Page:The Transvaal war; a lecture delivered in the University of Cambridge on 9th November, 1899.djvu/23

 written by their leaders, of his expression "I would repudiate them," and the answer which he gave—of course he had to take the opinion of his cabinet—the answer which the cabinet telegraphed was "under no circumstances can the Queen's authority in the Transvaal be relinquished." You may easily suppose that such a frustration of the hopes which they had been induced to hold, in a population which had immense confidence in themselves, brought about nearly unanimously the Transvaal insurrection at the end of 1880; and in the war so caused there occurred those successive defeats of the British forces at Laing's Nek and on Majuba Hill, after which—we must not say because of which—the British cabinet surrendered the country to its inhabitants. That surrender was made by the Pretoria Convention, which took its name from Pretoria, the capital of the Transvaal, in 1881. That convention again set up the republic as a separate state, though under the name of the Transvaal State. There has been some fog about that as there was about the convention which originally recognized the republic, and certainly it is a pity that it did not more expressly exclude the supposition that it might only be intended to erect a self-governing part of the Queen's dominions. But still, if you examine the matter impartially, there is no real doubt about its meaning. The Transvaal was to have distinct foreign relations, and that was provided for by the convention itself, only those foreign relations were to be conducted for it by the Queen's government. Consequently it would be a separate state, and, being a separate state, of course its inhabitants had a distinct national character. They were citizens, or as they call it burghers, of that republic, and not subjects of the Queen. You could not combine both characters any more than you can combine the characters of Englishman and Frenchman. Of course, although a separate state, it was to be under a suzerainty, because that is a fact for which, as you know well, the convention provided. The mere circumstance that