Page:The Annual Register 1899.djvu/84

 76] ENGLISH HISTOEY. [maech

racial issue may be involved." After mentioning the shooting of the man Edgar, the petition ended by declaring that the condition of the British subjects was intolerable, and asking for an inquiry to be held into their grievances.

The difficulty of insisting upon reforms in the sense prayed for was increased by the fact that the petition seemed to imply that British force should be employed in order to help men to divest themselves of their British nationality, and to adopt citizenship with those who had no desire to admit them. Moreover the Outlanders at one time, before 1894, could have been nationalised in the Transvaal without hindrance, but as citizenship involved military service when called upon, the British settlers had with very few exceptions abstained from paying this price, and on several occasions, when frontier wars were menacing, had claimed exemption. It was therefore not unnatural that the Boers, with the memory of the raid still rankling in their minds, had shown no desire to conciliate such unwelcome immigrants, whom the gold discoveries had alone attracted. Doubtless underneath this surface cause of hostility there was the deeper racial feeling which separated the Dutch and British throughout South Africa, and the remembrance of the way in which, fifty years before, the fathers of the present generation of Boers had " trekked out " across the Vaal Eiver to live their own lives according to their own ways.

Shortly before the House rose for the Easter recess Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman had the opportunity at the National Liberal Club (March 22) of reviewing the position of the party of which he had been elected the leader. The results of the bye-elections, although no seat was actually gained, gave suffi- cient grounds for hoping that the Liberal party was awakening from its prolonged slumber and depression. Sir H. Campbell- Bannerman was therefore fully justified in adopting a cheerful tone. He admitted that their opponents had a great majority in the Commons, and the Lords in their pocket ; out what had they done? Mr. Balfour was giving up his Irish University scheme because it did not suit the Liberal Unionists. A private bill on the half-timers question, which embodied a clause of a bill the Government had themselves brought in, and which fulfilled a pledge they had made at Berlin, had been read a second time by an enormous majority, and now it was said the Government were afraid to find time for the bill. The same thing was happening in the case of the bill to prevent railway accidents. The present was not a Government at all ; it was mere wire-pulling. Mr. Brodrick had accused him of talking platitudes, and the Duke of Devonshire of opportunism. He was not afraid of the word ; but there was bad and good oppor- tunism. Bad opportunism was that of a Government which rested upon the simultaneous support of extreme reactionaries and some advanced Badicals, and which had to please one after the other, which gave subsidies of public money in order to