Page:The empire and the century.djvu/564

 G. G. ROBINSON

I.

Nelson Centenary, which is the occasion of this volume, marks also the close of the first hundred years of British dominion in South Africa. It was just three months after the Battle of Trafalgar that the last of the Dutch commanders surrendered his colony to General Baird. The assertion of British predominance at the Cape was one incident, hardly noticed at the time, in the great struggle against Napoleon's scheme of universal despotism. To-day we are just emerging from another struggle, less imposing in appearance than the war with France, but fraught with consequences just as serious to the Empire; and the scene and cause of it has been that same African colony of which Pitt laid the foundations a hundred years ago. Everything has tended in this latter war to belittle the real magnitude of the issues involved. And since a true understanding of them is the beginning of wisdom in things South African, it may be worth while to repeat very briefly at the outset two or three considerations which affect it.

In the first place, then, the annexation of the Dutch Republics was not merely (as it is often represented, even by its supporters) the inevitable extinction of a backward State which lags behind its progressive neighbours. This was not the case—always a difficult case 521