The Result Was A Report Which Amply Vindicated The
Reformers, And Suggested Remedies Which Would Have Gone A Long Way
Towards Satisfying The Uitlanders.
With such enlightened
legislation their motives for seeking the franchise would have been
less pressing.
But the President and his Raad would have none of
the recommendations of the commission. The rugged old autocrat
declared that Schalk Burger was a traitor to his country for having
signed such a document, and a new reactionary committee was chosen
to report upon the report. Words and papers were the only outcome
of the affair. No amelioration came to the newcomers. But at least
they had again put their case publicly upon record, and it had been
endorsed by the most respected of the burghers. Gradually in the
press of the English-speaking countries the raid was ceasing to
obscure the issue. More and more clearly it was coming out that no
permanent settlement was possible where the majority of the
population was oppressed by the minority. They had tried peaceful
means and failed. They had tried warlike means and failed. What was
there left for them to do? Their own country, the paramount power
of South Africa, had never helped them. Perhaps if it were directly
appealed to it might do so. It could not, if only for the sake of
its own imperial prestige, leave its children for ever in a state
of subjection. The Uitlanders determined upon a petition to the
Queen, and in doing so they brought their grievances out of the
limits of a local controversy into the broader field of
international politics. Great Britain must either protect them or
acknowledge that their protection was beyond her power. A direct
petition to the Queen praying for protection was signed in April
1899 by twenty-one thousand Uitlanders. From that time events moved
inevitably towards the one end. Sometimes the surface was troubled
and sometimes smooth, but the stream always ran swiftly and the
roar of the fall sounded ever louder in the ears.
CHAPTER 3.
THE NEGOTIATIONS.
The British Government and the British people do not desire any
direct authority in South Africa. Their one supreme interest is
that the various States there should live in concord and
prosperity, and that there should be no need for the presence of a
British redcoat within the whole great peninsula. Our foreign
critics, with their misapprehension of the British colonial system,
can never realise that whether the four-coloured flag of the
Transvaal or the Union Jack of a self-governing colony waved over
the gold mines would not make the difference of one shilling to the
revenue of Great Britain. The Transvaal as a British province would
have its own legislature, its own revenue, its own expenditure, and
its own tariff against the mother country, as well as against the
rest of the world, and England be none the richer for the change.
This is so obvious to a Briton that he has ceased to insist upon
it, and it is for that reason perhaps that it is so universally
misunderstood abroad.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 26 of 435
Words from 13102 to 13618
of 225456
