Sir ALFRED MILNER, K.C.B.,
High Commissioner for South Africa.
Photo by Elliott & Fry, London.
The President afterwards agreed to grant a "seven years' Franchise" on terms that were scarcely practicable, while the Secretary of State for the Colonies held out for the five years' Franchise at first demanded. The bargaining was pursued for some weeks with considerable animation, and in the end Mr. Kruger offered to allow the five years' franchise on what he knew to be the impossible condition, that the question of suzerainty should be entirely dropped.
The mobilisation of the burghers, which had been secretly on foot for some time, was forthwith carried on apace, and later—much too tardily—British patience gave way, and troops were despatched to South Africa. Then followed, on the 9th of October, an insulting ultimatum from President Kruger, demanding the immediate withdrawal of British troops from the Transvaal border, and an assurance that no more should be landed. In default of this assurance, he declared that at 5 p.m. on the 11th of October a state of war would exist. To such an ultimatum only one answer was possible. British troops at once started for the Cape.
Naturally the whole of Great Britain was in a state of turmoil, and the vast multitude of people—"the men in the street," so to say—were inclined to express surprise that the question of two years' difference in the terms of obtaining the franchise should have been made into a casus belli. To all thinking men it was patent, however, that the quibble about the franchise was merely a Boer ruse to obtain time for the carrying out of a long-concerted scheme for the elimination of the British from the Cape to the Zambezi. These were aware that the military methods of the Transvaal were under process of reorganisation, and indeed had been readjusted gradually ever since 1896, and that the simple methods of 1881 had been superseded by newer and more modern principles of warfare. It was known that great additions had been made to the warlike resources of the Republic, and that the President of the Free State was, if anything, more bitter than Mr. Kruger in his hatred of Great Britain and all things British, and that the two Republics would make common cause with each other against a mutual enemy. It was also known that foreign experts were imported, and foreign stocks of war material—material of the newest and most expensive kind—were prepared in anticipation of war, and that even such a thing as tactical instruction—a thing hitherto ignored among the Transvaalers—had been acquired from accomplished German sources, and all this for one sole purpose—war with Great Britain. In order that there may be no doubt that the Boers were completely prepared and determined to fight long before the insolent Ultimatum was published, it is desirable to read a letter which appeared in the Times of the 14th of October 1899. This epistle, which was appropriately headed "Boer Ignorance," emanated from a Dutch writer, whose address was in a well-known part of Cape Colony. It runs:—
"Sir,—In your paper you have often commented on what you are pleased to call the ignorance of my countrymen, the Boers. We are not so ignorant as the British statesmen and newspaper writers, nor are we such fools as you British are. We know our policy, and we do not change it. We have no opposition party to fear nor to truckle to. Your boasted Conservative majority has been the obedient tool of the Radical minority, and the Radical minority has been the blind tool of our far-seeing and intelligent President. We have desired delay, and we have had it, and we are now practically masters of Africa from the Zambezi to the Cape. All the Afrikanders in Cape Colony have been working for years for this end, for they and we know the facts.
"1. The actual value of gold in the Transvaal is at least 200,000 millions of pounds, and this fact is as well known to the Emperors of Germany and Russia as it is to us. You estimate the value of gold at only 700 millions of pounds, or at least that is what you pretend to estimate it at. But Germany, Russia, and France do not desire you to get possession of this vast mass of gold, and so, after encouraging you to believe that they will not interfere in South Africa, they will certainly do so, and very easily find a casus belli, and they will assist us, directly and indirectly, to drive you out of Africa.
"2. We know that you dare not take any precautions in advance to prevent the onslaught of the Great Powers, as the Opposition, the great peace party, will raise the question of expense, and this will win over your lazy, dirty, drunken working classes, who will never again permit themselves to be taxed to support your Empire, or even to preserve your existence as a nation.
"3. We know from all the military authorities of the European and American continents that you exist as an independent Power merely on sufferance, and that at any moment the great Emperor William can arrange with France or Russia to wipe you off the face of the earth. They can at any time starve you into surrender. You must yield in all things to the United States also, or your supply of corn will be so reduced by the Americans that your working classes would be compelled to pay high prices for their food, and rather than do that they would have civil war, and invite any foreign Power to assist them by invasion, for there is no patriotism in the working classes of England, Wales, or Ireland.