vaal State emerged from its war of independence
penniless and unorganized, but with a redoubled sense of Divine favour
and a reinvigorated consciousness of national life. The old constitution
was set to work; the Volksraad again met; Mr. Stephen John Paul Kruger,
who had been the leading figure in the triumvirate, was chosen by the
people to be President, and has subsequently been thrice re-elected to
that office. Undismayed by the scantiness of his State resources, he
formed bold and far-reaching plans of advance on the three sides which
lay open to him. To the north a trek was projected, and some years later
was nearly carried out, for the occupation of Mashonaland. To the south
bands of Boer adventurers entered Zululand, the first of them as
trekkers, the rest as auxiliaries to one of the native chiefs, who were
at war with one another. These adventurers established a sort of
republic in the northern districts, and would probably have seized the
whole had not the British government at last interfered and confined
them to a territory of nearly three thousand square miles, which was
recognized in 1886 under the name of the New Republic, and which in 1888
merged itself in the Transvaal. To the west, other bands of Boer raiders
entered Bechuanaland, seized land or obtained grants of land by the
usual devices, required the chiefs to acknowledge their supremacy, and
proceeded to establish two petty republics, one called Stellaland,
round the village of Vryburg, north of Kimberley, and the other,
farther north, called Goshen. These violent proceedings, which were not
only injurious to the natives, but were obviously part of a plan to add
Bechuanaland to the Transvaal territories, and close against the English
the path to those northern regions in which Britain was already
interested, roused the British Government. In the end of 1884 an
expedition led by Sir Charles Warren entered Bechuanaland. The
freebooters of the two Republics retired before it, and the districts
they had occupied were erected into a Crown Colony under the name of
British Bechuanaland. In 1895 this territory was annexed to Cape Colony.
In order to prevent the Boers from playing the same game in the country
still farther north, where their aggressions had so far back as 1876 led
Khama, chief of the Bamangwato, to ask for British protection, a British
protectorate was proclaimed (March, 1885) over the whole country as far
as the borders of Matabililand; and