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CHAPTER XIV.

PLUNDERING.

Froude and Southey-Diamond Fields revolt- Muzzle to muzzle-A prophecy -The "house on fire."

I HAVE hitherto spoken of the annexation merely incidentally, as the views against it common amongst the people entered naturally into my subject, or as questions of the cost of war or of Kafir policy led to it. There is a great difference between declining to justify the annexation on the grounds put forward by the Annexationists and their apologists, and entering into a wholesale condemnation of the men by whom it was executed. It has been shown that the cry for annexation raised by a party in the Transvaal was merely "an ignorant expression of the dissatisfaction of a mean and contemptible minority." It has also been shown that there was nothing in the relations subsisting between the Boers and the Kafirs to justify the outcry made about cruelty and slavery; and it has been shown, above all things, that what has been done has failed to satisfy nine-tenths of the inhabitants of the Transvaal itself.1 Yet although all the reasons pleaded in support of this high-handed action be worthless and inapplicable, and even if the end should be failure and disaster, it is not so easy to blame Lord Carnarvon or Sir Theophilus Shepstone for this. They may have had higher and greater motives than they are willing to assign for what they have done. They may have been convinced of its necessity; and it is hardly fair now, after the event, to blame them for having availed themselves of every weapon 1 See Appendix F.

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put in their hands to hew down difficulties standing in the way of their policy.

It has for years been almost a faith amongst certain South African rulers that a mistake was committed when the Republics were abandoned, or rather, when they were permitted to enjoy that particular independence for which they had so long struggled. Newspapers were edited by men wedded to the idea of a vast British South African dominion; and it is undoubtedly the fact that much of the lasting popularity won by Sir George Grey is to be attributed to his adoption of most advanced views on this subject. Those views, as I have shown elsewhere, largely imbued the mind and governed the policy of many colonial worthies, chief amongst whom, by his talents, his energy, his experience, and his indomitable resolution, must be placed Sir Richard Southey, essentially a colonist, whose idea of progress was of the progress of British government and British institutions, and who, I have no doubt, sincerely believed that the only influences worth extending in the world were the British influences, which he has taken so great a part in guiding and consolidating.

That men possessed with notions of an almost boundless colonial dominion, under one flag, and subject to one system of government, should not have impressed their opinions. upon the Colonial Office, with which they were in hourly communication, would have been indeed wonderful; that when opportunity seemed to favour the immediate execution of their patriotic plans for the furtherance of their interests and the extension of their own rule, they should not have availed themselves of it, would have been much more wonderful. These men saw in the Boer system little else save stagnation, waste of public land, which they looked on as the true treasury of colonial empire, and a retardation of the only progress they had faith in, which, to their minds, was of itself a crime.

After what Mr Froude has written ('Leaves from a South African Diary'), and after the confirmation given to his

1 "The English Government, in taking up Waterboer's cause, have distinctly broken a treaty which they had renewed but one year before in a very solemn manner; and the Colonial Office, it is painfully evident to me, has been duped by an ingenious conspiracy."—FROUDE.

prophetic words by the events of the past three years, it will not be denied that these colonial politicians of what may be called the dominion school had resolved long ago, in the excess of their patriotism and the fervour of their convictions, to destroy the Republics. It is not surprising that they should have availed themselves of Transvaal disunion and weakness to effect this object. My argument, the argument of this book, the argument of the Boers, is not that their patriotic policy was wrong in itself,-is not that the means by which they hurried their plans into effect were in themselves grievous and oppressive, nor even that their apparently high-handed acts were cruel, or calculated to arouse fierce opposition and burning indignation,—but simply and solely that the reasons and arguments put forward in justification of those acts and that policy are false, untenable, and provoking. If the allegations about slavery and cruelty in the Transvaal had not been advanced; if the consent of non-existent majorities had not been pleaded in defence of an abstract wrong; if an inherent weakness that did not exist had not been urged as a plea in justification of an aggression that on its own. merits stood, perhaps, in need of no justification,—there would be less discontent in the Transvaal, and this book probably would never have been written.

