No impartial student of recent South African History can fail, I think, to see that the results of Mr. Gladstone’s policy in the retrocession of the Transvaal have been unhappy, however good the impulse which prompted his action.  To his supporters at home, and to many of his admirers throughout Europe, his action stood for pure magnanimity, and seemed a sort of prophetic instalment of the Christian spirit which, they hoped, would pervade international politics in the coming age.

To the Transvaal leaders it presented a wholly different aspect.  It meant to them weakness, and an acknowledgment of defeat.  “Now let us go on,” they felt, “and press towards our goal, i.e., the expulsion of the British from South Africa.”  The attitude and conduct of the Transvaal delegates who came to London in 1883, and of their chiefs and supporters, throws much light on this effect produced by the act of Mr. Gladstone.

There can be no doubt that the desire to supplant British by Dutch supremacy has existed for a long time.  President Kruger puts back the origin of the opposition of the two races to a very distant date.  In 1881, he said, “In the Cession of the Cape of Good Hope by the King of Holland to England lies the root out of which subsequent events and our present struggle have grown.”  The Dutch believe themselves,—­and not without reason,—­capable of great things, they were moved by an ambition to seize the power which they believed,—­and the retrocession fostered that belief,—­was falling from England’s feeble and vacillating grasp.  “Long before the present trouble” says a Member of the British Parliament well acquainted with South African affairs, “I visited every town in South Africa of any importance, and was brought into close contact with every class of the population; wherever one went, one heard this ambition voiced, either advocated or deprecated, but never denied.  It dates back some forty or fifty years."[15] The first reference to it is in a despatch of Governor Sir George Grey, in 1858; and it is to be found more definitely in the speeches of President Burgers in the Transvaal Raad in 1877 before the annexation, and in his apologia published after the annexation.  The movement continued under the administration of Sir Bartle Frere, who wrote in a despatch (published in Blue book) in 1879, “The Anti-English opposition are sedulously courting the loyal Dutch party (a great majority of the Cape Dutch) in order to swell the already considerable minority who are disloyal to the English Crown here and in the Transvaal.”  Mr. Theodore Schreiner, the brother of the Cape Premier, in a letter to the “Cape Times,” November, 1899, described a conversation he had some seventeen years ago with Mr. Reitz, then a judge, afterwards President of the Orange Free State, and now State Secretary of the Transvaal, in which Mr. Reitz admitted that it was his object to overthrow the British power and expel the British flag from South Africa.  Mr. Schreiner adds; “During the seventeen years that have elapsed I have watched the propaganda for the overthrow of British power in South Africa being ceaselessly spread by every possible means, the press, the pulpit, the platform, the schools, the colleges, the legislature; and it has culminated in the present war, of which Mr. Reitz and his co-workers are the origin and the cause.”