Boers, organised by Government officials and acting under the
protection of the police. By reason, therefore, of the direct, as well
as the indirect, act of the Government, Your Majesty's loyal subjects
have been prevented from publicly ventilating their grievances, and from
laying them before Your Majesty.

'Wherefore Your Majesty's humble petitioners humbly beseech Your Most
Gracious Majesty to extend Your Majesty's protection to Your Majesty's
loyal subjects resident in this State, and to cause an inquiry to be
made into grievances and complaints enumerated and set forth in this
humble petition, and to direct Your Majesty's representative in South
Africa to take measures which will insure the speedy reform of the
abuses complained of, and to obtain substantial guarantees from the
Government of this State for a recognition of their rights as British
subjects.'

From the date of this direct petition from our ill-used people to their
Sovereign events moved inevitably towards one end. Sometimes the surface
was troubled and sometimes smooth, but the stream always ran swiftly and
the roar of the fall sounded ever louder in the ears.

CHAPTER III

THE NEGOTIATIONS

The British Government and the British people do not desire any direct
authority in South Africa. Their one supreme interest is that the
various States there should live in concord and prosperity, and that
there should be no need for the presence of a British redcoat within the
whole great peninsula. Our foreign critics, with their misapprehension
of the British colonial system, can never realise that whether the
four-coloured flag of the Transvaal or the Union Jack of a
self-governing colony waved over the gold mines would not make the
difference of one shilling to the revenue of Great Britain. The
Transvaal as a British province would have its own legislature, its own
revenue, its own expenditure, and its own tariff against the mother
country, as well as against the rest of the world, and Britain be none
the richer for the change. This is so obvious to a Briton that he has
ceased to insist upon it, and it is for that reason perhaps that it is
so universally misunderstood abroad. On the other hand, while she is no
gainer by the change, most of the expense of it in blood and in money
falls upon the home country. On the face of it, therefore, Great Britain
had every reason to avoid so formidable a task as the conquest of the
South African Republic. A