in that preamble, and that if one lapsed the other must do so also.  On the other hand, the Boers pointed to the fact that there was actually a preamble to the second Convention, which would seem, therefore, to have taken the place of the first.  The point is so technical that it appears to be eminently one of those questions which might with propriety have been submitted to the decision of a board of foreign jurists—­or possibly to the Supreme Court of the United States.  If the decision had been given against Great Britain, we might have accepted it in a chastened spirit as a fitting punishment for the carelessness of the representative who failed to make our meaning intelligible.  Carlyle has said that a political mistake always ends in a broken head for somebody.  Unfortunately the somebody is usually somebody else.  We have read the story of the political mistakes.  Only too soon we shall come to the broken heads.

This, then, is a synopsis of what had occurred up to the signing of the Convention, which finally established, or failed to establish, the position of the South African Republic.  We must now leave the larger questions, and descend to the internal affairs of that small State, and especially to that train of events which has stirred the mind of our people more than anything since the Indian Mutiny.

CHAPTER 2.

The cause of quarrel.

There might almost seem to be some subtle connection between the barrenness and worthlessness of a surface and the value of the minerals which lie beneath it.  The craggy mountains of Western America, the arid plains of West Australia, the ice-bound gorges of the Klondyke, and the bare slopes of the Witwatersrand veld—­these are the lids which cover the great treasure chests of the world.

Gold had been known to exist in the Transvaal before, but it was only in 1886 that it was realised that the deposits which lie some thirty miles south of the capital are of a very extraordinary and valuable nature.  The proportion of gold in the quartz is not particularly high, nor are the veins of a remarkable thickness, but the peculiarity of the Rand mines lies in the fact that throughout this ‘banket’ formation the metal is so uniformly distributed that the enterprise can claim a certainty which is not usually associated with the industry.  It is quarrying rather than mining.  Add to this that the reefs which were originally worked as outcrops have now been traced to enormous depths, and present the same features as those at the surface.  A conservative estimate of the value of the gold has placed it at seven hundred millions of pounds.