With the Flag to Pretoria: A History of the Boer War of 1899-1900. Volume 1

by Herbert Wrigley Wilson

Majuba.

In quick succession three checks, or positive defeats, were inflicted upon a small British force, the most serious that of Majuba. The British government had announced that, come what might, it would suppress the insurrection, but losing heart and terrified by the prospect of a Dutch rising in the Cape, it conceded to the insurgents a limited measure of self-government, and strove to delude the world by talk of magnanimity. It explained that there was real nobility in receding from its pledges and giving way to a small but victorious force of Boers. Many people at the time doubted this nobility, and by an explicit statement of Lord Kimberley on November 14, 1899, the surrender is now known to have been due to cowardice, and to cowardice alone.

SIR BARTLE FRERE (the centre figure at the table), STAFF, CHAPLAIN, AND SECRETARY OUTSIDE THE BRITISH RESIDENCY IN PRETORIA, 1880.

A settlement based upon cowardice could never last, could never prove satisfactory. The Transvaal Government used Mr. Gladstone's fears as a lever to extort a fresh convention and get fresh concessions. Its attitude to England was almost openly hostile.

The Outlanders.

1881-1896.] The English a Subject Race.

And now the discovery of gold brought immense wealth and a large British population into its midst. The rights of that British population, known as Uitlanders or Outlanders, had been very inadequately guaranteed by Mr. Gladstone, who foresaw nothing, and thus failed hopelessly in the greatest department of statesmanship. The Transvaal Boers remained what they had been in the days of the Great Trek and in the early forties. They kept all the power in their own hands and made of the English—from whose wealth, however, and from whose energy they took ample toll—a subject race, excluded from all voice in the management of affairs, deprived of the rights of free speech and of free press, unable to obtain justice in the Boer courts, openly insulted and outraged without hope of redress. Corruption was rampant in the governing circles.

JOHANNESBURG.