Page:The Annual Register 1899.djvu/219

 1899.] Mr. Chamberlain's Vindication. [211

not insist upon our assertion of suzerainty and we should tacitly agree to drop the controversy. We accepted it. I am not certain that I should have accepted it if I had not been bound by my previous utterances. In the despatch which closed the old controversy of the suzerainty we had said of our own motion, without any reference to them, that, having laid our views before them, having declared that we adhered to them, we did not intend to carry the controversy any farther. I referred back to that despatch and in so doing I accepted that condition. So two of the conditions were at once accepted." The next condition, Mr. Chamberlain pointed out, was not only that the present action should not be made a precedent for further intervention, but that there should be no further inter- vention. "With our experience of the Transvaal, with the knowledge that the next day some difficulty of a similar char- acter might arise, ... we were under no circumstances and at no time to practise any intervention. That was impossible. . . . Our reply to the Transvaal despatch was the acceptance of every point except that, instead of giving a pledge that we would never interfere again, we expressed a hope, an honest and earnest hope, that if these measures were carried out there would be no reason for our intervention."

"I cannot," proceeded Mr. Chamberlain, "explain to the House why, having got that despatch from the Government, the Transvaal went back on their own proposal. . . . Personally I believe that in the interval a malign influence appeared in our transactions with the Transvaal, and that communications were received by the Transvaal from their advisers — I must not be misunderstood, I am not alluding to foreign Powers, but . . . I do believe that influential advisers of the Transvaal must have interfered and got them to withdraw the offer which, at all events, I hoped might have prevented this crisis, or at least have lessened the tension which existed. Then what happened ? The Transvaal, without reason as I conceive, formally with- drew their own proposal. They asserted that we had refused their conditions, although they could not prove it. They withdrew their proposal, and they went back to a proposal which was then, I think, a month or six weeks old, and asked us once more to engage in a commission which might have met and lasted for weeks, but which in the end was certain to have one, only one, result, because in the meantime we had ascer- tained from our own examination of the provisions of the bill that as it stood it was perfectly inadequate to give us the substantial representation we asked."

On this point Mr. Chamberlain quoted the opinion of Mr. Robson, Q.C., the Liberal member for South Shields, who did not hesitate to describe the July seven years' Franchise Act as " a grotesque and palpable sham," and doubted " whether two or three hundred Outlanders could be found who could honestly fulfil its conditions." Mr. Chamberlain added that he agreed

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