before long the British general who had succeeded to the command had
at his disposal a force which the Boers could not possibly have
resisted. The home government, however, had ordered an armistice to be
concluded (March 5), and on March 23 terms were agreed to by which the
"Transvaal State" (as it was called) was again recognized as a
quasi-independent political community, to enjoy complete self-government
under the suzerainty of the British crown. These terms were developed in
a more formal convention, signed at Pretoria in August, 1881, which
recognized the Transvaal as autonomous, subject, however, to the
suzerainty of the Queen, to British control in matters of foreign
policy, to the obligation to allow British troops to pass through the
Republic in time of war, and to guarantees for the protection of the
natives.[30] The position in which the Transvaal thus found itself
placed was a peculiar one, and something between that of a
self-governing Colony and an absolutely independent State. The nearest
legal parallel is to be found in the position of some of the great
feudatories of the British crown in India, but the actual circumstances
were of course too unlike those of India to make the parallel
instructive.

Few public acts of our time have been the subjects of more prolonged and
acrimonious controversy than this reversal in 1881 of the annexation of
1877. The British government were at the time accused, both by the
English element in the South African Colonies, and by their political
opponents at home, of an ignominious surrender. They had, so it was
urged, given way to rebellion. They had allowed three defeats to remain
unavenged. They had weakly yielded to force what they had repeatedly and
solemnly refused to peaceful petitions. They had disregarded the pledges
given both to Englishmen and to natives in the Transvaal. They had done
all this for a race of men who had been uniformly harsh and unjust to
the Kafirs, who had brought their own Republic to bankruptcy and chaos
by misgovernment, who were and would remain foes of the British empire,
who were incapable of appreciating magnanimity, and would construe
forbearance as cowardice. They had destroyed the prestige of British
power in Africa among whites and blacks, and thereby sowed for
themselves and their successors a crop of future difficulties.

To these arguments it was replied that the annexation had been made, and
the earlier refusals to reverse it pron