from which either cabinet or
parliament started. The government had decided that annexation had been an
error. The Boers had proposed inquiry. The government assented on
condition that the Boers dispersed. Without waiting a reasonable time for
a reply, our general was worsted in a rash and trivial attack. Did this
cancel our proffered bargain? The point was simple and unmistakable,
though party heat at home, race passion in the colony, and our everlasting
human proneness to mix up different questions, and to answer one point by
arguments that belong to another, all combined to produce a confusion of
mind that a certain school of partisans have traded upon ever since.
Strange in mighty nations is moral cowardice, disguised as a Roman pride.
All the more may we admire the moral courage of the minister. For moral
courage may be needed even where aversion to bloodshed fortunately happens
to coincide with high prudence and sound policy of state.

VI

The negotiations proceeded, if negotiation be the right word. The Boers
disbanded, a powerful British force was encamped on the frontier, no Boer
representative sat on the commission, and the terms of final agreement
were in fact, as the Boers afterwards alleged, dictated and imposed. Mr.
Gladstone watched with a closeness that, considering the tremendous load
of Ireland, parliamentary procedure, and the incessant general business of
a prime minister, is amazing. When the Boers were over-pressing, he warned
them that it was only "the unshorn strength" of the administration that
enabled the English cabinet, rather to the surprise of the world, to spare
them the sufferings of a war. "We could not," he said to Lord Kimberley,
"have carried our Transvaal policy, unless we had here a strong
government, and we spent some, if not much, of our strength in carrying
it." A convention was concluded at Pretoria in (M20) August, recognising
the quasi-independence of the Transvaal, subject to the suzerainty of the
Queen, and with certain specified reservations. The Pretoria convention of
1881 did not work smoothly. Transvaal affairs were discussed from time to
time in the cabinet, and Mr. Chamberlain became the spokesman of the
government on a business where he was destined many years after to make so
conspicuous and irreparable a mark. The Boers again sent Kruger to London,
and he made out a good enough case in the opinion of Lord Derby, then
secretary of state, to justify a fresh arra