Messrs. Kruger and Jorissen left within a month to protest in England against the annexation.

Sir T. Shepstone wrote (May 9):  ’Mr. Paul Kruger and his colleague, Dr. Jorissen, D.D., the Commission to Europe, leave to-day.  I do not think that either of them wishes the Act of Annexation to be cancelled; Dr. Jorissen certainly does not.’  And Mr. J.D.  Barry, Recorder of Kimberley, wrote to Frere (May 15):  ’The delegates, Paul Kruger and Dr. Jorissen, left Pretoria on the 8th, and even they do not seem to have much faith in their mission.  Dr. Jorissen thinks that the reversal of Sir Theophilus’s Act would not only be impossible, but a great injury to the country.’

It is not necessary to seek hostile testimony to establish the fact that the Boers as a whole acquiesced in the annexation; the foregoing quotation from Aylward’s book supplies all that is needed—­unintentionally, perhaps.  The Zulu menace, which Aylward so lightly dismisses, was a very serious matter; the danger a very real one.  It has frequently been asserted by the Boers and their friends that the Zulu trouble was fomented by a section of the Natal people, and that Sir Theophilus Shepstone himself, if he did not openly encourage the Zulu King in his threats and encroachments on the Transvaal, at any rate refrained from using his unique influence and power with the Zulus in the direction of peace, and that he made a none too scrupulous use of the Zulu question when he forced the annexation of the Transvaal.  It is stated that, in the first place, there was no real danger, and in the next place, if there were, such was Sir Theophilus’s power with the Zulus that he could have averted it; and in support of the first point, and in demolition of Sir T. Shepstone’s pro-annexation arguments, the following extract from the latter’s despatches is quoted by Aylward and others: 

Extract from despatch, dated Utrecht, Transvaal, January 29, 1878.

Sir T. Shepstone to Sir H. Bulwer.

Par. 12.  ’Although this question has existed for many years, and the settlement of it has been long postponed, yet on no former occasion has it assumed so serious an aspect, or included so wide an area of territory; never before has there existed any bar to the farmers occupying their farms after an absence more or less temporary, caused by a temporary and local scare.  Practically, the line of occupied farms has not been heretofore affected by the dispute about the beaconed boundary, but now the prohibition to these has become absolute by Zulu claims and action.  Ruin is staring the farmers in the face, and their position is, for the time, worse under Her Majesty’s Government than ever it was under the Republic.’