efused absolutely, and not
offered impartially.[17]

[Footnote 16: International Law in South Africa, p. 71.]

[Footnote 17: Ibid., p. 73.]

[Footnote 18: Times Military History of the War in South Africa, Vol.
IV, p. 369]

In February the Transvaal Government had attempted to bring troops into
Rhodesia by way of Portuguese territory. Portugal had promptly sent out
forces to prevent such an evasion of Portuguese neutrality and had
guarded the railway bridges along the line to Rhodesia. And in March
Great Britain had met with a refusal to allow a large quantity of
foodstuffs, mules, and wagons to be landed at Beira for the purpose of
transportation to Rhodesia. Nevertheless, on April 9, General Sir
Frederick Carrington landed at Cape Town under orders to proceed
immediately to Beira.[18] He was to use transports put at his disposal
by his government for the purpose of collecting a full equipment for his
command of five thousand men to be mobilized at Beira, and from that
port was to enter Rhodesia. This province was then to be made the base
for an expedition against Pretoria in concert with the English forces
advancing from the south.

It is undoubted that the laws of neutrality demanded of Portugal not
only an impartial treatment of both belligerents, as the earlier writers
held, but an absolute prohibition against such a warlike expedition by
either of them, as unanimously held by all the more recent authorities.
At the time English public expression contended that absolute equality
of neutrality was not incumbent upon independent States in the
performance of their neutral duties. English writers spoke of a
"benevolent neutrality" as possible, and cited such cases as that in
1877, when Roumania, before taking an active part in the war against
Turkey, permitted Russian troops to march through her territory; and the
incident which occurred during the Neuchatel Royalist insurrection in
1856 when the Prussian Government requested permission to march through
Wurtemberg and Baden "without any idea of asking those states to abandon
their neutrality, or assist Prussia against Switzerland."

It was alleged upon the authority of such precedents that the privilege
of passage for troops might be granted by Portugal to England without a
breach of neutrality really occurring. Portugal would be merely giving
her neutrality a benevolent character towards one of the belligerents,
which it was asserted she was perfectly entitled