of these defensive operations we had
refused to go forward with the negotiations which, before the first of
these miscarriages had occurred, we had already declared that we were
willing to promote and undertake."(29)

The policy of the reversal of annexation is likely to remain a topic of
endless dispute.(30) As Sir Hercules Robinson put (M19) it in a letter to
Lord Kimberley, written a week before Majuba (Feb. 21), no possible course
was free from grave objection. If you determine, he said, to hold by the
annexation of the Transvaal, the country would have to be conquered and
held in subjection for many years by a large force. Free institutions and
self-government under British rule would be an impossibility. The only
palliative would be to dilute Dutch feeling by extensive English
immigration, like that of 1820 to the Eastern Province. But that would
take time, and need careful watching; and in the meantime the result of
holding the Transvaal as a conquered colony would undoubtedly be to excite
bitter hatred between the English and Dutch throughout the Free State and
this colony, which would be a constant source of discomfort and danger. On
the other hand, he believed that if they were, after a series of reverses
and before any success, to yield all the Boers asked for, they would be so
overbearing and quarrelsome that we should soon be at war with them again.
On the whole, Sir Hercules was disposed to think--extraordinary as such a
view must appear--that the best plan would be to re-establish the supremacy
of our arms, and then let the malcontents go. He thought no middle course
any longer practicable. Yet surely this course was open to all the
objections. To hold on to annexation at any cost was intelligible. But to
face all the cost and all the risks of a prolonged and a widely extended
conflict, with the deliberate intention of allowing the enemy to have his
own way after the conflict had been brought to an end, was not
intelligible and was not defensible.

Some have argued that we ought to have brought up an overwhelming force,
to demonstrate that we were able to beat them, before we made peace.
Unfortunately demonstrations of this species easily turn into
provocations, and talk of this kind mostly comes from those who believe,
not that peace was made in the wrong way, but that a peace giving their
country back to the Boers ought never to have been made at all, on any
terms or in any way. This was not the point