The vindication of Frere's statesmanship has been carried, by the inexorable logic of events, far beyond the sphere of Blue-book arguments. But it is impossible to read this smug despatch without recalling the words which Mr. Krüger wrote to Mr. (now Lord) Courtney on June 26th of the same year: "The fall of Sir Bartle Frere will ... be useful.... We have done our duty and used all legitimate influence to cause the conference proposals to fail." That is to say, it was known to these faithful confederates of that section of the Liberal party of which Mr. Courtney was the head, that the Gladstone Government had determined to recall Sir Bartle Frere three days before "the special reason" for maintaining him at the Cape had disappeared.
Frere's forecast.
But what we are really concerned with is the nature of the opinions upon the central question of South African administration which Frere put forward at this critical period. With these before us, the most elementary acquaintance with the events of the last ten years will suffice to indicate the profound degree in which his knowledge of South African conditions surpassed the knowledge of those who took upon themselves to reverse his policy. What, above all, Frere realised was, that a point had been reached at which the whole of South Africa must be gathered under the British flag without delay. He had noted the disintegrating influences at work in the Cape Colony and the strength of the potential antagonism of the republican Dutch. The annexation of the Transvaal was not his deed, nor did either the time or the manner in which it was done command his approval. But he asserted that British rule, once established there, must be maintained at all costs. With this end in view, he urged that every responsibility incurred by England in the act of annexation must be fulfilled to the letter. Utilising the information which he had gained by personal observation during his visit to the Transvaal in 1879, and availing himself of the co-operation of President Brand, of the Free State, and Chief Justice de Villiers, in the Cape Colony, he drafted a scheme of administrative reform sufficient to satisfy the legitimate aspirations of the Boers for self-government without endangering the permanency of British rule. It included proposals for administrative and financial reforms framed with a view of reducing the cost of government to the lowest point consistent with efficiency, for the reorganisation of the courts of law, for the survey of the proposed railway line to Delagoa Bay, and full details of a system of representative government. This measure he urged upon the Colonial Office as one of immediate necessity, since it embodied the fulfilment of the definite promises of an early grant of self-government made to the Boers at the time of annexation.[8]
He recognised the value of Delagoa Bay as an essential factor in the political and commercial system of a united South Africa, and he earnestly recommended its acquisition by purchase from the Portuguese Government. His perception of the extreme importance of satisfying all legitimate claims of the Boers, and his acute realisation of the danger of allowing the Transvaal to become a "jumping-off ground" either for foreign powers or Afrikander Nationalists, are exhibited in due relationship in a private memorandum which he wrote from the Cape at the end of July, 1879:
"Any reliance on mere force in the Transvaal must react dangerously down here in the old colony, and convert the Dutch Country party, now as loyal and prosperous a section of the population as any under the Crown, into dangerous allies of the small anti-English Republican party, who are for separation, thus paralysing the efforts of the loyal English party now in power, who aim at making the country a self-defending integral portion of the British Empire. Further, any attempt to give back or restore the Boer Republic in the Transvaal must lead to anarchy and failure, and probably, at no distant period, to a vicious imitation of some South American Republics, in which the more uneducated and misguided Boers, dominated and led by better educated foreign adventurers—Germans, Hollanders, Irish Home Rulers, and other European Republicans and Socialists—will become a pest to the whole of South Africa, and a most dangerous fulcrum to any European Power bent on contesting our naval supremacy, or injuring us in our colonies.
"There is no escaping from the responsibility which has already been incurred, ever since the British flag was planted on the Castle here. All our real difficulties have arisen, and still arise, from attempting to evade or shift this responsibility.... If you abdicate the sovereign position, the abdication has always to be heavily paid for in both blood and treasure.... Your object is not conquest, but simply supremacy up to Delagoa Bay. This will have to be asserted some day, and the assertion will not become easier by delay. The trial of strength will be forced on you, and neither justice nor humanity will be served by postponing the trial if we start with a good cause."
Could not the man who foresaw these dangers have prevented them? It is impossible to resist the momentum of this thought.
The retrocession.
The events by which this forecast was so closely realised are not likely to be effaced from the memory of this generation. Frere had scarcely left the Colony from which he had been recalled by the joint efforts of Mr. Krüger and Lord (then Mr.) Courtney before the former, with his fellow triumvirs, had raised the Vier-kleur upon the still desolate uplands of the Witwatersrand. The attempt to put down by force the Boer revolt of 1880-81 failed. Mr. Gladstone's cabinet recoiled before the prospect of a war in which the Boers might have been supported by their kinsmen in the Free State and the Cape Colony. The retrocession of the Transvaal under the terms of the Pretoria Convention (1881) was followed by further concessions embodied in the London Convention of 1884. It is absolutely established as fact that Mr. Gladstone's Government intended, by certain articles contained in both conventions, to secure to all actual and potential British residents in the Transvaal the enjoyment of all the political rights of citizenship possessed by the Boers. But it is equally certain that the immediate contravention of Article XVI. of the Pretoria Convention, when in 1882 the period of residence necessary to qualify for the franchise was raised from two to five years, was allowed to pass without protest from the Imperial Government. And thus a breach of the Convention, which the discovery of the Witwatersrand gold-fields (1886) and the subsequent establishment of a great British industrial community made a matter of vital importance, was condoned. A few years more and the country which prided itself upon being the home of liberty and of free institutions was confounded by the spectacle of a South Africa of its own making, in which a British majority denied the franchise in a Dutch Republic, contrasted with a Dutch minority dominating and controlling the machinery of responsible government in a British colony.