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DIAMOND FIELDS REVOLT.

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its favour, which were so palpably fictitious and inconsistent with known facts, that they were believed to be merely the cloak of a conspiracy which had made the British name and the British flag the instruments of its success. The discontented people could not believe that her Majesty's Ministers would, if the truth were permitted to reach their ears, support a usurpation that was founded on a fraud. But access to the home authorities was slow-the path was filled with difficulties-the words and wishes of the people were misrepresented by men who had everything to gain by shutting out inquiry, and who hoped that lapse of time would provide them with the safeguards of accomplished facts and established precedent.

The representations of the people were not listened to in England. Is it to be wondered at that, like the pagans of old, who when their gods would not hear them grew angry, the Diamond Fields people, irritated by neglect, maddened by the difficulties they felt in tearing away from between them and England the screen of lies and falsifications that had been raised up as a bar against inquiry, determined by a violent and unmistakable demonstration to provoke investigation, even though it should be heralded by cannon and bayonets, and followed by punishment? The people revolted. The rest of the matter belongs to history, and forcibly illustrates the Transvaal question as it is.

I would here remind a very great and a very good man one of the leaders of all that is best in English public opinion, who visited Kimberley, and met there the chiefs of the anti-Government League-of something that passed at his interview with them. The delegates were asked by him as to their cause of complaint, and amongst others they mentioned "that Government took no steps to curb the growing insolence of the natives in and around the Fields; that the rapacious land-schemes of persons, one of whom claimed no less than 840 square miles of country, had irritated the barbarous squatters over an immense area; that the blacks, having been first led to believe that the land had been taken over in their name and for their protection, could at length plainly see that the so-called protection was but the juggling trick of political thimble-riggers and land-swindlers."

Be

sides this, he was told that the "licence" permitted in the name of law to the natives on the Diamond Fields was undermining the foundation of authority all over Africa, while the guns that were being sold in thousands daily to the Kafirs would be, ere long, used in war. He was told that, wherever they began, troubles with the natives might soon be expected, and that if the barbarous element in Kimberley was not speedily placed under fair and moderate but strong and repressive rule, great disasters would occur; that even already Government had armed blacks to prevent the free expression of public opinion. He will perhaps remember what he said: "When it does come, you will not be afraid to meet them muzzle to muzzle, till you can look into the whites of their eyes. There are no laws to prevent Englishmen arming and defending themselves."

I should not now recall this conversation, but that the facts revealed in it bear strongly upon the Transvaal question.

Mr Froude also, before he left the country, judged, as events have proved, rightly of what was taking place. He says, in 'Leaves from a South African Journal,' speaking of Mr Southey, "His desire was and is to see South Africa British up to the Zambesi River, the native chiefs taken everywhere under the British flag, and the whole country governed by the Crown. When the Diamond Fields were annexed as a Crown colony he accepted the governorship, with a hope that, north of the Orange River, he might carry out his own policy, check the encroachments of the Transvaal Republic, and extend the empire internally. It has been the one mistake of Mr Southey's life. Being without a force of any kind, he could only control the Republics by the help of the native chiefs."

These words were prophetic. They have been more than justified. The war between Secocoeni and the Transvaal was the result of that policy that used the Kafirs, not as a "check to the aggressions," but as a means for the extinction, of the Republic. But this policy has produced other consequences, for which the Republic is held to be blamable. In fact, the direct and indirect results of the policy are ascribed not to it but to Republican misrule. The dangers,

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the widespread revolts which the success of that treacherous and roundabout scheme has given rise to, are no longer traceable to it, but are used as arguments in proof of the "weakness" of the Transvaal, which it was its object to destroy, and to cause the ruin of which it was initiated; hence the "house-on-fire" argument. Griqualand West is in revolt; the tribes on the borders of the Cape Colony have revolted and been crushed; there is a danger from the Zulus; and Secocoeni has now been for five months in arms against us,—all this is not the result of any inherent weakness in the Transvaal, not the result of any Boer abandonment of the Secocoeni campaign. All the native troubles, north, south, east, and west, have proceeded from the extraordinary scheme of colonial policy, so clearly laid bare to the mind of our distinguished visitor by the discontented diggers and his other informants, long before the Transvaal troubles with Secocoeni had commenced. "This was the mistake of his (Richard Southey's) life," so says this impartial critic, this able and dispassionate inquirer.

