Chapter 3 - Page 2

exception of one or two papers which
considered that even the persistent ill usage of our people, and the
fact that we were peculiarly responsible for them in this State, did
not justify us in interfering in the internal affairs of the republic.
It cannot be denied that the Jameson raid and the incomplete manner in
which the circumstances connected with it had been investigated had
weakened the force of those who wished to interfere energetically on
behalf of British subjects. There was a vague but widespread feeling
that perhaps the capitalists were engineering the situation for their
own ends. It is difficult to imagine how a state of unrest and
insecurity, to say nothing of a state of war, can ever be to the
advantage of capital, and surely it is obvious that if some
arch-schemer were using the grievances of the Uitlanders for his own
ends the best way to checkmate him would be to remove those
grievances. The suspicion, however, did exist among those who like to
ignore the obvious and magnify the remote, and throughout the
negotiations the hand of Great Britain was weakened, as her adversary
had doubtless calculated that it would be, by an earnest but fussy and
faddy minority. Idealism and a morbid, restless conscientiousness are
two of the most dangerous evils from which a modern progressive State
has to suffer.

It was in April 1899 that the British Uitlanders sent their petition
praying for protection to their native country. Since the April
previous a correspondence had been going on between Dr. Leyds,
Secretary of State for the South African Republic, and
Mr. Chamberlain, Colonial Secretary, upon the existence or
non-existence of the suzerainty. On the one hand, it was contended
that the substitution of a second convention had entirely annulled the
first; on the other, that the preamble of the first applied also to
the second. If the Transvaal contention were correct it is clear that
Great Britain had been tricked and jockeyed into such a position,
since she had received no quid pro quo in the second convention, and
even the most careless of Colonial Secretaries could hardly have been
expected to give away a very substantial something for nothing. But
the contention throws us back upon the academic question of what a
suzerainty is. The Transvaal admitted a power of veto over their
foreign policy, and this admission in itself, unless they openly tore
up the convention, must deprive them of the position of a sovereign
State. On the whole, the question must be acknowledged to have been
one which might very well have been referred to trustworthy
arbitration.

But now to this debate, which had so little of urgency in it that
seven months intervened between statement and reply, there came