retoria had convinced him of the uselessness of expecting that any
satisfactory settlement of the franchise question could be brought
about through the agency of the High Commissioner. He, therefore,
invited President Krueger to visit England in the hope that his own
personal advocacy of the cause of the Uitlanders, backed up by the
weight of the Salisbury Government, might remove the "root causes" of
Transvaal unrest. But President Krueger refused to confer with the
Colonial Secretary upon any other than the wholly inadmissible basis
of the conversion of the London Convention into a treaty of amity such
as one independent power might conclude with another. Mr. Chamberlain,
therefore, having put upon record that the purpose of the proposed
conference was to give effect to the London Convention and not to
destroy it, proceeded to formulate a South African policy that would
enable him to make the most effective use of the authority of Great
Britain as paramount Power. His purpose was to win Dutch opinion in
the Free State and the Cape Colony to the side of the Imperial
Government, and then to use this more progressive Dutch opinion as
the fulcrum by which the lever of Imperial remonstrance was to be
successfully applied to the Transvaal Government. In the speech[25] in
which he sketched the main lines of this policy he declared
emphatically that the paramount power of England was to be maintained
at all costs, that foreign intervention would not be permitted under
any pretence, and that the admitted grievances of the Uitlanders were
to be redressed:

[Footnote 25: 1896.]

"We have," he continued, "a confident hope that we shall be able
in the course of no lengthened time to restore the situation as
it was before the invasion of the Transvaal, to have at our backs
the sympathy and support of the majority of the Dutch population
in South Africa, and if we have that, the opinion--the united
opinion--which that will constitute, will be an opinion which no
power in Africa can resist."

With the record of the last ten years before us it seems strange that
Mr. Chamberlain should ever have believed in the efficacy of such a
policy: still more strange that he should have spoken of his
"confident hope" of winning the Afrikander nationalists to support the
paramount Power. But it must be remembered that the evidence of the
real sentiments and purposes of the nationalists here set forth