ment, neither
of the persons deemed most likely to succeed would have thrown obstacles
in the way of reform, nor would any successor have been able to oppose a
resistance as strong as Mr. Kruger's had proved. These considerations
were so obvious that one asks why, with the game in their hands at the
end of a few years, the various groups concerned did not wait quietly
till the ripe fruit fell into their mouths. Different causes have been
assigned for their action. It is said that they believed that the
Transvaal Government was on the eve of entering into secret relations,
in violation of the Convention of 1884, with a European Power, and that
this determined them to strike before any such new complication arose.
Others hint that some of those concerned believed that a revolution must
in any case soon break out in the Transvaal, that a revolution would
turn the country into an independent English Republic, that such a
republic would spread Republican feelings among the British Colonies,
and lead before long to their separation from the mother country. To
prevent this, they were resolved to take control of the movement and
steer it away from those rocks. Without denying that these or other
still more conjectural motives which one hears assigned may have
influenced some of the more long-sighted leaders,--and the Transvaal,
with its vast wealth and growing population, was no doubt becoming the
centre of gravity in South African politics,--I conceive that a more
obvious cause of haste may be found in the impatience of those Uitlander
residents who were daily vexed by grievances for which they could get no
redress, and in the annoyance of the capitalists, who saw their mining
interests languishing and the work of development retarded. When people
have long talked over their wrongs and long planned schemes for throwing
off a detested yoke, they yield at last to their own impatience, feeling
half ashamed that so much talk should not have been followed by action.

Whatever were the motives at work, whatever the ultimate aims of the
leaders, few things could have been more deplorable than what in fact
occurred. Since the annexation of the Transvaal in 1877 nothing has done
so much to rekindle racial hostility in South Africa; nothing has so
much retarded and still impedes the settlement of questions which were
already sufficiently difficult.

I have described in this chapter only such part of the circumstances
which led up to th