According To The Liberal
Colonial Policy Of Great Britain, The Time Had Come To Cut The Cord
And Let The Young Nation Conduct Its Own Affairs.
In 1872 complete
self-government was given to it, the Governor, as the
representative of the Queen, retaining a nominal unexercised veto
upon legislation.
According to this system the Dutch majority of
the colony could, and did, put their own representatives into power
and run the government upon Dutch lines. Already Dutch law had been
restored, and Dutch put on the same footing as English as the
official language of the country. The extreme liberality of such
measures, and the uncompromising way in which they have been
carried out, however distasteful the legislation might seem to
English ideas, are among the chief reasons which made the illiberal
treatment of British settlers in the Transvaal so keenly resented
at the Cape. A Dutch Government was ruling the British in a British
colony, at a moment when the Boers would not give an Englishman a
vote upon a municipal council in a city which he had built himself.
Unfortunately, however, 'the evil that men do lives after them,'
and the ignorant Boer farmer continued to imagine that his southern
relatives were in bondage, just as the descendant of the Irish
emigrant still pictures an Ireland of penal laws and an alien
Church.
For twenty-five years after the Sand River Convention the burghers
of the South African Republic had pursued a strenuous and violent
existence, fighting incessantly with the natives and sometimes with
each other, with an occasional fling at the little Dutch republic
to the south.
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