For the present discontent on the part of the South African Dutch, the attempts at justification, far more than the annexation itself, or even the method of its accomplishment, are responsible.

The same cause produced very similar results at the Diamond Fields. Great Britain, shortly after the discovery of diamonds in what is now called Griqualand West, annexed that province for the sake of public convenience, but on false pretences. This fact is now everywhere admitted. The payment of £90,000 sterling by us to the President of the Free State as compensation for the wrong done to him, proves beyond a shadow of doubt that the annexation of the Diamond Fields was unjustifiable. As to whether it was necessary or not, all parties seem now to be pretty well agreed. What the people complained of at the time was, that annexation was not justified by the reasons assigned in

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its favour, which were so palpably fictitious and inconsistent with known facts, that they were believed to be merely the cloak of a conspiracy which had made the British name and the British flag the instruments of its success. The discontented people could not believe that her Majesty's Ministers would, if the truth were permitted to reach their ears, support a usurpation that was founded on a fraud. But access to the home authorities was slow-the path was filled with difficulties-the words and wishes of the people were misrepresented by men who had everything to gain by shutting out inquiry, and who hoped that lapse of time would provide them with the safeguards of accomplished facts and established precedent.

The representations of the people were not listened to in England. Is it to be wondered at that, like the pagans of old, who when their gods would not hear them grew angry, the Diamond Fields people, irritated by neglect, maddened by the difficulties they felt in tearing away from between them and England the screen of lies and falsifications that had been raised up as a bar against inquiry, determined by a violent and unmistakable demonstration to provoke investigation, even though it should be heralded by cannon. and bayonets, and followed by punishment? The people revolted. The rest of the matter belongs to history, and forcibly illustrates the Transvaal question as it is.

I would here remind a very great and a very good man --one of the leaders of all that is best in English public opinion, who visited Kimberley, and met there the chiefs of the anti-Government League-of something that passed at his interview with them. The delegates were asked by him as to their cause of complaint, and amongst others they mentioned "that Government took no steps to curb the growing insolence of the natives in and around the Fields; that the rapacious land-schemes of persons, one of whom claimed no less than 840 square miles of country, had irritated the barbarous squatters over an immense area; that the blacks, having been first led to believe that the land had been taken over in their name and for their protection, could at length plainly see that the so-called protection was but the juggling trick of political thimble-riggers and land-swindlers." Be

sides this, he was told that the "licence" permitted in the name of law to the natives on the Diamond Fields was undermining the foundation of authority all over Africa, while the guns that were being sold in thousands daily to the Kafirs would be, ere long, used in war. He was told that, wherever they began, troubles with the natives might soon be expected, and that if the barbarous element in Kimberley was not speedily placed under fair and moderate but strong and repressive rule, great disasters would occur; that even already Government had armed blacks to prevent the free expression of public opinion. He will perhaps remember what he said: "When it does come, you will not be afraid to meet them muzzle to muzzle, till you can look into the whites of their eyes. There are no laws to prevent Englishmen arming and defending themselves."

I should not now recall this conversation, but that the facts revealed in it bear strongly upon the Transvaal question.

Mr Froude also, before he left the country, judged, as events have proved, rightly of what was taking place. He says, in 'Leaves from a South African Journal,' speaking of Mr Southey, "His desire was and is to see South Africa British up to the Zambesi River, the native chiefs taken everywhere under the British flag, and the whole country governed by the Crown. When the Diamond Fields were annexed as a Crown colony he accepted the governorship, with a hope that, north of the Orange River, he might carry out his own policy, check the encroachments of the Transvaal Republic, and extend the empire internally. It has been the one mistake of Mr Southey's life. Being without a force of any kind, he could only control the Republics by the help of the native chiefs."

These words were prophetic. They have been more than justified. The war between Secocoeni and the Transvaal was the result of that policy that used the Kafirs, not as a "check to the aggressions," but as a means for the extinction, of the Republic. But this policy has produced other consequences, for which the Republic is held to be blamable. In fact, the direct and indirect results of the policy are ascribed not to it but to Republican misrule. The dangers,