nsvaal Government. An annual revenue greatly in
excess of what was required for its internal government was raised
almost entirely from the taxation of an unrepresented class, to whom
the prosperity of the State was mainly due, and it was employed in
accumulating a great armament which could only be intended for use
against England and for maintaining the subjection of an English
population.

This was the position to which the paramount Power in South Africa,
the Power which of its own free will had conceded a limited
independence to the Transvaal, found itself reduced. And yet it was
possible for the Boer Government to maintain that there was nothing in
all this legislation which was inconsistent with the terms of the
convention of 1884.

I do not think that the justice of this criticism can be wholly
denied. The Transvaal authorities had already given clear intimation
of their desire to emancipate themselves from all British control, and
especially of their determination to disregard the limitations which
had been imposed on the expansion of their State. There is, however,
one very material fact to be remembered in judging the policy of Lord
Derby. At the time of the convention of 1884 the English population in
the Transvaal was a small, scattered, and powerless minority, and as
their numbers were far too scanty to make them a danger to the State,
there was not much reason to believe that the Transvaal authorities
would repudiate their own assurances and subject them to oppressive
disabilities. It was not until two years after the convention that the
vast gold-mines of the Transvaal were discovered and all the
conditions of the South African problem fundamentally changed. The
gigantic immigration that ensued reversed the proportion between the
two races. The revenue and the expenditure of the State multiplied
more than fifteen fold in little more than ten years.[45] The
Transvaal became the most powerful and wealthy State in South Africa,
and the great preponderance of the Outlander element in numbers,
wealth, energy, and industry rendered a conflict of races almost
inevitable. No statesman could have foreseen this change, and a
convention that might have allayed discontent if the gold-mines had
never been discovered, proved wholly inefficient to meet it.

Though in a politician of the stamp of Lord Derby the change from a very
liberal conservatism to a very conservative liberalism involved little
real modificatio