Page:The Transvaal war; a lecture delivered in the University of Cambridge on 9th November, 1899.djvu/18

 necessary between nations, bringing into operation demands not founded merely upon a legal position but upon the intolerable character which a certain situation has assumed.

In 1652 the Dutch founded the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope. That colony was reinforced about the end of the seventeenth century by Huguenot refugees from France, and then at once the Dutch began to show that worship of their own system and that tenacity in clinging to it which they have shown ever since. The French language was only allowed to the French emigrants; it became compulsory for the next generation to adopt Dutch. The colony was occupied by England during the great wars at the end of the last and the commencement of the present century, when Holland, having been overrun and annexed by France, was an enemy in our war with France. We occupied that colony in amity with the family of the Prince of Orange, which had been the ruling family in Holland, but was in exile on account of the country having become French. At the peace in 1814 the colony was left in British hands. It was ceded by the restored dynasty of Holland. Its position had become of vital importance to England as a halfway house on the road to India, and at once our difficulties with the Dutch began. In 1815, the very year after the Colony had been ceded at the peace, a Dutchman called Bezuidenhout was summoned to answer for his conduct towards a native, quite proper according to the ideas of his own people, but inhuman according to ours. He refused to appear before the court and soldiers were sent to arrest him. He fired on those soldiers and, the soldiers firing in return, he was killed. The result was a Dutch rising in revenge for his death, and five of the leaders of that rising were hanged. That incident is remembered to this day with the bitterest feeling by the Dutch. The place where it occurred is called Slagter's Nek, and it still plays a considerable part in Dutch invective against England. The feeling was brought to a head by the emancipation of the