or portions of the same, should provisionally and pending the announcement of Our pleasure,* be administered in Our name and on Our behalf, then and in such case only* We-" authorize you to annex so much of any such territories as aforesaid.

But the caution against such annexing was continued much further. "Provided first-that". -no such annexation shall be made-"unless you shall be satisfied that the inhabitants thereof, or a sufficient number of them, or the Legislature thereof* desire to become Our subjects, nor if any conditions unduly limiting Our power and authority are sought to be imposed. And secondly, that, unless the circumstances are such as in your opinion to make it necessary to issue a Proclamation forthwith, no such Proclamation shall be issued by you until the same has been submitted to and approved by——” the Governor of the Cape Colony, all whose titles are given at great length.

Could anything be more guarded, or less likely one would say on the mere perusal of the document, to lead to an immediate and permanent annexation of the whole country. The annexation if made at all was to be provisional only and pending the Queen's pleasure, and then it was only to be made if the inhabitants, or a sufficient number of them, or the Legislature should wish it. What the sufficient number might be was left to the discretion of the Commissioner. But he was only to do this in compliance with the wishes of the people themselves. He was to take temporary possession,-only temporary possession,-of a part of the Transvaal should the people desire it, and in the event of such a measure being approved by a distant Governor,-unless the circumstances were such as to make him think it expedient

*The Italics are my own.

to do it without such approval. Such was the nature of the Order, and I think that any one reading it before the event would have said that it was not intended to convey an authority for the immediate and permanent annexation of the whole country.

But Sir Theophilus, after a sojourn of ten weeks at Pretoria, in which the question of the annexation was submitted to the Volksraad and in which petitions and counter-petitions were signed, did annex the whole country permanently, without any question of provisional occupation, and without, as far as I have been able to learn, any sanction from the Governor of the Cape Colony. As to conditions limiting Her Majesty's power, the mere allusion to such a condition of things seems to be absurd now that we know what has been done. "Now therefore I do. . . . proclaim and make known that from and after the publication hereof the territory heretofore known as the South African Republic . . . . shall be, and shall be taken to be, British territory." These are the words which contain the real purport of the Proclamation issued by Sir Theophilus Shepstone at Pretoria on 12th April, 1877. Was ever anything so decided, so audacious, and apparently so opposed to the spirit of the instructions which the Commissioner had received? When the Secretary of State received a telegram from Madeira, the nearest telegraph station, saying that the Transvaal had been annexed, which he did in the following May, he surely must have been more surprised than any other man in England at what had been done.

Was the deed justifiable? Has it been justified by what has occurred since? And if so how had come about a state of things which had made necessary a proceeding apparently so outrageous? The only man I have met in all South Africa who has questioned the propriety of what

has been done is Mr. Burgers, the ousted President. Though I have discussed the matter wherever I have been, taking generally something of a slant against Sir Theophilus, as I must seem to have done in the remarks I have just made, and to which I always felt myself prompted by the high-handedness of the proceeding,—I have never encountered even a doubtful word on the subject, except in what Mr. Burgers said to me. And Mr. Burgers acknowledged to me, not once or twice only, that the step which had been taken was manifestly beneficial, to the Natives, to the English,-and to the Dutch. He thought that Sir Theophilus had done a great wrong, -but that the wrong done would be of great advantage to every one concerned. He made various complaints;— that the Natives around him had been encouraged to rebel in order that an assumed difficulty might be pleaded; -that no national petition, and indeed no trustworthy petition, had been sent forward praying for annexation;that the deed was uncalled for and tyrannical;—and that the whole proceeding was one in which the courtesy due to a weaker nation was neglected and omitted. He then asserted that fresh emigrants would not flock into a land governed under a European crown as they would have done into a Republic. But he repeated his admission. that for Dutchmen, Englishmen, and Natives as at present settled in the country, the British rule would be the best.

He alleged as to himself that when Sir Theophilus stated to him his intentions, three courses appeared to be open to him. He might use his influence and his words in assisting the transference of the country to the British. This as President of the Republic he could not do; and the less so as he did not think that it should be done. Or he might cause Sir Theophilus and his

twenty-five policemen to be marched back over the border, treating them on their way as unauthorized intruders. This he would not do, he said, because he knew it to be useless to wage war with Great Britain. Or he might yield and remonstrate;-yield to power while he remonstrated against injustice. This, he said, that he did do. The words and personal bearing of the man recommended themselves to me much. Whether he is to be regarded as a banished patriot or a willing placeman must depend on a delicate question which has not as far as I know yet been answered, though it has been broached,-to which, delicate as it is, I will refer again before I have ended my story.

I had not the pleasure of meeting Sir Theophilus and have the less repugnance therefore to surmise the condition of his mind when he received the order to go to Pretoria. Had he told me his mind I might have been unable to publish my own surmises. He knew that the native races of the Transvaal unless convinced of the superiority of their white neighbours would ever struggle to prove them inferior,—and that such inferiority if proved would at once be their death-warrant. The Natives had long learned to respect the English and to hate the Dutch; —but even that respect would not restrain them if once they had asserted their masterhood to a white race. And now this state of things was at hand. He was aware that though English troops could be supplied to maintain English authority, English troops would not be lent to fight the battles of the Dutch. There might, nay there probably would be, a native triumph just across our borders which he as a minister in Natal could not interfere to quell, but which, when a rumour of it should spread among the Zulus on our border, might induce 300,000 coloured subjects to think that they could free themselves

.by a blow from 20,000 white masters. And he knew the condition which I have attempted to explain,-that these Dutch people in the Transvaal would not pay a stiver of tax, that there was in fact no government, that the gaols were unlocked in order that prisoners might find elsewhere the bread which their gaolers could not get for them, that the posts could not be continued because the Contractors were not paid, that no one would part with a coin which he possessed, that property was unsaleable, that industry was unprofitable, that life was insecure, that Chaos was come upon the land. I do not suppose that Sir Theophilus doubted much when he read the Commission which had been sent to him, or that he thought very much of all the safeguards and provisions. He probably felt, as did everybody else, that the South African Republic had from the first been a failure,—almost a farce, and that the sooner so expensive a failure could be brought to an end, the better. If indeed the Volksraad would have voted their own extermination that would have been very well; but he could hardly have expected it. As for petitions, and the wish of a "sufficient number" of the inhabitants,—I should imagine that he must have been a little indifferent to that. His mind probably was made up,—with a resolve to give the Volksraad what time might be needed for their deliberations. They did not deliberate, only deliberated whether they would deliberate or not, and then declined even to deliberate. Whereupon Sir Theophilus said that then and from thenceforth the Transvaal should be British property. So he put up the Queen's flag;—and the Transvaal is and probably will remain British property.

I have to acknowledge, with all my sympathies strongly opposed to what I call high-handed political operations, that I think Sir Theophilus was justified. A case of such