eakness, and an acknowledgment of defeat. "Now let us go
on," they felt, "and press towards our goal, i.e., the expulsion of the
British from South Africa." The attitude and conduct of the Transvaal
delegates who came to London in 1883, and of their chiefs and
supporters, throws much light on this effect produced by the act of Mr.
Gladstone.

There can be no doubt that the desire to supplant British by Dutch
supremacy has existed for a long time. President Kruger puts back the
origin of the opposition of the two races to a very distant date. In
1881, he said, "In the Cession of the Cape of Good Hope by the King of
Holland to England lies the root out of which subsequent events and our
present struggle have grown." The Dutch believe themselves,--and not
without reason,--capable of great things, they were moved by an ambition
to seize the power which they believed,--and the retrocession fostered
that belief,--was falling from England's feeble and vacillating grasp.
"Long before the present trouble" says a Member of the British
Parliament well acquainted with South African affairs, "I visited every
town in South Africa of any importance, and was brought into close
contact with every class of the population; wherever one went, one heard
this ambition voiced, either advocated or deprecated, but never denied.
It dates back some forty or fifty years."[15] The first reference to it
is in a despatch of Governor Sir George Grey, in 1858; and it is to be
found more definitely in the speeches of President Burgers in the
Transvaal Raad in 1877 before the annexation, and in his _apologia_
published after the annexation. The movement continued under the
administration of Sir Bartle Frere, who wrote in a despatch (published
in Blue book) in 1879, "The Anti-English opposition are sedulously
courting the loyal Dutch party (a great majority of the Cape Dutch) in
order to swell the already considerable minority who are disloyal to the
English Crown here and in the Transvaal." Mr. Theodore Schreiner, the
brother of the Cape Premier, in a letter to the "Cape Times," November,
1899, described a conversation he had some seventeen years ago with Mr.
Reitz, then a judge, afterwards President of the Orange Free State, and
now State Secretary of the Transvaal, in which Mr. Reitz admitted that
it was his object to overthrow the British power and expel the British
flag from South Africa. Mr. Schreiner adds; "During the seventeen years
that have elap