d died when chased out of
Kabul by the British in 1878; while his indunas and the bulk of the
Matabili people submitted with little further resistance. Matabililand
was now occupied by the Company, which shortly afterwards took
possession of the northern part of its sphere of operations by running a
telegraph wire across the Zambesi and by placing officers on the shore
of Lake Tanganyika. In March, 1896, the Matabili and some of the Mashona
chiefs revolted, but after five months' fighting, in which many lives
were lost, peace was restored, and the subsequent construction of two
railways into the heart of the country of these tribes has given a
great, if not complete, security against a renewal of like troubles.[34]

By the establishment of the British South Africa Company to the north of
the Transvaal that State had now become inclosed in British territory on
every side except the east; nor could it advance to Delagoa Bay, because
Portugal was bound by the Arbitration Treaty of 1872 to allow Great
Britain a right of pre-emption over her territory there. Meantime new
forces had begun to work within the Republic. Between 1867 and 1872 gold
had been found in several places on the eastern side of the country, but
in quantities so small that no one attached much importance to the
discovery. After 1882, however, it began to be pretty largely worked. In
1885 the conglomerate or _banket_ beds of the Witwatersrand were
discovered,[35] and the influx of strangers, which had been considerable
from 1882 onward, increased immensely, till in 1895 the number of recent
immigrants, most of whom were adult males, had risen to a number
(roughly estimated at 100,000) largely exceeding that of the whole Boer
population. Although the first result of the working of the gold mines
and the growth of the towns had been to swell the revenues of the
previously impecunious Republic, President Kruger and the Boers
generally were alarmed at seeing a tide of aliens from the British
colonies and Europe and the United States, most of them British
subjects, and nearly all speaking English, rise up around and threaten
to submerge them. They proceeded to defend themselves by restricting the
electoral franchise, which had theretofore been easily acquirable by
immigrants. Laws were passed which, by excluding the newcomers, kept the
native Boer element in a safe majority; and even when in 1890 a
concession was made by the creation of a second Legislative Chamb