During three years the little State showed signs of a tumultuous activity.  Considering that it was as large as France and that the population could not have been more than 50,000, one would have thought that they might have found room without any inconvenient crowding.  But the burghers passed beyond their borders in every direction.  The President cried aloud that he had been shut up in a kraal, and he proceeded to find ways out of it.  A great trek was projected for the north, but fortunately it miscarried.  To the east they raided Zululand, and succeeded, in defiance of the British settlement of that country, in tearing away one third of it and adding it to the Transvaal.  To the west, with no regard to the three-year-old treaty, they invaded Bechuanaland, and set up the two new republics of Goshen and Stellaland.  So outrageous were these proceedings that Great Britain was forced to fit out in 1884 a new expedition under Sir Charles Warren for the purpose of turning these freebooters out of the country.  It may be asked, why should these men be called freebooters if the founders of Rhodesia were pioneers?  The answer is that the Transvaal was limited by treaty to certain boundaries which these men transgressed, while no pledges were broken when the British power expanded to the north.  The upshot of these trespasses was the scene upon which every drama of South Africa rings down.  Once more the purse was drawn from the pocket of the unhappy taxpayer, and a million or so was paid out to defray the expenses of the police force necessary to keep these treaty-breakers in order.  Let this be borne in mind when we assess the moral and material damage done to the Transvaal by that ill-conceived and foolish enterprise, the Jameson Raid.

In 1884 a deputation from the Transvaal visited England, and at their solicitation the clumsy Treaty of Pretoria was altered into the still more clumsy Convention of London.  The changes in the provisions were all in favour of the Boers, and a second successful war could hardly have given them more than Lord Derby handed them in time of peace.  Their style was altered from the Transvaal to the South African Republic, a change which was ominously suggestive of expansion in the future.  The control of Great Britain over their foreign policy was also relaxed, though a power of veto was retained.  But the most important thing of all, and the fruitful cause of future trouble, lay in an omission.  A suzerainty is a vague term, but in politics, as in theology, the more nebulous a thing is the more does it excite the imagination and the passions of men.  This suzerainty was declared in the preamble of the first treaty, and no mention of it was made in the second.  Was it thereby abrogated or was it not?  The British contention was that only the articles were changed, and that the preamble continued to hold good for both treaties.  They pointed out that not only the suzerainty, but also the independence, of the Transvaal was proclaimed