On arriving at Pretoria we drove at once to the Post-Office to deliver the mails, then going round to the principal hotel, Up with the lark, I made the round of the main part of Pretoria before breakfast. Just in front of the hostelry where I was stopping, the Market Square extended like a large grass plot, very little business evidently being transacted there, as grass was growing nearly all over. At one end there was a large Cathedral in course of erection,[[101]] which I was told would cost £20,000, and will be a decided ornament to the town when finished. The streets were all at right angles, lined in many places with large gum trees, while the houses, neat and cosy, had pretty, well-kept gardens in front, between which the rose hedges were blooming in prodigal profusion. I saw no public buildings in the place worthy the name. The government offices and banks, built merely of brick, had no pretensions to architecture whatever. Every thing seemed in a state of utter stagnation, very different, I was told, to the state of affairs under British rule, when building was going ahead and trade and speculation were brisk.
Gold was the theme of conversation at every meal, and seemed to have attracted to the place the few strangers whom I met at the hotel, mere speculators either in prospective gold concessions, or engaged in examining and certifying to the richness of gold fields about which, before they even had made an inspection, the “straight tip” had been given them as to the kind of report expected.
Here, visiting the capital town of the Transvaal, it was impossible not to look back and think over the causes which led to the late war. Any impartial observer of men and things could come to no other conclusion but that, if Sir Theophilus Shepstone had remained in the Transvaal, and had been allowed to finish that which he had so well commenced, the Transvaal would have been a British possession to-day. Sir Theophilus Shepstone, if not known personally, yet at least by name was familiar to every farmer in the State. There is no doubt that President Burgers was driven, at the time of Sir Theophilus Shepstone’s arrival, almost to despair. With a dissatisfied people, no money in the Treasury, the Sekukuni expedition a failure, Sir Theophilus Shepstone appeared on the scene just at the right moment. As proof of this, read Mr. Burgers’ speech in the Volksraad in March, 1877:
“You have lost the country by your own stupidity. It is not this Englishman, or that Englishman, it is you—you! who have sold the country for a soupie.[[102]] It is now too late, you have become a danger, and a nuisance, and, like Turkey, your prostrate carcase is infecting the air. England now says, as she said to Turkey, ‘Remove it at once, remove it, or we shall do it at your cost.’”
President Burgers again, in the very last speech he ever delivered to the members of the Volksraad, out-Heroded Herod in his disappointed (?) frankness—in fact the Transvaal’s most bitter foe could not have spoken more openly.
This is the peroration of his speech on that eventful occasion: “Gentlemen, I may say in conclusion that when you want presidents, when you want doctors, when you want clergymen, when you want surgeons, when you want any educated men whatever, you have to get them from abroad; but whenever I bring forward measures for railways, for education, and for other necessary advancements, you refuse to pass them or pay for them. I say emphatically your independence is not to be lost, but is lost.”[[103]]
Yet if Mr. Burgers had then or at any moment held up his little finger, Sir T. Shepstone must have gone back. Instead of that Mr. Burgers, knowing he would never be reelected President, saw in the arrival of the English an opportune solution of the difficulties of the Executive, and this, to my mind, was the secret of his advising the Boers not to resist, but simply to “Protest! protest, and never cease protesting!”
No wonder, in after years, the Transvaal Boers were furious and looked with disgust upon Mr. Burgers and his action and words, when they learned that in 1878 Sir Bartle Frere gave orders that Mr. Burgers was to be paid an allowance of £500 per annum, with arrears from April 12th, 1877, the day on which Sir T. Shepstone issued his Proclamation, taking over the country. This, when it became known in 1879, was looked upon by the Boers as a bribe to Mr. Burgers, and at any rate my readers must agree with me, that this allowance should have been paid out of Imperial funds, as the country was taken over for Imperial purposes.
Aristotle in his “Politics” states that revolutions are produced by trifles, but not out of trifles. The revolution in the Transvaal was precipitated by a trifle, but that trifle was led up to by a series of blunders to my mind quite unpardonable. The trifle to which I allude was the harsh treatment (as it was at the time considered by the Dutch) in the Potchefstroom district of a man named Bezuidenhout, who was summoned for certain taxes amounting to £27 5 0. Refusing to pay, his wagon was seized, and on the day appointed for its sale in the local market, Bezuidenhout drove it away in face of the authorities to his farm, and Commandant Haaf was sent to arrest him, but found him too well supported by his friends and had to retire. On account of this, the great mass meeting at Paarde Kraal was held on December 8th, 1880, which lasted until the 13th, when the Boers formed the solemn resolution of fighting for their independence.
But to return to Sir Theophilus Shepstone, in an address which he issued shortly after his arrival, addressed “To the Burgers of the Transvaal,” in April, 1877, he thus appealed to them: