"it would be an easy thing to find a casus belli in what had taken place." In spite of all this, Mr. Gladstone in 1884 obligingly agreed to a new Convention. By examination of its terms, it will be seen how far and how ignobly the Government went on the road to concession. By this Convention the British Resident was replaced by a diplomatic agent; the old title of South African Republic was restored; the Republic was allowed to negotiate on its own account with foreign Powers, limitations on treaty-making alone being imposed. Complete freedom of religion was promised, and the Republic agreed to "do its utmost" to prevent any of its inhabitants from making any encroachments upon lands beyond the boundaries laid down. Article 14 will be seen to be verbally similar to Article 26 of the Pretoria Convention of 1881, only the words South African Republic being substituted for Transvaal State. Nothing was said about the preamble to the Pretoria Convention or the question of British "suzerainty." The word was omitted from the new text; but it was supposed to be operative as before. Over this matter there has been so much argument that, unless we can devote a volume to solving the Convention riddle, it is best left alone. We must allow that the ambiguity of an already ambiguous Ministry had here reached its climax! Certain it is that the Transvaal representatives returned to inform the Raad that the suzerainty had been abolished, and that statement they were allowed to maintain without contradiction! As a natural consequence of this indecision and weakness on the part of the then Government, subsequent Governments have been placed in an unenviable quandary. The Boers contend that the omission of the word "suzerainty" in 1884 was intentional, and designed to permit the State to style itself an independent Republic, while all level-headed persons are fully aware that no Republic could have been granted complete independence while under a weight of debt for money and blood spent for years and years to save it from collapse and annihilation. Moreover, the guarantee of independence of the Transvaal was so unmistakably a result of suzerainty that the repetition of the word was unnecessary.
MR. KRUGER
Of the man who now began to play so prominent a part on the political stage, the world at that time knew but little. Even now opinions regarding him are many and varied, and it may be interesting to read, in close juxtaposition, sketches of his character and ways which have from time to time been drawn by those who have come in contact with him.
Perhaps no more impartial sketch can be presented than that of Mr. Distant, a naturalist, who visited the Transvaal about eight years ago. He said:—"President Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger was born on the 10th October 1825, in the district of Colesburg in the Cape Colony, and is without doubt the greatest and most representative man that the Boers have yet produced. Uneducated, or self-educated, he possesses a very large amount of that natural wisdom so often denied to men of great learning and of literary cultivation. With many prejudices, he is fearless, stubborn, and resolute, and he really understands Englishmen little better than they understand him. In his earlier days he has been a somewhat ardent sportsman and a good shot. He has been engaged and honourably mentioned in most of the Kaffir fights of his time. … Socially, he has always lived in a somewhat humble position, and it is to the credit of his nature as a man that he bears not the slightest trace of the parvenu. Plain and undistinguished in appearance, he combines the advantages of a prodigious memory with a remarkable aptitude for reading his fellow-man, and this last quality would be more valuable were it not leavened by a weakness in resisting flattery and adulation. He is very pious and self-reliant, which is provocative of bigotry and hot temper; and surrounded and approached on all sides by clever and often unscrupulous financiers and speculators, his scutcheon has worn wonderfully well, and his character and reputation passed through many fiery ordeals. He is also a rough diplomatist of no mean rank."
The picture is distinctly interesting, but it does Mr. Kruger an injustice. Mr. Distant says that "he understands Englishmen little better than they understand him." Surely this remark is an insult to Mr. Kruger's great sagacity. He long ago "took the measure" of the Englishman, and he has enjoyed himself immensely in seeing how far it was possible—vulgarly speaking—to "try it on" with the British nation. If Mr. Kruger could be induced to write a book entitled "My Life and Games with the British Government for the last Twenty Years," he might afford our politicians some useful and instructive entertainment.
To Mr. Distant's portrait of the President of the South African Republic another and a later one may be appended. It is drawn by the able pen of Mr. Fitzpatrick, the author of "The Transvaal from Within." "In the history of South Africa the figure of the grim old President will loom large and striking—picturesque, as the figure of one who, by his character and will, made and held his people; magnificent, as one who, in the face of the blackest fortune, never wavered from his aim or faltered in his effort; who, with a courage that seemed and still seems fatuous, but which may well be called heroic, stood up against the might of the greatest empire in the world. And, it may be, pathetic too, as one whose limitations were great, one whose training and associations, whose very successes, had narrowed and embittered and hardened him; as one who, when the greatness of success was his to take and hold, turned his back on the supreme opportunity and used his strength and qualities to fight against the spirit of progress and all that the enlightenment of the age pronounces to be fitting and necessary to good government and a healthy State.
"To an English nobleman who, in the course of an interview, remarked, 'My father was a Minister of England and twice Viceroy of Ireland,' the old Dutchman answered, 'And my father was a shepherd!' It was not pride rebuking pride; it was the ever-present fact which would not have been worth mentioning but for the suggestion of the antithesis. He, too, was a shepherd, and is—a peasant. It may be that he knows what would be right and good for his people, and it may be not; but it is sure that he realises that to educate would be to emancipate; to broaden their views would be to break down the defences of their prejudices; to let in the new leaven would be to spoil the old bread; to give unto all men the rights of men would be to swamp for ever the party which is to him greater than the State. When one thinks of the one-century history of this people, much is seen that accounts for their extraordinary love of isolation, and their ingrained and passionate aversion to control; much, too, that draws to them a world of sympathy. And when one realises the old Dopper President hemmed in once more by the hurrying tide of civilisation, from which his people have fled for generations—trying to fight both Fate and Nature, standing up to stem a tide as resistless as the eternal sea—one sees the pathos of the picture. But this is as another generation may see it. To-day we are too close, so close that the meaner details, the blots and flaws, are all most plainly visible: the corruption, the insincerity, the injustice, the barbarity—all the unlovely touches that will by-and-by be forgotten, sponged away by the gentle hand of Time, when only the picturesque will remain."
PAUL KRUGER,
President of the Transvaal Republic.
Photo by Elliott & Fry, London.
Mr. Fitzpatrick speaks somewhat more plainly in another place:—
"Outside the Transvaal Mr. Kruger has the reputation of being free from taint of corruption from which so many of his colleagues suffer. Yet within the Republic and among his own people one of the gravest of the charges levelled against him is, that by his example and connivance he has made himself responsible for much of the plundering that goes on. There are numbers of cases in which the President's nearest relations have been proved to be concerned in the most flagrant jobs, only to be screened by his influence; such cases, for instance, as that of the Vaal River Water Supply Concession, in which Mr. Kruger's son-in-law 'hawked' about for the highest bid the vote of the Executive Council on a matter which had not yet come before it, and, moreover, sold and duly delivered the aforesaid vote. There is the famous libel case in which Mr. Eugene Marais, the editor of the Dutch paper Land en Volk, successfully sustained his allegation that the President had defrauded the State by charging heavy travelling expenses for a certain trip on which he was actually the guest of the Cape Colonial Government."
The light thus thrown on the dealings of Mr. Kruger