contemptible, there would be something utterly insane, in the mighty Power, which offers battle steadfastly to any nation or any possible union of nations on this earth, meekly yielding up its demands before the whinings and menaces of a President Krüger. When such an event comes to pass, it may safely be averred that the strength of England is that of a broken reed, and its policy that of a madhouse.

At the beginning of this message to the English people I said that the dispute between our Government and the Transvaal is one involving the very existence of the British Empire; that to take the wrong course would be to court our own disaster. Does any

one of my readers now feel the slightest doubt of the literal truth of this assertion? Our countrymen have suffered great injustice, which has not yet been remedied. Our suzerainty has been denied. Our Government has been flouted. The London Convention has been repeatedly violated. Our oppressed citizens have appealed to us for help. We have promised and undertaken to liberate them. The disloyalists throughout South Africa are waiting for a sign of vacillation on the part of our Government to raise against us the standard of revolt.

If our course be one of undeviating firmness, our countrymen will be set free. President Krüger's tyrannies and intrigues will be crushed. The rebellious hopes of the disloyalists will fade completely away. The whole of South Africa will know peace and prosperity, guarded from civil war and from external conquest by the power of the British arms.

But if our course be one of weakness, if we falter, though only for a moment, a fearful prospect is laid open before us. Foreign nations will be encouraged to believe that our seeming huge strength is but a mockery. Our own colonial kinsmen will sink in despair under the belief that our ancient might in the cause of freedom is gone from us. And for South Africa itself there will be nothing but a prolonged and dreadful civil war.

For if our power be gone out of that land, what power is there to take its place? Could President Krüger and his disloyalist friends in Cape Colony erect a Dutch republic or empire? Could our loyal countrymen and supporters in South Africa submit, without civil war, to a Dutch ascendancy of the insufferable type which prevails in the Transvaal?

President Krüger has already exercised, by raid and intrigue, all the means he controls to extend his dominions and his influence. If he were to defeat us in this conflict, either by arms or by diplomacy, wherein would lie South Africa's hope for the future?

There must be no question of a Boer ascendancy. It is only under the English flag that a united and prosperous South Africa

is possible. Let me quote on this subject a distinguished American writer.*

"I confess," he has declared, "that I crossed the Vaal River prejudiced in favour of the Boers." But a stay among them soon convinced him that his favourites were completely in the wrong. "The Boer Government, to-day," he accordingly continues, writing shortly after the rising of Johannesburg, "is applying to a complex modern community administrative principles fit only for a community of cattle-herders and teamsters. Every white man

who was not an official of the Boer Government, and who had any property at stake, was heartily in favour of a reform in the Government."t And, finally, here are his conclusions, which must be accepted as quite remarkable, as coming from one who wished to be a friend to the Boers, and whose natural sympathies were enlisted on behalf of the Boer projects for the establishment of an Afrikander republic. "The flag of Great Britain," he writes, "represents freedom of trade, freedom of thought, beyond that of any flag on the high seas; and in Africa, at least, it is the only flag strong enough and generous for our purpose. It guarantees life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to all within the sphere of its influence. It is, in short, the only flag which to-day makes possible our dream of a white man's Africa."

To go forward, firmly exacting from President Krüger that which he is unwilling to give, is, therefore, our only honourable, our only possible, course. The world expects it of us; all our colonial kinsmen, the great majority of people in Cape Colony, the Uitlanders, the very Boers themselves-all these look to our following a strong, undeviating line of action. To recoil now would be to abandon our loyal colonists, as well as our representative himself; and would bring to the hearts of our enemies an intolerable delight.

What

It has been suggested, by a few English writers in whom claritude of reasoning is not the most apparent quality, that we cannot possibly make war upon the Transvaal for the sake of our countrymen, because a Dutch Ministry is in power at Cape Town. official status a Dutch Ministry at Cape Town has in an independent republic under our suzerainty it is not easy to see. There is no direct official connection between the Transvaal and Cape Colony; but there is a very definite official connection, under the London Convention, between the Transvaal and the British Government. For the Dutch Ministry at the Cape to attempt to come between us and a just chastisement of the Boers would be a piece of unpermissible impertinence, for which they could find no warrant in their * "White Man's Africa," by Poulteney Bigelow. London: Harper and Brothers, 1896.

†The italics are mine.

constitutional powers, and which would end as thanklessly as such impertinences usually do.

It will be observed, naturally, that there is a threat underlying this suggestion: that if we make war upon the Boers in the Transvaal, their sympathisers in the Cape Government will exert their official and personal influence to frustrate our military movements. It might be remarked, in passing, that this would seem to be a very peculiar and unsatisfactory method of proving the loyalty of the Dutch Ministry-the loyalty which has been so often and so loudly proclaimed of late. Should this Ministry desire to stand aside from the conflict, it can indeed do so, with such military forces as it actually controls and pays for; but, in any event, we may have no doubt that the Imperial troops, unaided, would be quite equal to the task of subjugating the Boers.

