CHAPTER V

THE SURRENDER OF 1884

ORDINARILY, on the settlement of a dispute, after terms and conditions have been agreed to, reduced to writing and signed by duly accredited representatives of both opposing interests, the matter is looked upon as finished, and each side considers itself bound by the document so executed. Not so the Boers. If they fail to get their own way in a deal, they consider that they have been wronged, and must at once set to work to redress the imagined grievance, for the fact of having to submit to any restrictions, real or fancied, is in their eyes an aggravation of the injustice done them. Bearing this in mind, one can readily account for the conduct of Mr. Kruger and his co-signatories when they faced their Volksraad and produced the "Convention" for ratification.

Secretly, they had stirred up the members of that body, who were all like themselves disaffected, to protest against the terms and conditions which the Triumvirate had signed. This protest was lodged with the object of reopening the whole question when a favourable opportunity offered, and although the members of the Volksraad sanctioned the Convention, they

did so with the understanding that every step would be taken to have its provisions speedily upset.

Their objections and alternatives were mainly as follows:

(1) Instead of the direction of foreign affairs by Her Majesty's Government, there should only be supervision thereof.

(2) There should be no interference with the future legislation of the country, either with regard to the white inhabitants, or to measures affecting the interest of native tribes.

(3) The Resident should simply be the representative of the Sovereign, but should possess no further authority.

(4) The Transvaal should receive compensation from Great Britain, for the territory east and west which had been taken, and that the debts of the country should only be paid by the burghers after those debts had been proved lawfully to exist.

Mr. Kruger came over again to this country with the object of advocating the reconstruction of the Convention on these lines. Whilst here, he and his able legal adviser who accompanied him, had ample opportunities afforded them, not only of studying from our Blue Books the policy which Mr. Gladstone's Cabinet had laid down to the Royal Commissioners in 1881, but also the trend of British affairs generally, the condition of Ireland, at that time, occupying the attention of the Government in such a manner as to exclude all minor considerations; such for instance as the affairs of

the Transvaal State. Although they had to depart from England without having effected any change in the Convention, they were well aware that, as long as the Liberal Government kept in office, there was every hope of eventual success in the direction at which they were aiming, viz., at all hazards and by every means to destroy or evade its provisions.

It must be borne in mind that these objects were continually kept in view by the Boer delegates, and no blame can possibly attach to them or to the other leaders of the movement, determined like themselves to get rid of every obligation imposed by the Convention. Their desire was to render the Transvaal territory free from control of Her Majesty as suzerain, and they naturally took advantage of the weakness and vacillation evinced by the Government of the day, to become emancipated from all surveillance.

These Commissioners, profiting by the knowledge gained in England, on their return to Pretoria proceeded to disseminate their views amongst the Boers, and agitated within and without the Volksraad to have those Articles of the Convention which were repugnant to their notions of freedom either recast or expunged. Now, from the manner in which the Boers were even then treating the Suzerain in the question of the franchise by flagrantly setting the Convention at defiance, they felt they could advance their pretensions with impunity, and, no matter what their action, that Mr. Gladstone's Ministers would never cause a shot to be fired against them to enforce Her Majesty's authority.

For, in open disregard of Article 3, a law was passed

in 1882 providing that, before a new comer could become naturalised and acquire full rights of citizenship, he must have resided in the country for a period of five years, must have been registered on the Field Cornet's list for that period, and pay a sum of £25. This law, opposed to the spirit and intent of the Convention of 1881, was actually in force in 1884, and was passed unquestioned by Her Majesty's Government when, in that year, the second Convention was signed in London.

It is not surprising, then, that in 1884, after all their experience of British indecision and apathy, the Boers should make another bold effort to cancel all, or as many as they could, of the terms, conditions, reservations, and limitations obnoxious to them, but which they had accepted scarcely two and a half years before. Once more President Kruger accompanied by two delegates, Mr. S. J. du Toit and Mr. N. J. Smit, visited England to try and accomplish the object for which he had incessantly striven, this time with a clever Hollander lawyer named Beelaerts van Blockland in his train, and without loss of time they approached Mr. Gladstone and Lord Derby, then Colonial Secretary. These Boer envoys knew their own minds, they determined to wipe out from the Convention of 1881 every article which militated against their independence as a Sovereign State, or which fettered in any way their right to frame laws affecting the interests of the Uitlander.

They did not quite succeed in carrying out the programme in its entirety, but a comparison of the two conventions shows that they went a long way towards it. Judging them from their own standpoint, the aims

of these Boer delegates were lofty and patriotic, and because they took advantage of the weakness or shiftlessness of their opponents, praise rather than censure should be awarded them. But what can be said in defence of those responsible Ministers of the Crown, who had pledged Her Majesty in 1881 to guarantee to all the inhabitants of the Transvaal complete self-government, and the enjoyment of all civil rights under her Suzerainty? The changes in the second Convention are more than startling. In the first place, no allusion is even made to the Suzerainty of the Queen, or to Her Majesty's guarantee set out at the commencement of the Convention of 1881!

That the omission was made designedly there can be no doubt, and indeed, to-day the Boers allege that under the 1884 Convention no Suzerainty exists. That, in fact, Her Majesty through her Ministers contracted herself out of the exercise of all suzerain authority, save only the shred of it expressed in Article 4, whereby the South African Republic agreed not to conclude any "treaty or engagement with any State or nation other than the Orange Free State, nor with any native tribe to the eastward or westward of the Republic, until the same has been approved by Her Majesty the Queen."

The fallacy of such a contention is apparent when these two documents are compared, for be it clearly understood that no alteration was made in the form of guarantee of complete self-government, given by Her Majesty in 1881, to all inhabitants of the Transvaal State subject to her Suzerainty. Unlike the declaration at the commencement of the 1881 Convention, there is