The Boer President refused to think of this, on the precise and often expressed ground that the Uitlanders were a large majority of the people, and there could be no safeguards for the Boer Government if these outsiders and strangers were permitted to have any political rights whatever. The President held indomitably that the "newcomers" and "strangers" should not occupy and possess the country to any degree by force of numbers or merit of industry and property. They were in the "blood-bought land"—that is truthfully applied, especially the native blood, and British blood had been shed copiously, and the land was bloody enough in that sense; but the condition of English-speaking people and all white immigrants in the gold fields, the richest in the world, and the diamond fields, also the richest ever known—the whole output amounting to more than one hundred millions of dollars a year—should be abject submission to an extortionate, tyrannous and brutal caste that respected no human rights and revelled in selfishness, sordidness and personal and racial insolence. Mr. Kruger's Views on the Question The initial point at which President Kruger stood through these negotiations, in which he had ample and honorable opportunities to make peace, was that the great communities of English-speaking people were composed of strangers and aliens who must be inferiors. This amounted to a presumption, officially and peremptorily and continuously asserted, that the Boers must, though a minority, and because they were a minority, be consecrated by "blood" a ruling caste, a caste whose authority it was impious to dispute, and that they must have confided to them exclusively and forever commanding powers held sacred over the natives they had enslaved; and the English-speaking people they taxed, assessed and restricted, insulted and humiliated with ostentation at their sovereign, savage pleasure. It is a mild and gentle form of expression to say that the behavior of the Boers has been that of a barbarous tribe, and that their conduct has had a nearer correspondence with Zulu savagery than with Christian civilization, and totally lacks the kindliness of the Hottentot. The Boers forced the war with England in the spirit of haughty, tribal, class, racial, contemptuous hostility, and would have it so throughout the Conferences.

The English Language not Permitted

After the Conferences between the British Commissioner and Governor of South Africa, Sir Alfred Milner and President Kruger, the peace-making efforts lacked acute interest, but were perseveringly continued. The latest concession of the Boers was that if the "people"—and by the "people" were meant the burghers of the Transvaal—approved, and the Government would try to get them to do so, a "retrospective five years' franchise" would be granted, and the amount of it was that of two-thirds of the white men of the Transvaal were to have one-fourth of the representation in the Volks Raad, but by no possibility, it was a little later explained, could the English language be permitted in that august body—the barbarous jargon of the Boers being the official language and the only tongue to be spoken. The President of the Orange State, as the gravity of the situation increased played a raucous second fiddle to President Kruger, and busied himself against the English, constantly professing friendliness to excess, working upon the line of securing the acceptance of an impossible complacency by the majority of white men in the Transvaal, in reference to the policy of their own subordination. That sort of submission is not according to the inheritance of the blood or the antecedent history of the English-speaking race, and the Uitlanders were not effusive with satisfaction even at the last Boer effort to make peace by offering a fractional representation in a body while they must listen to an unknown tongue and not be permitted to speak in the "Republican" parliament the language of the majority of the tolerably white men dwelling in the territory of the Republic.

The utility of the hysteria of the President of the Orange State was in the warning his frequent and voluminous impracticable suggestions gave, that peace could only be preserved by another case of sublime magnanimity like that of Mr. Gladstone, whose Christian benevolence had given the Boers confidence in their own invincibility and also in the timidity of the British, who were supposed to be most happy when dealing in generosities toward enemies in arms and victorious over the generous. Suddenly the peace-maker, President of the Orange State, snatched the British gold in transit, arrested or expelled British subjects by countenancing and justifying a panic that led them to take flight from his peaceable State, at the same time commandeering the burghers in force, assuming that this was done in a purely pacific way; and on the fourth of October this man of peace wrote to Sir Alfred Milner that he must urge the "urgent necessity of intimating to me without further delay whether Your Excellency sees your way clear to give effect to these my views and wishes."

The President of the Orange Free State as Peace Maker

It will be remarked that there is found in the Orange President's literature the same sort of note that Aguinaldo was in the habit of putting in his proclamations expressions of his intense passion for pacification when he was plotting the burning of Manila and the massacre of the American army. President Steyn had just stated that the South African Republic would not "make or entertain proposals or suggestions unless not only the troops menacing their State were withdrawn further from their borders, but an assurance given" that all increase of British troops in South Africa would be stopped and those on the water not landed "or as far removed as can be from the scene of possible hostilities;" and then if the Orange State President was to do anything more for peace he must now—this was the evening of October 5th—"if this preliminary but absolutely essential matter can be regulated between this and to-morrow." This shows that the professional presidential pacificator had received due notice of the purpose of the Boers to rush a declaration of war.

CHAPTER V

The Boer Declaration of War and the
Gathering of the Armies.

Both sides Surprised