"(d) That Her Majesty's troops which are now on the high seas shall not be landed in any part of South Africa.
"This Government must press for an immediate and affirmative answer to these four questions, and earnestly requests Her Majesty's Government to return such an answer before or upon Wednesday, October 11th, 1899, not later than five o'clock p.m., and it desires further to add that, in the event of unexpectedly no satisfactory answer being received by it within that interval, it will with great regret be compelled to regard the action of Her Majesty's Government as a formal declaration of war, and will not hold itself responsible for the consequences thereof, and that in the event of any further movements of troops taking place within the above-mentioned time in the nearer directions of our borders, the Government will be compelled to regard that also as a formal declaration of war.
"I have, etc.,
"F. W. Reitz, State Secretary."[178]
An appeal to Afrikanders.
The war had come; and come in the almost incredible form of a naked assertion of the intention of the South African Republic to oust Great Britain from its position of paramount Power in South Africa. And the declaration of war,[179] published two days later by President Steyn, was no less definite. It referred to Great Britain's "unfounded claim to paramountcy for the whole of South Africa, and thus also over this State," and exhorted the burghers of the Free State to "stand up as one man against the oppressor and violator of right." Even greater frankness characterised the appeal to "Free Staters and Brother Afrikanders" issued by Mr. Reitz. In this document[180] not only was the entire Dutch population of South Africa invited to rid themselves, by force of arms, of British supremacy, but the statement of the Boer case took the form of an impeachment that covered the whole period of British administration. Great Britain—
"has, ever since the birth of our nation, been the oppressor of the Afrikander and the native alike.
"From Slagter's Nek to Laing's Nek, from the Pretoria Convention to the Bloemfontein Conference—they have ever been the treaty-breakers and robbers. The diamond fields of Kimberley and the beautiful land of Natal were robbed from us, and now they want the gold-fields of the Witwatersrand.
"Where is Waterboer to-day? He who had to be defended against the Free State is to-day without an inch of ground. Where lies Lobengula in his unknown grave to-day, and what fillibusters and fortune-hunters are possessors of his country?