Now what becomes of the famous "house-on-fire" argument,-Expediency's vindication of the high-handed act by which the Transvaal was made British territory? I shall give the anti-Boer argument fairly and in full, in the words. of its greatest exponent:

"That we must interfere for our own protection in regard to the natives seemed to be necessary. As has been said so often, there was a house on fire next door to us, in the flames of which we ourselves might be enveloped. If any other people could have assisted us in putting out the fire-French, Germans, or Italians-so that we might not seem to tyrannise, it would have been so comfortable. But in South Africa there were none to help us. Something must be done, and therefore an order was sent out directing Sir T. Shepstone to go to Pretoria and see what he could do. He was a man held in special respect by the king of the Zulus; and the king of the Zulus was, in truth, the great power whom both Dutch and English would dread should the natives be encouraged to rebel. When men have talked of our South African house being in danger of fire, Cetywayo, the king of the Zulus, has been the fire to whom they alluded."

And Sir Theophilus annexed the Transvaal, and our house caught fire in the Cape Colony and in Griqualand West, and Secocoeni broke out again into flame; and we will go to war

with the Zulu king, notwithstanding our exertions for the extinction of the Transvaal.

Now there is not a Boer in the Transvaal that does not know and appreciate facts. Boers are not stupid. They have seen that certain South African colonists and colonial politicians urged on and armed the natives against them; and they know that the "house was set on fire" by those politicians the Annexationists-who put in firemen after they had committed the arson. Now I do not know anything more irritating to individuals or peoples than to find themselves placed hopelessly in the wrong by an active and unscrupulous adversary, who first causes the evil he complains of, then shifts the blame to the shoulders of the sufferer from that evil, and punishes the victim, as if he, and he only, were to blame in the matter. Irritation is the state of the Boer mind on the annexation question.

It is unfortunate, as I have said elsewhere, that the concurrence of threats from the Zulu king with the advance of Sir Theophilus Shepstone into the Transvaal territory, should have engendered in the minds of thousands an opinion that so grave and peculiar a coincidence was not altogether accidental. Whether this is so or not, the impression remains; and it is the existence of this, with all the other almost unavoidable suspicions and doubts of the bona fides of the pleas by which the annexation is justified, that forms the real danger in the Transvaal.

As to the annexation itself, no important transaction of a similar character in modern history has been so ably, so peacefully, or so successfully carried out. Granting its necessity, presuming its expediency, Sir Theophilus Shepstone and his staff of Annexationists have earned most unqualified approval. The step seems to have been carefully thought out in all its details. I will describe it, as well as endeavour to sketch the state of things existing in the Republic at the moment of its execution, in such a way as to lay before the public a fair résumé of what really occurred on this interesting occasion.

CHAPTER XV.

STIRRING EVENTS-SIR THEOPHILUS AND HOW
HE DID IT.

National paralysis-Foredoomed-Too late-The reaction-Our first mistake -A sinister proposition-Arming the Blacks-Illegal Armaments.

THE war with Secocoeni was drawing to a conclusion in the January of 1877. His people had suffered from drought, and had, by the presence of the volunteers in advanced forts, covering the outlets of his country, been prevented for five months from making even one successful raid. All South Africa was for the moment at rest, with the exception of the district of Utrecht, where an old-standing grievance with Cety wayo was the cause of some little alarm and excitement. Still, the Transvaal was disturbed throughout its whole extent by the expectation of some pending changea change coming from the outside, which had been invited by an active discontented party, chiefly foreigners, dwellers in towns, non-producers, place-hunters, deserters, refugees, land speculators, "development-men," and pests of Transvaal society generally, who openly preached resistance to the law, refusal to pay taxes, and contempt of the natural and guaranteed owners of the country in which they lived, in the distinctly and often expressed hope that foreign intervention would fill the country with British gold and conduce to their own material prosperity. The Boers, spread over a country larger than France, were stunned into stupor by the demonstrative loudness of the party of discontent. In some districts they (the Boers) were poor, and could not. readily pay the taxes imposed upon them by the wars and

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