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.  The semi-tropical sun was waking strange ferments in the placid Friesland blood, and producing a race who added the turbulence and restlessness of the south to the formidable tenacity of the north.  Strong vitality and violent ambitions produced feuds and rivalries worthy of medieval Italy, and the story of the factious little communities is like a chapter out of Guicciardini.  Disorganisation ensued.  The burghers would not pay taxes and the treasury was empty.  One fierce Kaffir tribe threatened them from the north, and the Zulus on the east.  It is an exaggeration of English partisans to pretend that our intervention saved the Boers, for no one can read their military history without seeing that they were a match for Zulus and Sekukuni combined.  But certainly a formidable invasion was pending, and the scattered farmhouses were as open to the Kaffirs as our farmers’ homesteads were in the American colonies when the Indians were on the warpath.  Sir Theophilus Shepstone, the British Commissioner, after an inquiry of three months, solved all questions by the formal annexation of the country.  The fact that he took possession of it with a force of some twenty-five men showed the honesty of his belief that no armed resistance was to be feared.  This, then, in 1877 was a complete reversal of the Sand River Convention and the opening of a new chapter in the history of South Africa.

There did not appear to be any strong feeling at the time against the annexation.  The people were depressed with their troubles and weary of contention.  Burgers, the President, put in a formal protest, and took up his abode in Cape Colony, where he had a pension from the British Government.  A memorial against the measure received the signatures of a majority of the Boer inhabitants, but there was a fair minority who took the other view.  Kruger himself accepted a paid office under Government.  There was every sign that the people, if judiciously handled, would settle down under the British flag.  It is even asserted that they would themselves have petitioned for annexation had it been longer withheld.  With immediate constitutional government it is possible that even the most recalcitrant of them might have been induced to lodge their protests in the ballot boxes rather than in the bodies of our soldiers.