nce concerning our dealings with the Orange
Free State. Thus in 1852 and in 1854 were born those sturdy States who
have been able for a time to hold at bay the united forces of the
Empire.

In the meantime Cape Colony, in spite of these secessions, had prospered
exceedingly, and her population--British, German, and Dutch--had grown
by 1870 to over two hundred thousand souls, the Dutch still slightly
predominating. According to the liberal colonial policy of Great
Britain, the time had come to cut the cord and let the young nation
conduct its own affairs. In 1872 complete self-government was given to
it, the Governor, as the representative of the Queen, retaining a
nominal unexercised veto upon legislation. According to this system the
Dutch majority of the colony could, and did, put their own
representatives into power and run the government upon Dutch lines.
Already Dutch law had been restored, and Dutch put on the same footing
as English as the official language of the country. The extreme
liberality of such measures, and the uncompromising way in which they
have been carried out, however distasteful the legislation might seem to
English ideas, are among the chief reasons which made the illiberal
treatment of British settlers in the Transvaal so keenly resented at the
Cape. A Dutch Government was ruling the British in a British colony, at
a moment when the Boers would not give an Englishman a vote upon a
municipal council in a city which he had built himself.

For twenty-five years after the Sand River Convention the burghers of
the Transvaal Republic had pursued a strenuous and violent existence,
fighting incessantly with the natives and sometimes with each other,
with an occasional fling at the little Dutch republic to the south.
Disorganisation ensued. The burghers would not pay taxes and the
treasury was empty. One fierce Kaffir tribe threatened them from the
north, and the Zulus on the east. It is an exaggeration to pretend that
British intervention saved the Boers, for no one can read their military
history without seeing that they were a match for Zulus and Sekukuni
combined. But certainly a formidable invasion was pending, and the
scattered farmhouses were as open to the Kaffirs as our farmers'
homesteads were in the American colonies when the Indians were on the
war-path. Sir Theophilus Shepstone, the British Commissioner, after an
inquiry of three months, solved all questions by the formal annexation
of th