Page:The Transvaal war; a lecture delivered in the University of Cambridge on 9th November, 1899.djvu/12



a Greek or Roman writer had to tell the story of a war, he usually took some opportunity at its commencement to throw the views and motives of the parties into the form of set speeches, supposed to have been delivered by their statesmen or generals. No better occasion of the kind was ever invented than that which in sober fact presented itself in the last days of May and the first days of June this year, when Sir Alfred Milner, the Queen's High Commissioner for South Africa, and Mr Kruger, the President of the South African Republic, met in conference at Bloemfontein. You know in a general way that at that time there were great complaints of grievances suffered by Uitlanders, or foreigners, in the South African Republic, of whom the larger proportion were British subjects, and that those grievances, which I shall mention more particularly later, had their foundation in the steady resolve of the Dutch government of that republic to maintain the Dutch language and the Dutch social and political system, including their methods of treating the natives. Now at the commencement of that conference Sir Alfred Milner said that he asked for the franchise, that is the power of voting for the election of the volksraad or parliament, for the Uitlanders, together with such an increase to the number of seats enjoyed by the Rand, the district where the gold mines are situated, as would give the Uitlanders a substantial representation in the volksraad.