did, put their own
representatives into power and run the government upon Dutch lines.
Already Dutch law had been restored, and Dutch put on the same footing
as English as the official language of the country. The extreme
liberality of such measures, and the uncompromising way in which they
have been carried out, however distasteful the legislation might seem
to English ideas, are among the chief reasons which made the illiberal
treatment of British settlers in the Transvaal so keenly resented at the
Cape. A Dutch Government was ruling the British in a British colony,
at a moment when the Boers would not give an Englishman a vote upon a
municipal council in a city which he had built himself. Unfortunately,
however, 'the evil that men do lives after them,' and the ignorant Boer
farmer continued to imagine that his southern relatives were in bondage,
just as the descendant of the Irish emigrant still pictures an Ireland
of penal laws and an alien Church.

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 th