that on all matters of expediency relating to the Government or the future destinies of the Republic, their views were as wide apart as the poles. The more educated of the community supported the President, but the Voortrekkers either stood aloof or trusted to Kruger, who urged them to continue the struggle for the maintenance of their independence, although he was incapable of suggesting a way out of the difficulty which their own dissensions and incapacity had brought about.

CHAPTER II

ANNEXATION BY ENGLAND

WITH their usual aggressiveness towards natives, the
Boer Government in the year 1876 seized lands be-
longing to an independent Kaffir chief named Sekukuni,
who, though by no means powerful in comparison with
others on their borders, utterly routed the Boer forces. In
short, the Boers displayed such cowardice in their attack
on Sekukuni's stronghold that their President Thomas
Burgers had to raise a force of mercenaries regardless
of nationality, by the offer to each of £5 per month.
and a farm at the end of the campaign. This body was
commanded by a German, named Von Schlickman.
Matters progressed from bad to worse, and other native
chiefs, emboldened by Sekukuni's success, began to
threaten both the Boers and our own colonists. Notable
among these was the Zulu King Cetewayo, the most
powerful of all, who in haughty terms declared his
intention to "allow his
young men to wash their

spears."

Sir Henry Barkly, at that time Governor of Cape Colony, in a letter dated October 30, 1876, to the Earl of Carnarvon, Secretary of State for the Colonies,

explanatory of the situation, expressed himself as follows*:

"5. Thirteen volunteers it is further stated had reached Pretoria from the Diamond Fields, sixty or seventy more being expected the week after, and Von Schlickman had gone on before them to Lydenburg, to the military command of which district he has been officially gazetted.

"6. He is said likewise to have been appointed by President Burgers to collect the taxes there with a salary of £1 a day and 5 per cent. on the amount collected.

"7. This appointment, as your Lordship will perceive from the enclosed letter, which has just reached me from the chairman of the Defence Committee at Pilgrims Rest, has excited much apprehension, in consequence of Von Schlickman having recommended when examined before the Volksraad 'that the Gold Fields should be subdued.'

"8. It is feared that an attempt to coerce the diggers into exorbitant payments by armed force will be made, the impression that this is contemplated acquiring strength from the summary suppression of the office of Special Magistrate, which is described in the letter as an arbitrary and unconstitutional act.

"9. Nor is the discontent confined to the Gold Fields population only. At a public meeting held in Lydenburg on the 2nd inst., before the appointment of Von Schlickman was known, resolutions moved by some of the oldest and most influential inhabitants of Dutch

* See Blue Book C 1748, No. 148, p. 178.

extraction were unanimously carried, condemning the continuance of the war and the imposition of war taxes, and in favour of Confederation and of applying for British intervention in the dispute with Sekukuni.

"10. I append a translation of the petition to the President and the Volksraad founded thereon, which is said to have been signed by nearly every adult male inhabitant of Lydenburg and Kruger's Post.

"II. As the Volkraad had been prorogued before it reached Pretoria, this expression of opinion could have little effect, and it has since been determined in default to open negotiations with Sekukuni, at whose mercy for weeks past the district has virtually lain, the Boers from a distance commandeered by the President for its protection having positively refused to obey the order.

"12. In short, the whole state of things borders very closely upon anarchy; and although in other parts of the Republic lawlessness and inhumanity are less rampantly exhibited, the machinery of administration is everywhere all but paralysed, and the Republic seems about to fall to pieces through its own weakness.

"13. In that event, the Boers in each district would either have to make their own terms with the adjacent Kaffir tribes, or trek onwards into the wilderness, as is their wont, whilst the position of the large number of British subjects scattered about on farms, or resident in the towns and at the Gold Fields, might fairly claim the humane consideration of Her Majesty's Government even if there were not other reasons for interposing to save so fine a country from so miserable a fate."

In the information supplied to Parliament and to be

found in the different Blue Books, it is conclusively proved that the war then carried on by the Boers was conducted in the most cruel and barbarous manner. As an illustration I quote from the Blue Book C 1776, p. 15.

"There is no doubt that what Turkey is to the rest of Europe, the Transvaal is to the remainder of South Africa. Both countries are centuries behind the civilisation of the day; both are out of sympathy with, yea we may use a stronger word and say, that both are determinedly opposed to, the sentiments and policy of all educated and Christian nations." Both, "by virtue of their religion and by virtue of that idea of superiority which it encourages, have remained as they were long ago, except where partial changes have been forced upon them from without." Since the Boers are Christians it will be incomprehensible to many how this comparison can hold, and yet it is so. Nothing is clearer than that the Boers regard themselves as the elect of heaven, and their particular formularies and mode of worship as rendering them, par excellence, the people of God. No Mussulman treats with greater superciliousness the religion of the Christian than does the Transvaal Boer the style of worship followed by his fellow Christians of another school of thought. In his ignorance of history and geography, the farmer of to-day looks upon himself as the lineal descendant of the Jewish patriarch, to whom was given the vocation of a peculiar separation from the world, together with the legacy of superior spiritual privileges. The "stand by, for I am holier than thou" is apparent in all the