Page:The truth about the Transvaal.djvu/10

Rh upon the part of the inhabitants of any country produces a spirit of lawlessness, and brings about consequences which cannot be confined to their own community. This, too, is especially the case in a country situated as is the Transvaal. Unrestrained by the laws which would have prevailed among a more civilised people, the Boers from 1852 up to 1877 were constantly engaged either in civil war among themselves or in conflicts with the numerous native tribes whose children they sought to enslave and whose lands they desired to appropriate to themselves. By the continual and cruel inroads of the Boers upon these natives, the "system of non-interference" made binding by the Sand River Convention was practically violated as much as the provision against slavery. For these natives were in many instances the neighbours and kin of the native population dwelling in British territory, and, apart from all questions of justice and humanity, the British Government could not afford to tolerate the constant kindling of warlike and hostile feelings among the native tribes which might at any moment culminate in a war of races, the result of which could not but be widely disastrous to the best interests of civilisation. That such a state of things had really been reached in 1876-7 may be proved from the mouth of President Burghers himself, whose speeches to the Volksraad absolutely demolish the pretence lately put forward that the Transvaal Boers could have "pulled through" the difficulties by which they were surrounded at that time. Upon this particular point the President said with regard to England: "It is asked, what have they to do with our position? I tell you, as much as we have to do with that of our Kaffir neighbours. As little as we can allow barbarities among the Kaffirs on our borders, so little can they allow that in a state on their borders anarchy and rebellion should exist." It is beyond all doubt that "anarchy and rebellion" did exist in the Transvaal in the spring of 1877, and that there appeared no prospect of a better state of things. The taxes were not paid, the law was utterly disregarded, the treasury was empty, the administration had practically disappeared, and savage tribes were threatening the country with no doubtful voice. What, then, was the duty of England? Mr. Sellar, writing as a political partisan, tells us that our Colonial Minister, Lord Carnarvon, had a "forward policy" in South Africa, just as Lord Salisbury in India, and that "as Lord Salisbury found an agent in Lord Lytton to carry out his policy, so Lord Carnarvon found an agent in Mr. Shepstone, who was knighted as a prospective honour attaching to the instrument who accomplished this achievement of annexation." The attempt here made to confound Lord Carnarvon's policy in South Africa with that of Lord Salisbury in India is as absurd as it is unfair. Lord Salisbury may have been quite right or quite wrong in India, but the circumstances of the two cases are entirely different, and each must be judged upon its own merits. Moreover, since Sir Theophilus Shepstone had been a Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George since 1869, and had for forty years