Mr. Chamberlain made a speech (Aug. 26) which sharply arrested the attention of the whole empire. At a garden party which he gave to the members of the Birming- ham Liberal Unionist Association at his residence at Highbury, Birmingham, the Colonial Secretary, having observed that he wished he could have told his guests that the difficulties which had existed for so many years between the British Government and the oligarchy in Pretoria were happily settled, went on to say : " We have been, as you know, for the last three months negotiating with President Kruger. We have made, perhaps, some little progress, but I cannot truly say that the crisis is passed. Mr. Kruger procrastinates in his replies. He dribbles out reforms like water from a squeezed sponge, and he either accompanies his offers with conditions which he knows to be impossible, or he refuses to allow us to make a satisfactory investigation of the nature and the character of these reforms. . . What we have asked is admitted by the whole world to be just and reasonable and moderate, so moderate, indeed, that the proposals which were made by Sir Alfred Milner at the Bloem- fontein Conference appear to many to verge upon weakness. We cannot ask less, and we cannot take less. The issues of peace and of war are in the hands of President Kruger and of his admirers. . . . Will he speak the necessary words ? The sands are running down in the glass. The situation is too fraught with danger, it is too strained, for any indefinite postponement.