Yet these accusations were the sole pretexts for the war, except that fear of the proximity of a nation strong enough and warlike enough to injure us, if it wished to do so, which Sir Bartle Frere declared made it impossible for peaceful subjects of Her Majesty to feel security for life or property within fifty miles of the border, and made the existence of a peaceful English community in the neighbourhood impossible.[110] He speaks in the same despatch (2269, pp. 1, 2) of the king as “an irresponsible, bloodthirsty, and treacherous despot,” which terms, and others like them, do duty again and again for solid facts, but of the justice of which he gives no proof whatever. We cannot do better than give, in conclusion, and as a comment upon the above fear, a quotation from Lord Blachford’s speech in the House of Lords, March 26th, 1879, which runs:
“Some people assumed that the growth of the Zulu power in the neighbourhood of a British colony constituted such a danger that, in a common phrase, it had to be got rid of, and that, when a thing had to be done, it was idle and inconvenient to examine too closely into the pretexts which were set up. And this was summed up in a phrase which is used more than once by the High Commissioner, and had obtained currency in what he might call the light literature of politics. We might be told to obey our ‘instincts of self-preservation.’ No doubt the instinct of self-preservation was one of the most necessary of our instincts. But it was one of those which we had in common with the lowest brute—one of those which we are most frequently called on to keep in order. It was in obedience to the ‘instinct of self-preservation’ that a coward ran away in battle, that a burglar murdered a policeman, or, what was more to our present purpose, that a nervous woman jumped out of a carriage lest she should be upset; or that one man in a fright fired at another who, he thought, meant to do him an injury, though he had not yet shown any sign of an intention of doing so. The soldiers who went down in the Birkenhead—what should we have thought of them if, instead of standing in their ranks to be drowned, they had pushed the women and children into the hold and saved themselves? A reasonable determination to do that which our safety requires, so far as it is consistent with our duty to others, is the duty and interest of every man. To evade an appeal to the claims of reason and justice, by a clamorous allegation of our animal instinct, is to abdicate our privileges as men, and to revert to brutality.”
CHAPTER XII.
THE ULTIMATUM, DECLARATION OF WAR, AND COMMENCEMENT OF CAMPAIGN.
On December 11th the boundary award was delivered to the Zulus by four gentlemen selected for the purpose, who, by previous arrangement, met the king’s envoys at the Lower Tugela Drift. The award itself, as we already know, was in favour of the Zulus; nevertheless it is impossible to read the terms in which it was given without feeling that it was reluctantly done. It is fenced in with warnings to the Zulus against transgressing the limits assigned to them, without a word assuring them that their rights also shall in future be respected; and, while touching on Zulu aggressions on Boers in the late disputed territory, it says nothing of those committed by Boers.
But perhaps the most remarkable phrase in the whole award is that in which Sir Bartle Frere gives the Zulus to understand that they will have to pay the compensation due to the ejected Transvaal farmers, while he entirely ignores all that can be said on the other side of injuries to property and person inflicted on Zulus in the disputed territory (of which the Blue-books contain ample proof), not to speak of the rights and advantages so long withheld from them, and now decided to be their due.
Sir Henry Bulwer plainly took a very different view on this point when he summed up the judgment of the Commissioners (2220, p. 388), and added as follows: “I would venture to suggest that it is a fair matter for consideration if those Transvaal subjects, who have been induced ... under the sanction, expressed or tacit, of the Government of the Republic, to settle and remain in that portion of the country, have not a claim for compensation from their Government for the individual losses they may sustain.”
Sir Bartle Frere, starting with phrases which might be supposed to agree with the above, gradually and ingeniously shifts his ground through propositions for compensation to be paid to farmers “required or obliged to leave” (omitting the detail of who is to pay), and then for compensation to be paid to farmers wishing to remove, until he finally arrives, by a process peculiarly his own, at a measure intended to “secure private rights of property,” which eventually blossomed out into a scheme for maintaining, in spite of the award, the Boer farmers on the land claimed by them, which we shall presently relate in full. Although nothing appeared in the award itself on this point, the whole tone of it was calculated to take the edge off the pleasure which the justice done them at last would naturally give the Zulus, and it was promptly followed up by an “ultimatum” from the High Commissioner calculated to absorb their whole attention.
This “ultimatum” contained the following thirteen demands, and was delivered on the same day with the award, an hour later:
1. Surrender of Sihayo’s three sons and brother to be tried by the Natal courts.