ss"--tricked out with
the same humbug about "magnanimity" and "conciliation," about trust in
Boer (or Nationalist) moderation when in power, the same contemptuous
passing over of the loyalists as persons of "too pronounced" views, or
as "interested contractors and stock-jobbers."[59] It was embodied in a
Convention by which the "inhabitants of the Transvaal territory" were
"accorded complete self-government, subject to the suzerainty of Her
Majesty" under a series of limitations which, if enforced, would have
implied a measure of British control in many respects greater than that
exercised over a self-governing Colony, and with a number of guarantees
to protect the loyalists. The Government was able to "save its face,"
while its hesitating followers were able to quiet their consciences, by
the reassuring phrases of the Convention. The Boer Volksraad frankly
declared itself still dissatisfied, but ratified the Convention,
"maintaining all objections to the Convention ... and for the purpose of
showing to everybody that the love of peace and unity inspires it, for
the time being, and provisionally submitting the articles of the
Convention to a practical test." If any Nationalist Convention in Dublin
should accept the new Home Rule Bill, we can take it for granted that it
will be in exactly the same spirit, and possibly in almost the same
phraseology.[60]

From the first the limitations of the Convention were disregarded. Short
of armed intervention there was no machinery for enforcing them, and the
Boers knew perfectly well that there was no real desire on the part of
an embarrassed Government to raise a hornet's nest by making the
attempt. The British resident, with his nominally autocratic powers, was
a mere impotent laughing stock. The ruined loyalists left the country,
or remained to become the most embittered enemies of the British
Government. In three years a new Convention was drafted--an even greater
masterpiece of make-believe than the first--which could be expounded to
Parliament as a mere modification of certain unworkable provisions, but
which the Boers took as a definite surrender of all claims to
suzerainty, and as a definite recognition of their position as an
"independent sovereign state," bound temporarily by the provisions of a
treaty, which could have no permanent force in "fixing the boundary to
the march of a nation." So far from being reconciled they were only
emboldened to embark on a policy of aggr