all real political power from the Outlanders, in a fashion which grew steadily stricter as their numbers increased.

A great deal of abuse has been heaped upon the Boers for adopting this policy. One can hardly see that it is justified. It seems, indeed, that they adopted a course which was predestined to ultimate failure. The logic of facts, of the geographical situation, of the steady influx of Outlanders, forces one to the conclusion that the Transvaal must in the end cast in its lot with a united South Africa, and no patriotic Englishman can refuse to hope and believe that it will do so under the English flag. But our enlightened colonial policy of to-day is a plant of very recent growth. The Boers had had many opportunities of studying the rank and bitter weeds that had usurped its place in the Middle Victorian period. Is it surprising that they took all the measures in their power to ward off the inevitable. destiny?

If, indeed, the Boers of the Transvaal had been quite faithful to their old ideas, and had refused to permit gold-mining at all within their territory, they would have deserved far more sympathy to-day. As honest rustics who objected to urban

civilisation and the many evils and uglinesses that come, with much good, in its train, they would have held a perfectly defensible position; and, whilst they might have had something to fear from gold-hunting filibusters, they would at least have had no Outlander difficulty. Such purely agricultural settlers as might have entered the Transvaal would have readily fallen in with the Boer policy. But the Transvaal Government was driven by the fear of imminent bankruptcy into a compromise, which has proved unworkable. Happily it is not yet too late for the Boers frankly to face the position, and, by granting all genuine settlers a fair chance of sharing their political rights, to pave the way to the Transvaal's entrance into the South African Union with an entire retention of that local independence which the Boer has always prized above all else.

CHAPTER XIV

THE STRUGGLE FOR REFORM

THE time has not yet come to write the history of the Outlanders' struggle for political rights in the South African Republic. Indeed, only the first act in that drama had yet been played, when its striking close suddenly called the attention of all Europe to the theatre of action. To change the metaphor, it may be said that many threads that have not hitherto come into sight are here woven into the complex fabric; all of them are intricately ravelled, and the ends of most are still attached to the shuttle of Fate. The utmost that can at present be done by one who is not a partisan is to present a brief and colourless view of that policy of Mr. Krüger which has led up to the present position and the Outlanders' discontent.

Before the arrival of the Outlanders, there had never been any particular debates upon the Transvaal Constitution, which was about as pure

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and as fortuitous a democracy as existed anywhere in the world. The Executive Government consisted of the President, elected for a term of five years by all the burghers, with a council of three official members, the State Secretary, the Commandant-General, and the Secretary, and three non-official members, elected by the Volksraad. The Legislative Authority had been from the earliest times-from the Thirty-three Articles, indeed, of 1849-in the hands of a popularly elected Volksraad (a Folkmote, as Mr. Freeman would say). Originally the Volksraad had consisted of twenty-four members, but the accession of territory and other causes had swollen its numbers, by the year 1887, to more than forty. A law passed in 1882 had provided that only burghers of the Republic might vote in the election of the Volksraad or be chosen to sit in it. Burghers were understood to be the original trekkers and their descendants, or, generally, all men who had been born in the Transvaal of white parents. But the Boers were not then unwilling to grant citizenship to new-comers, and the same law provided that strangers settling in the Transvaal might be naturalised and become fully qualified burghers

upon the production of a certificate of five years' residence, during which they had paid the taxes and obeyed the laws of the Republic. This process, which was quite satisfactory to a farmer who might cast in his lot with the South African Republic, was too slow to satisfy the impatient goldminers, who soon began to suspect that they were regarded simply in the light of milch cows by the Government, and to raise the ancient Anglo-Saxon cry of "no taxation without representation."

For a time the Outlanders, who had, indeed, no proper organisation, endured what they held to be their wrongs in silence. Perhaps they remembered that the Boer system of naturalisation was, on the whole, less onerous than that in force in Great Britain, and not harsher than that of the United States. In July, 1887, the Volksraad passed an Act amending the Constitution in a fashion which slightly increased the difficulties of becoming a burgher. By this Act the number of the Volksraad was fixed at thirty-nine members, who were elected for four years, one half retiring every two years. The franchise was bestowed upon (a) burghers by birth, (b) Outlanders who had resided five years in the Transvaal, taken the oath of