British Bechuanaland.

A Redistribution Act of 1898 altered the areas of some of the electoral
divisions, and the number of members returned by some, so as to adjust
representation more accurately to population.]

[Footnote 77: Some friction has, however, arisen from the right claimed
by the Council of amending money bills, especially for the purpose (one
is told) of securing grants to the electoral provinces they represent.]

CHAPTER XXV

THE SITUATION IN THE TRANSVAAL BEFORE THE RISING OF 1895

The agitation at Johannesburg, which Dr. Jameson's expedition turned
into a rising, took place in December, 1895. I spent some time in
Pretoria and Johannesburg in the preceding month, and had good
opportunities of observing the symptoms of political excitement and
gauging the tendencies at work which were so soon to break out and fix
the eyes of the world upon the Witwatersrand. The situation was a
singular one, without parallel in history; and though I did not know
that the catastrophe was so near at hand, it was easy to see that a
conflict must come and would prove momentous to South Africa. Of this
situation as it presented itself to a spectator who had no personal
interest involved, and had the advantage of hearing both sides, I
propose to speak in the present chapter.

To comprehend the position of the Transvaal Boers one must know
something of their history. From the brief sketch of it given in earlier
chapters (Chapters XI and XII) the reader will have gathered how unlike
they are to any European people or to the people of the United States.
Severed from Europe and its influences two hundred years ago, they have,
in some of the elements of modern civilisation, gone back rather than
forward. They were in 1885, when the Rand goldfields were discovered,
and many of them are to-day, a half-nomad race, pasturing their flocks
and herds over the vast spaces of what is still a wilderness, and
migrating in their waggons from the higher to the lower pastures
according to the season of the year--

--Omnia secum
Armentarius Afer agit, tectumque laremque
Armaque, Amyclaeumque canem, Cressamque pharetram.

Living in the open air, and mostly in the saddle, they are strangely
ignorant and old fashioned in all their ideas. They have no literature
and very few newspapers. Their religion is the Dutch and Huguenot
Calvinism of the seventeenth century, rigid and stern, hostile