I am in a position to-day only to announce the decision to which the Government have come with respect to the Transvaal.  The case of the Transvaal is urgent.  It is the nerve-centre of South Africa.  It is the arena in which all questions of South African politics—­social, moral, racial, and economic—­are fought out; and this new country, so lately reclaimed from the wilderness, with a white population of less than 300,000 souls, already reproduces in perfect miniature all those dark, tangled, and conflicting problems usually to be found in populous and old-established European States.  The case of the Transvaal differs fundamentally from the case of the Orange River Colony.  The latter has been in the past, and will be again in the future, a tranquil agricultural State, pursuing under a wise and tolerant Government a happy destiny of its own.  All I have to say about the Orange River Colony this afternoon is this—­that there will be no unnecessary delay in the granting of a Constitution; and that in the granting of that Constitution we shall be animated only by a desire to secure a fair representation of all classes of inhabitants in the country, and to give effective expression to the will of the majority.

When we came into office, we found a Constitution already prepared for the Transvaal by the right hon.  Member for St. George’s, Hanover Square.[1] That Constitution is no more.  I hope the right hon. gentleman will not suspect me of any malevolence towards his offspring.  I would have nourished and fostered it with a tender care; but life was already extinct.  It had ceased to breathe even before it was born; but I trust the right hon. gentleman will console himself by remembering that there are many possibilities of constitutional settlements lying before him in the future.  After all, the Abbe Sieyes, when the Constitution of 1791 was broken into pieces, was very little younger than the right hon. gentleman, and he had time to make and survive two new Constitutions.

Frankly, what I may, for brevity’s sake, call the Lyttelton Constitution was utterly unworkable.  It surrendered the machinery of power; it preserved the whole burden of responsibility and administration.  Nine official gentlemen, nearly all without Parliamentary experience, and I daresay without Parliamentary aptitudes, without the support of that nominated majority which I am quite convinced that the right hon.  Member for West Birmingham had always contemplated in any scheme of representative government, and without the support of an organised party, were to be placed in a Chamber of thirty-five elected members who possessed the power of the purse.  The Boers would either have abstained altogether from participating in that Constitution, or they would have gone in only for the purpose of wrecking it.  The British party was split into two sections, and one section, the Responsibles, made public declarations of their intention to bring about a constitutional deadlock by obstruction and refusing supplies, and all the other apparatus of Parliamentary discontent.  In fact, the Constitution of the right hon. gentleman seemed bound inevitably to conjure up that nightmare of all modern politicians, government resting on consent, and consent not forthcoming.