We need fear nothing from this source. The Cape Ministry would be simply mad to oppose an advance of the Imperial forces, when the immense majority of white people in South Africa would support it. The Uitlanders-forming two-thirds of the population of the Transvaal-would support it. The people of Natal would support it in mass. The Orange Free State-an enlightened country with no sympathy for barbarous and corrupt forms of government-would remain neutral; for its people know that the independence of their State is not and never will be threatened by England, so long as it is not a menace to the general peace. Finally, the great majority of people in Cape Colony itself would support the Imperial Government.

It should not be forgotten that the Dutch Ministry holds office by a very slender tenure; that it was placed in power-through one of the anomalies of representative government-by a minority of the people; and that it would be strenuously withstood by a powerful opposition under a still more powerful leader. Finally, what Cape Colony as a whole thinks of Sir Alfred Milner has been evinced by the great petition in his favour, signed by some fifty thousand people. and by the cordial reception he has received from all classes of people in Cape Town itself. The Dutch Ministry has acted wrongly and unujstly, and has not worked for the peace of South Africa, in giving its unofficial support to the utterly unsatisfactory franchise proposals of President Krüger. But there it would be well advised to stop. If its members are loyal to the British flaglet them prove their loyalty. If they are otherwise, let them remember the punishments which follow on treason.

49

IV. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION.

I have let it be seen plainly what I consider to be the cure for the disorders of which the Transvaal—no, not so much the Transvaal, but Paul Krüger alone-is the cause.

The duty of our Government is Intervention. Once before, when the Transvaal had shown itself a danger to South Africa, we did not hesitate to intervene; and we were right. But now the case for intervention is threefold more powerful than then. Before, the Boers had been weak, but not corrupt. Before, they had not denied to a great body of our countrymen the ordinary rights of civilised human beings. Before, they had broken no trust, and had infringed no Convention. Now, as then, they are a danger to the whole country; but a danger immensely more serious and threatening.

The real ultimatum has been sent—the ultimatum of the English people; but now the definite verbal one should follow. Let President Krüger be given a time by which a Bill, granting the franchise without restriction to all Uitlanders who have lived five years in the country, shall go through the Raad and become law. The time need not be far distant. The Raad is a small chamber, and can discuss its Bills quickly. An important piece of legislation has, before now, been carried through it within the space of twenty minutes. Nay; even a simple resolution of the Volksraad will suffice; for itself has enacted that such resolutions are to be the law of the land as surely as measures regularly passed.

Should President Krüger declare that his burghers would not permit the Act, then his word would be false; for his burghers never have opposed any measures for the wider enfranchisement of the Uitlanders. It is but lately that they acquiesced unhesitatingly in any such proposals as he might choose to make, though never referred to them.

If, by a given date, this ultimatum be not obeyed, then, in God's name let us end the matter once and for all.

As I have no wish to imitate the hypocrisy which I have so frankly condemned in the Boer President, I do not fear to speak of

war.

On the contrary, I scorn these foolish babblers who prate of peace when there is no peace. Is it for nothing that we expend fifty millions of money every year on our legions of men at arms on land and sea? If these men be kept for usage, what higher pur

pose can they have, than to liberate a great body of their own countrymen, and to bring peace and unity to half a continent?

But let there be no more Majuba Hills. Let us arm ourselves for the conflict with wisdom in every point and detail. There must be no more of the ghastly blundering which wrecked our little forces in 1881. Since shooting is the word, let our soldiers know how to shoot. I hope there will be no relying on mere masses. Our soldiers should expect to be outnumbered by their adversaries on every occasion; so long as they are in capable hands, and under calculating but daring leaders, it may safely be left to them to prove that an Englishman is a man of better mettle than a Boer.

The Boers are brave men, and they use the rifle well; but they have no principles of cohesion. Their armies should, in every way, be outmarched, outmanoeuvred, outgeneralled by the English. It will be seen then that these over-confident enemies of ours will weaken rapidly, as their like have ever weakened, under a series of engagements, for them inconclusive or disastrous. When the fight shall begin to go against them, and the war proves no mere triumphant succession of victories, then they will bethink them of the homesteads they have left, of the cattle ill-tended, and of the crops that are rotting in the ground. Then, too, they will have time to reflect that it is Paul Krüger who has brought them to this trouble, and who, with his corrupt supporters at Johannesburg, urges them to lay down their lives that the corruption may continue.

But, on the English side, we shall see that our men gain strength and wisdom from ill success; that the less easy becomes the work the more stubborn are they in prosecuting their labours. They will not soon cry out that they have had their bellyful of fighting; it is the lack of fighting, the inertia, the disciplined monotony of peace, of which they ever complain. Neither better nor worse than their fathers, they have the hearts of bulldogs; and, once they have set their teeth in the Transvaal, no power on earth will shake them loose from it.

Soldiers of the Empire!-brave Englishmen, Irishmen, Scotsmen, Colonials-into your hands will be given the task of subjugating this iniquitous ruler. Well may you go into this fight, from which many of you shall never issue alive, with a firm heart and a clear conscience. Never in the history of the world did Englishmen fight in a better cause. You will set forth to the relief of men and women of your own blood and race-men and women who have sent up a last despairing appeal for your help.

No people have ever waged so many wars as you and your ancestors; yet of all the battles which you and they have fought, three-fourths have been gloriously won; not one in a hundred has been a dishonourable defeat. Mark this! That in all your long