But the Boers, as the colonial Dutch were called—the name is akin to German bauer, a peasant—were, and are, a people who valued their nationality and their independence. It was not for more than thirty years that they formally acknowledged the British rule, which in the meantime had been extended to include the district of Natal. After a few years of experience of that rule, the Boers made a great "trek," or exodus, and established themselves farther north, beyond the British domination, in what was then called the Orange Free State.
And there it is possible they might have dwelt for many generations as a free republic of farmers had it not been for the discovery, some twenty years later, of the diamond mines in the Transvaal district, farther north again, whither the Boers had by that time extended their occupation.
The effect of that discovery was to attract to the region of the diamond mines a rush, chiefly of British, but of variously mixed, nationality. Ten years later the Transvaal was proclaimed a British possession, and almost immediately the Boers went to war to maintain its independence.
The war was inglorious for Great Britain and involved a serious disaster to a considerable British force. It ended in a compromise which did not promise much security for the future. The Boers acknowledged the suzerainty of Great Britain and, subject to that not very clearly defined control, were conceded the right of managing affairs in the Transvaal. That was in 1881.
And from that time until the end of the century trouble grew and grew between the increasing population of the diamond fields and the increasing numbers and strength of the Transvaal Boers. Britain's position was difficult. These Boers had been the first to shoulder the white man's burden—if we like to put it in that way. They had been the first to drive out those black people who had owned the land before them—if we prefer to put it so. Whichever way we prefer, they had a right prior to that of those diamond finders, who came in and bought up their farms at great prices and were not at all welcome to the majority of the Boers whose farms did not happen to lie over diamond-producing strata.
From that point of view, all the argument seems to be on the Boers' side. But there is another point of view. These diamond searchers had come in in a perfectly peaceful way. They brought much wealth to the Boer Government which taxed them very severely, and really did not give them fair and decent treatment. The result was the breaking out, in 1899, of the great Boer War which went for a while so hardly for Great Britain that it looked at one moment as if her armies might be forced right back to the sea. Not only the Transvaal Boers but those of the Free State, and of Natal, joined together. Fortunately for Great Britain, Cape Colony, where the British element was largest, stood firmly for the Empire. At length the fortune of war turned, as more and more British troops arrived from oversea. By 1903 it was ended: the Boers surrendered at discretion.
And then was done one of the noblest and most generous and most courageous acts that the whole of this Greatest Story is able to show in the way of the treatment of a vanquished people by the victors: a very large part of the independent rule for which the vanquished foe had been fighting was voluntarily given to him. It was a tremendous experiment—tremendous, in the most literal sense of the word; that is to say, an experiment to be feared. It seemed an immense risk to take—thus to rely on the sense of gratitude of a beaten foe. But that foe showed himself as generous in acceptance of the experiment as Great Britain in making it. He proved his gratitude by devoted service for the Empire in the Great War. It was a tremendous experiment, wonderfully justified.
The division of Africa
It is not needful, for the purposes of this story, to go over in detail the possessions, and their boundaries, of the various white nations in Africa. The French have a huge area in the north-west, reaching right down from Algeria to a junction with the Congo River. The Belgian Congo lies between that French area and British Rhodesia, which joins the other British colonies farther south. Great Britain has Nigeria on the west coast and British East Africa on the east. Portugal has Angola on the one side and Mozambique on the other, with the large island of Madagascar, which is French, lying off it. Abyssinia, easterly of the Sudan and bounded on the east again by the British and the Italian Somalilands, is by far the greatest and most interesting of the African countries still in the possession of a coloured race. Even Morocco, just westerly of Algiers, is now under French protection, and on either side of it lies a territory that is under Spain.
These many and very different countries have not been won for the white man without heavy fighting with the natives whom the white intruders found there. Great Britain has had its severe campaigns against the Kaffirs and the Zulus in the south. The Italians have received very rough handling from the Abyssinians. Spain and France still have their troubles in the north. But the white man has prevailed, and must prevail increasingly as his better science puts better instruments of war into his hands.