to flight twelve thousand
Metabeli spearsmen. But again the Boer was only clearing the way for
British occupation, which, commencing at Natal in 1842, had, by 1848,
extended over the entire Orange Free State. And then there was another
trek. Again the Boers migrated, this time crossing the River Vaal, and
founding a "Transvaal Republic."

In the history of the next thirty years we see not a vacillating, but
rather a tentative policy, behind which was always an inflexible
purpose to establish British rule in South Africa, peaceably, if
possible, or by force, if compelled. The British Government was trying
to bring to terms the most intractable race it had ever dealt with in
all its colonizing experience. The thing which embarrassed the English
was that flaw in their claim; and the trouble with {179} the Boers was
that they were archaic in their ideals, and obstructive to all policies
which belonged to a modern civilization. They had stopped growing when
they left Holland. The emancipation and the philanthropies forced upon
them by a people who were stealing their land, exasperated them, and
outraged their sense of justice; and when the English punished them for
cruelties to the native savages, by executing four Boers, vitriol was
poured upon an open wound, and peace was forever impossible.

In 1852 England, in placating mood, yielded the local control of the
Orange Free State and the Transvaal Republic. But in less than five
years the Boers had thrown away their opportunity by strife and discord
among themselves, and had separated into four small hostile Republics,
which Paul Stephanus Kruger, then President of the Transvaal, was
vainly striving to bring together. The only time they were not at war
with each other was when they were all fighting the natives, with whom
they never established friendly relations. Perhaps it {180} is asking
too much of a people so many times emptied from one region into
another, to have established internal conditions, economic and
political, such as belong to ordinary civilized states. But the
condition of disorder had become such that the British Government
believed, or at least claimed to believe, that as a measure of safety
to their own Colonies, the Transvaal should be annexed to the Colony at
the Cape.

The people were cautiously approached upon this subject, and even some
of the leaders among the burghers advocated the measure as the best,
and, indeed, only thing possibl