Page:The Annual Register 1899.djvu/640

 216 STATE PAPERS— TRANSVAAL. [1899.

have felt themselves compelled to declare emphatically that under no circumstances whatever will they admit the intervention of any foreign Power in regard to their interpretation of the Conventions.

Her Majesty's Government note, however, with satisfaction that, in the course of- the discussion at Bloemfontein, President Kruger with- drew the proposal for the intervention of a foreign Power. In the memorandum put in by him at the afternoon meeting on June 5 he spoke of his request for arbitration by other than foreign Powers, and the Government of the South African Republic, in a communication addressed to the British Agent on June 9, to which I have already referred, has modified its former proposal as to the formation of a Tribunal of Arbitration, so as to substitute for a foreign Power a foreigner as President, and, therefore, as supreme arbiter, in a Court to be otherwise composed of two members nominated respectively by her Majesty's Government and by the Government of the South African Republic. This proposal, although in a different form to those previ- ously made, is equally objectionable, inasmuch as it involves the admission of a foreign element in the settlement of controversies between her Majesty's Government and the Government of the South African Republic ; and for this reason it is impossible for her Majesty's Government to accept it.

Her Majesty's Government recognise, however, that the interpreta- tion of the Conventions in matters of detail is not free from difficulty. While on the one hand there can be no question of the interpretation of the preamble of the Convention of 1881, which governs the articles substituted in the Convention of 1884, on the other hand there may be fair differences of opinion as to the interpretation of the details of those articles, and it is unsatisfactory that in cases of divergence of opinion between her Majesty's Government and the Government of the South African Republic there should be no authority to which to refer the points at issue for final decision.

If, therefore, the President is prepared to agree to the exclusion of any foreign element in the settlement of such disputes, her Majesty's Government would be willing to consider how far and by what methods such questions of interpretation as have been above alluded to could be decided by some judicial authority whose independence, impar- tiality and capacity would be beyond and above all suspicion.

After the discussion by delegates, as already proposed, of the details and the technical matters involved in the points which her Majesty's Government desire to urge for the consideration of the Government of the South African Republic in relation to the political representation of the Outlanders, it may be desirable that you should endeavour to come to an agreement with President Kruger as to the action to be taken upon their reports by means of another personal conference.

In this case, the occasion would be a suitable one for you to discuss with his Honour the matter of the proposed tribunal of arbitration and those other questions which were not brought forward at the Bloem- fontein Conference because of the failure to arrive at an understanding on the question of the political representation of the Outlanders, but