On March 22, under instructions from home, the general concluded an agreement for peace. The Boers made some preliminary requests to which the government declined to assent. Their proposal that the commission should be joint was rejected; its members were named exclusively by the crown. They agreed to withdraw from the Nek and disperse to their homes; we agreed not to occupy the Nek, and not to follow them up with troops, though General Roberts with a large force had sailed for the Cape on March 6. Then the political negotiation went forward. Would it have been wise, as the question was well put by the Duke of Argyll (not then a member of the government), “to stop the negotiation for the sake of defeating a body of farmers who had succeeded under accidental circumstances and by great rashness on the part of our commanders, in gaining a victory over us?” This was the true point.
The parliamentary attack was severe. The galling argument was that government had conceded to three defeats what they had refused to ten times as many petitions, memorials, remonstrances; and we had given to men with arms in their hands what we refused to their peaceful prayers. A great lawyer in the House of Lords made [pg 042] the speech that is expected from a great lawyer who is also a conspicuous party leader; and ministers undoubtedly exposed an extent of surface that was not easy to defend, not because they had made a peace, but because they had failed to prevent the rising. High military authorities found a curious plea for going on, in the fact that this was our first contest with Europeans since the breech-loader came in, and it was desirable to give our troops confidence in the new-fashioned weapon. Reasons of a very different sort from this were needed to overthrow the case for peace. How could the miscarriage at Majuba, brought on by our own action, warrant us in drawing back from an engagement already deliberately proffered? Would not such a proceeding, asked Lord Kimberley, have been little short of an act of bad faith? Or were we, in Mr. Gladstone's language, to say to the Boers, “Although we might have treated with you before these military miscarriages, we cannot do so now, until we offer up a certain number of victims in expiation of the blood that has been shed. Until that has been done, the very things which we believed before to be reasonable, which we were ready to discuss with you, we refuse to discuss now, and we must wait until Moloch has been appeased”? We had opened a door for negotiation; were we to close it again, because a handful of our forces had rashly seized a post they could not hold? The action of the Boers had been defensive of the status quo, for if we had established ourselves on Majuba, their camp at Laing's Nek would have been untenable. The minister protested in the face of the House of Commons that “it would have been most unjust and cruel, it would have been cowardly and mean, if on account of these defensive operations we had refused to go forward with the negotiations which, before the first of these miscarriages had occurred, we had already declared that we were willing to promote and undertake.”[29]
The policy of the reversal of annexation is likely to remain a topic of endless dispute.[30] As Sir Hercules Robinson put [pg 043]
Case Considered
it in a letter to Lord Kimberley, written a week before Majuba (Feb. 21), no possible course was free from grave objection. If you determine, he said, to hold by the annexation of the Transvaal, the country would have to be conquered and held in subjection for many years by a large force. Free institutions and self-government under British rule would be an impossibility. The only palliative would be to dilute Dutch feeling by extensive English immigration, like that of 1820 to the Eastern Province. But that would take time, and need careful watching; and in the meantime the result of holding the Transvaal as a conquered colony would undoubtedly be to excite bitter hatred between the English and Dutch throughout the Free State and this colony, which would be a constant source of discomfort and danger. On the other hand, he believed that if they were, after a series of reverses and before any success, to yield all the Boers asked for, they would be so overbearing and quarrelsome that we should soon be at war with them again. On the whole, Sir Hercules was disposed to think—extraordinary as such a view must appear—that the best plan would be to re-establish the supremacy of our arms, and then let the malcontents go. He thought no middle course any longer practicable. Yet surely this course was open to all the objections. To hold on to annexation at any cost was intelligible. But to face all the cost and all the risks of a prolonged and a widely extended conflict, with the deliberate intention of allowing the enemy to have his own way after the conflict had been brought to an end, was not intelligible and was not defensible.
Some have argued that we ought to have brought up an overwhelming force, to demonstrate that we were able to beat them, before we made peace. Unfortunately demonstrations of this species easily turn into provocations, and talk of this kind mostly comes from those who believe, not [pg 044] that peace was made in the wrong way, but that a peace giving their country back to the Boers ought never to have been made at all, on any terms or in any way. This was not the point from which either cabinet or parliament started. The government had decided that annexation had been an error. The Boers had proposed inquiry. The government assented on condition that the Boers dispersed. Without waiting a reasonable time for a reply, our general was worsted in a rash and trivial attack. Did this cancel our proffered bargain? The point was simple and unmistakable, though party heat at home, race passion in the colony, and our everlasting human proneness to mix up different questions, and to answer one point by arguments that belong to another, all combined to produce a confusion of mind that a certain school of partisans have traded upon ever since. Strange in mighty nations is moral cowardice, disguised as a Roman pride. All the more may we admire the moral courage of the minister. For moral courage may be needed even where aversion to bloodshed fortunately happens to coincide with high prudence and sound policy of state.
VI
The negotiations proceeded, if negotiation be the right word. The Boers disbanded, a powerful British force was encamped on the frontier, no Boer representative sat on the commission, and the terms of final agreement were in fact, as the Boers afterwards alleged, dictated and imposed. Mr. Gladstone watched with a closeness that, considering the tremendous load of Ireland, parliamentary procedure, and the incessant general business of a prime minister, is amazing. When the Boers were over-pressing, he warned them that it was only “the unshorn strength” of the administration that enabled the English cabinet, rather to the surprise of the world, to spare them the sufferings of a war. “We could not,” he said to Lord Kimberley, “have carried our Transvaal policy, unless we had here a strong government, and we spent some, if not much, of our strength in carrying it.” A convention was concluded at Pretoria in [pg 045]
The Sequel
August, recognising the quasi-independence of the Transvaal, subject to the suzerainty of the Queen, and with certain specified reservations. The Pretoria convention of 1881 did not work smoothly. Transvaal affairs were discussed from time to time in the cabinet, and Mr. Chamberlain became the spokesman of the government on a business where he was destined many years after to make so conspicuous and irreparable a mark. The Boers again sent Kruger to London, and he made out a good enough case in the opinion of Lord Derby, then secretary of state, to justify a fresh arrangement. By the London convention of 1884, the Transvaal state was restored to its old title of the South African Republic; the assertion of suzerainty in the preamble of the old convention did not appear in the new one;[31] and various other modifications were introduced—the most important of them, in the light of later events, being a provision for white men to have full liberty to reside in any part of the republic, to trade in it, and to be liable to the same taxes only as those exacted from citizens of the republic.