Efforts and Conciliation not Successful
Mr. Hofmeyr, the nominal leader of the Bund in Cape Colony, might at almost any time during recent years have become Premier and, through his reputation for moderate views, might, perhaps, have done good service to the cause of compromise and conciliation. On the other hand, it is doubtful whether he could have succeeded in this respect when Mr. Rhodes, between 1890 and 1895, failed. The latter did everything that man could do to hold the racial elements together and checkmate the Kruger influence, and it seems probable that Hofmeyr could not in the end have resisted the power of Pretoria over the Afrikanders any more effectively than did Mr. W. P. Schreiner in the two years preceding the outbreak of war. His Ministry would have been a Bund Government just as that of Schreiner is to-day; his principal co-workers would have been instruments of Kruger in much the same degree as members of the Schreiner Cabinet have been; and his participation in the general Afrikander movement, or conspiracy, or whatever it may be called, would have been more dangerous than that of Mr. Schreiner because his loyalty has always been asserted, and would have been used, consciously or unconsciously as a cloak for the action of his colleagues and friends. Kruger's Auspicious Opportunity In 1898, however, Mr. Schreiner took office; the Bund was triumphant at the polls in Cape Colony and in Parliament; and had a weak Government or vacillating Colonial Secretary been in power in London, Mr. Kruger's day would have indeed come. He undoubtedly built upon this latter possibility and upon his personal experiences of Mr. Gladstone, Lord Kimberley and Lord Derby. To demand, even in the days of Transvaal weakness, had been to receive, and now, with the Uitlander population under the heels of an ironclad law and of enactments allowing them less liberty than was given the Kaffir; with great guns guarding Pretoria and commanding Johannesburg—coupled with the consciousness of other and more extensive military preparations; with the policy of the Imperial Government hampered by the rash aggressiveness of the Jameson Raid; with the Orange Free State in close defensive and offensive alliance and its President a mere tool in his own hands; with clever advisers and unscrupulous helpers such as Reitz and Leyds; with the certainty of European sympathy, the expectation of American support and the hope of active interposition on the part of France, or Russia, or Germany; with the Cape Colonial Government in tacit sympathy with his aims and in occasional active support of his policy; with the assurance of an extensive support from the Boers of the Colony itself; it is not surprising that President Kruger entered the lists at the Bloemfontein Conference with great confidence, and ultimately faced the might of Britain with assurance that the weakness of a British Ministry, the power of a European combination, the interposition of the United States, or some other providential aid, would secure the abrogation of that British suzerainty which was the bane of his life and the chief apparent element in preventing the supremacy in South Africa of the Dutch race in general and the Transvaal Republic in particular.
Chamberlain's Strong Policy
But he knew not Mr. Chamberlain or the changed conditions of British thought. He did not realize that the days of indifference to the Colonies had passed away, and that the Colonial Office had become one of the greatest posts in the British Government and had been deliberately selected by one of the most ambitious and able of modern statesmen as a suitable field for achievement and labor. He had no idea that the retention and extension of British territory was no longer a party question, and that the days of Granville at the Foreign Office had as completely passed away as had those of Derby at the Colonial Office. His very knowledge of British political life and its see-saw system was turned into a source of error through the rapid developments of an epoch-making decade. It must have been a shock to him to find that an insult to the Imperial Government in the form of his ultimatum was looked upon as an insult to a dozen other British Governments throughout the world, and that the invasion of the soil of Natal and Cape Colony was regarded as an assault upon the interests of Canada and Australia as well as of Great Britain. The days of weakness had indeed departed, and despite all the conciliatory slowness and caution of Mr. Chamberlain during weary months of controversy the iron hand was concealed beneath the glove of velvet and there was nowhere a thought of surrendering that right of suzerainty which preserved and ensured British supremacy in South Africa. The inevitable war has now come—the struggle which the Gladstone Government shrank from in days when the Boer Power was weak, and which Sir George Grey spoke of in its wider sense when he declared, in 1858, after the abandonment of the Orange River State, that "many questions might arise, in which it might be very doubtful which of the two Governments the great mass of the Dutch population (in Cape Colony) would obey."
Uitlander's Many Grievances
Its more immediate cause has not been the chief reason, though, of course, the more prominent and pronounced. The position of the Uitlander was bad enough, and the facts which have been drilled into the public mind and explained in the dispatches of Mr. Chamberlain and Sir Alfred Milner are sufficiently explicit. Since 1895 the hundred thousand aliens—chiefly British subjects—established in Johannesburg and at the mines have been subjected to every restriction of liberty which is conceivably possible. None of the rights of self-government pledged in the Conventions of 1881 and 1884 have been given them or rendered possible in any succeeding period worthy of consideration. The press had been gagged and public discussion prevented; the Courts had been made subservient to the Boer Volksraad and the money raised in taxes applied upon armaments directed against Great Britain and the Uitlander. No attention had been paid to industrial development or financial security and the drink traffic amongst the natives had been openly encouraged. No protection had been given to individual Englishmen and their families by the Boer Police and education had become a matter of Dutch language and Dutch methods. Roman Catholics were excluded from even the faintest chance of obtaining the franchise and monopolies were publicly sold to Hollander favorites and adventurers. Heavier and heavier burdens of taxes have been laid upon the Uitlanders—poll tax, railway tax, road tax, miner's claims, digger's license, prospector's license. An enactment made in 1894, in addition to the five years' residence required of adult aliens, declared that the children of such, though born in the Transvaal, must wait fourteen years after making claim for the right to vote. The respectable, educated Hindoo merchants had been classed with and treated with the same contempt as the indentured coolies. These things were surely cause enough for Mr. Chamberlain's intervention, and more than cause for his sustained effort to obtain equal rights for British men.
Causes of the War
Nominally, therefore, the failure to modify these grievances and abuses of the Uitlander was the cause of the condition out of which war came. Practically, the cause was in the distant past, in the character of the Boer, the development of his peculiar history, the British mistakes of 1836, 1852 and 1877, the aggressive Dutch pride of recent years, the historical hatred of the English, the growth of military resources in the Transvaal, the evolution of the Afrikander Bund, the determination to create a Dutch South Africa. The means for success, even to the most utterly ignorant and intensely vain Dutchman, were not apparent until the gold mines of the Witwatersrand paved the way and the revenues of the little State rose in the following ratio from $889,000 in 1885—the year preceding the discoveries—to nearly $25,000,000 in the year 1897:
1886 ............... $1,902,165 1892 ............... $6,279,145
1887 ............... 3,342,175 1893 ............... 8,513,420
1888 ............... 4,422,200 1894 ............... 11,238,640
1889 ............... 7,887,225 1895 ............... 17,699,775
1890 ............... 6,145,300 1896 ............... 22,660,970
1891 ............... 4.835.955 1897 ............... 24,432,495
Misappropriation of Taxes