fore the prospect of a war in which the Boers might have
been supported by their kinsmen in the Free State and the Cape Colony.
The retrocession of the Transvaal under the terms of the Pretoria
Convention (1881) was followed by further concessions embodied in the
London Convention of 1884. It is absolutely established as fact that
Mr. Gladstone's Government intended, by certain articles contained in
both conventions, to secure to all actual and potential British
residents in the Transvaal the enjoyment of all the political rights
of citizenship possessed by the Boers. But it is equally certain that
the immediate contravention of Article XVI. of the Pretoria
Convention, when in 1882 the period of residence necessary to qualify
for the franchise was raised from two to five years, was allowed to
pass without protest from the Imperial Government. And thus a breach
of the Convention, which the discovery of the Witwatersrand
gold-fields (1886) and the subsequent establishment of a great British
industrial community made a matter of vital importance, was condoned.
A few years more and the country which prided itself upon being the
home of liberty and of free institutions was confounded by the
spectacle of a South Africa of its own making, in which a British
majority denied the franchise in a Dutch Republic, contrasted with a
Dutch minority dominating and controlling the machinery of responsible
government in a British colony.

This situation brings us (to use a military phrase) within striking
distance of the objective of the present work--the personality and
efforts of the man who administered South Africa in the momentous
years of the struggle for equal rights for all white men from the
Zambesi to Capetown.

If the records set out in the preceding pages leave any impression
upon the mind, it is one that must produce a sense of amazement,
almost exasperation, at the thought of the many mistakes and disasters
that might have been avoided, if only greater weight had been attached
to the advice tendered to the British Government by its local
representative in South Africa. And with this sense of amazement a
generous mind will associate inevitably a feeling of regret for the
injustice unwittingly, but none the less irreparably, inflicted upon
loyal and capable servants of the Crown--an injustice so notorious
that it has made South Africa the "grave of reputations." Apart from
the pre-eminence with which the period of Lord Milne