To this may be added his admission (May 30th) of the impossibility of again attempting to raise a revolt in the Cape Colony.
"Commander-in-Chief de Wet ... had a large force, and the season of the year was auspicious for his attempt, and yet he failed. How then shall we succeed in winter, and with horses so weak that they can only go op-een-stap?"[344]
Elsewhere the minutes of the burgher meetings afford even more direct evidence of the fact that it was the desperate condition of the Boers, and not any desire to make friends with a generous opponent, that led them to surrender. "To continue the war," says General Botha on May 30th, "must result, in the end, in our extermination."... The terms of the English Government "may not be very advantageous to us, but nevertheless they rescue us from an almost impossible position." And Acting-President Schalk-Burger: "I have no great opinion of the document which lies before us: to me it holds out no inducement to stop the war. If I feel compelled to treat for peace" ... it is because "by holding out I should dig the nation's grave.... Fell a tree, and it will sprout again; uproot it and there is an end of it. What has the nation done to deserve extinction?" De Wet himself and the majority of the Free State representatives advocated the continuation of the war at the Vereeniging meetings. But in the brief description of the final meeting which he gives in his book,[345] he writes:
"There were sixty of us there, and each in turn must answer Yes or No. It was an ultimatum—this proposal of England. What were we to do? To continue the struggle meant extermination."
Boer claim to independence.
Even more significant than these admissions is the spirit in which the question of submission is discussed. There is no recognition of the moral obliquity of the Boer oligarchy, or of the generosity of the British terms. Physical compulsion is the sole argument to which their minds are open. At the very moment when the sixty representatives agreed to accept the British terms, and thereby to acknowledge the sovereignty of the British Crown, they passed a resolution affirming their "well-founded" claim to "independence." History may well ask, On what was this claim based? Judged by the ethical standard,[346] the Boers had shown themselves utterly unworthy of the administrative autonomy conferred upon them by Great Britain. Judged by the laws of war,[347] they had been saved from the alternatives of physical annihilation or abject submission by the almost quixotic generosity of the enemy who fed and housed their non-combatant population. From a constitutional point of view, the presence of Article IV.[348] in the London Convention was in itself sufficient to refute the claim of the republic to be a "sovereign international state."
Effect of surrender terms.
Obviously the quality of mercy was strained to the point of danger by the grant of terms to such a people. It will always remain a question whether it would not have been better policy, instead of negotiating at all, to wait for that unconditional surrender of the Boers which, as the discussion at Vereeniging clearly shows, could only have been deferred for a very few months. But, granting that the course actually pursued was the right one, little fault can be found with the terms actually agreed to. No doubt they were generous, but they gave the British Government practically a free hand to shape the settlement of the country, and left it to them to decide at what time, and by what stages, to establish self-government in the new colonies. The two respects in which the Vereeniging terms seemed at first sight dangerously lenient were the undertaking to allow the Boers to possess rifles for their protection and the recognition of the Dutch language in the law courts and public schools. Yet both of these concessions are justified by considerations of practical convenience and sound policy. In respect of the first it must be remembered that in certain districts of the Transvaal the population is composed of a very small number of Europeans, almost exclusively Boers, living in isolated homesteads, together with a native population many times as numerous and still under the immediate authority of its tribal chiefs. The refusal to allow the Boers thus circumstanced to provide themselves with the only weapons sufficient to protect them against occasional Kafir outrages and depredations would have thrown a heavy responsibility upon the new administration, or involved it in an altogether disproportionate expenditure on European and native police. At the same time, in view of the smallness of the Boer population in such districts, the necessity for obtaining a licence (required under the clause in question) provided the Government with an efficient remedy against incipient disaffection. For under the licence system—a system generally adopted as a check upon the acquisition of arms by the natives in South Africa—the number of rifles possessed by the Boers in any particular district would be known to the Government; while, at the same time, the power to refuse or withdraw the privilege of possessing a rifle from any person believed to be disaffected to British rule would form an additional safeguard.
In respect of the second concession, there could be no question, of course, as to the desirability of hastening the general adoption of English as the common language of the Europeans of both races in South Africa. But any attempt to proscribe the Dutch language would have resulted in creating an obstinate desire to preserve it on the part of the Boers, coupled with a sense of injury; and would, therefore, have retarded rather than advanced the object in view. In these circumstances the decision to rely mainly upon the natural inclination of the more enlightened Boers to secure for their children the material advantages which a knowledge of English would bring them, was the right one. And the policy which this clause allowed the new administration to pursue may be described as that of a modified "free trade in language"—that is to say, free trade up to, but not beyond, the point at which the toleration of Dutch would not impede the convenient and efficient discharge of the ordinary business of administration. It is doubtful, however, whether either of these concessions were justifiable except on the assumption that full self-government would not be granted to either of the new colonies until a British or loyalist majority was assured.
Free initiative secured.