7 C, 2367, p. 55.

_ 18 Afghanistan and S. Africa:_ A letter to Mr. Gladstone by Sir Bartle
Frere. Murray, 1891, pp. 24-6. Frere, on his return to England, once
more impressed on the colonial office the necessity of speedily
granting the Boers a constitution, otherwise there would be serious
trouble. (_Life_, ii. p. 408.)

M14 Boer Rising

19 Sir George Colley pressed Lord Kimberley in his correspondence with
the reality of this grievance, and the urgency of trying to remove
it. This was after the Boers had taken to arms at the end of 1880.

20 Before the Gladstone government came into office, between August
1879 and April 1880, whilst General Wolseley was in command, the
force in Natal and the Transvaal had been reduced by six batteries
of artillery, three companies of engineers, one cavalry regiment,
eleven battalions of infantry, and five companies of army service
corps. The force at the time of the outbreak was: in Natal 1772, and
in the Transvaal 1759--a total of 3531. As soon as the news of the
insurrection reached London, large reinforcements were at once
despatched to Colley, the first of them leaving Gibraltar on Dec.
27, 1880.

21 Sir B. Frere was recalled on August 1, 1880, and sailed for England
September 15. Sir Hercules Robinson, his successor, did not reach
the Cape until the end of January 1881. In the interval Sir George
Strahan was acting governor.

M15 Paragraph In The Royal Speech

22 Lord Kimberley justified this decision on the ground that it was
impossible to send a commissioner to inquire and report, at a moment
when our garrisons were besieged, and we had collected no troops to
relieve them, and when we had just received the news that the
detachment of the 94th had been cut off on the march from Lydenberg
to Pretoria. "Is it not practically certain," he wrote, "that the
Boers would have refused at that time to listen to any reasonable
terms, and would have simply insisted that we should withdraw our
troops and quit the country?" Of course, the Boer overture, some six
weeks after the rejection by Lord Kimberley of the Cape proposal,
and after continued military success on the side of the Boers,
showed that this supposed practical certainty was the exact reverse
of certain.

M16 Boer Overture