TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE TRANSVAAL SETTLEMENT.
THE settlement with the Boers will do, if it works well, and that is about all wo care to say for it. It is not a per- fect settlement, but we do not see how a better could have been obtained. The briefest and clearest account of it is to say that henceforth the Transvaal Republic will occupy the position of a Protected Indian State, its rulers acknowledging Great Britain as the Paramount Power, surrendering the management of foreign policy, and admitting a Resident at the capital, with certain rights of advice or veto,—to be defined by a Commission, consisting of Sir Hercules Robinson, Sir Evelyn Wood, and Chief Justice Villiers—whenever the local Government legislates for natives, or in any way oppresses them. A considerable tract of country will be ceded on the eastward, the tract, we imagine, next to Natal, and marked farther on by the long range of hills parallel with the coast ; and the Boers, pending the decisions of the Commission, will abandon Laing's Neck, and disperse to their own homes. The British troops now in the Transvaal will remain there, but no more soldiers will advance into the protected State until the final settlement
of all disputes. It is added informally, on independent authority, that a complete amnesty will be granted on both sides to all persons, except the murderers of Captain Elliot.
There is nothing whatever in these terms dishonourable to the British Flag. It was impossible, with due regard either to justice or to public feeling in this country, to treat the Boers as rebels, and very difficult to treat them as the inhabitants of a foreign and independent country ; and the course adopted, to treat them as in India we treat protected Native States which have risen against us, was an expedient compromise quite in harmony with British history and usages. We always, when we do not simply annex, allow the rulers of such a State, on their demanding peace, withdrawing their troops, and acknow- ledging the Paramount Power, to retain complete internal self-government, to keep their right of bearing arms, and to be dealt with through a Resident, that is, through an Ambassador invested with a few definite prerogatives and many very indefinite powers, which vary with all manner of circum- stances. We have made a hundred such treaties. We hold at this moment precisely that relation to the " Nizara's Dominions," and the Government knows perfectly well how to work such arrangements so as to secure all the political advantages it wants, without undertaking the burden of local administration. There is nothing either disgraceful or unusual in the arrangement, which, in fact, was the precise one made after the first Sikh war, when, as now, the British 'arms had not gained what could be considered a complete victory. As to the argument that we should have stormed Laing's Neck, that is a mere argument for slaughter. Laing's Neck is abandoned and the Boers disperse, and if wo had fought for five years, and wasted all British strength in a campaign which might easily have developed into a war for the reconquest of South Africa, that is all "the military success" we could have secured. The Boers would not have liked us a bit the better for beating them. We could not have disarmed them without surrendering them to the natives, and we could not have governed them in their daily lives without sacrifices which the country would not have consented to endure for any length of time. Politically, we get all wo want, and it is far better to get it without more useless sacrifice of life. If we had won a dozen skirmishes, we should only have induced the Boers to submit, and they are submitting now. Moreover, we secure by these terms the natives outside Boer authority for whom we are responsible. The rulers of the Transvaal cannot under the Treaty invade the Zulus, or bring on a war with the great Matabele tribe on the north, or oppress Secocoeni's people, or take any step involving them with other native tribes. All that is covered by the clause reserving foreign policy abso- lutely to the Crown. That is a clause which can be enforced, and will be enforced, for any open violation of it will be a declaration of war. For ourselves and our dependent allies, the settlement will do well enough, and in a few years, when the Boors are dependent upon our ports—Dolagoa in particular —for supplies, will probably not be difficult to work, while a Confederation of South Africa could work it with ease.
The weak point in the settlement is the position of the natives within the range of the direct internal authority of the Beers. What is to become of them l The three Commis-
sioners, all men who may be trusted, are to arrange a scheme for their protection ; but any scheme must depend for its execu- tion upon the conduct of the Resident, and we have our doubts.
about that. In an Indian State the Resident rather likes inter- fering, he has irresistible force in the distance behind him, and if he says firmly, as has been said once or twice about slavery and infanticide and suttee, and a few other kindred practices, that they must and shall be put down, they are either put down, or• so discouraged that they rapidly die out. Will the Resident at. Heidelberg be willing to interfere in this style with the Boers, to " take up " cases of inhumanity, and to drive the Colonial Office frantic by constant demands for a support which they will not be heartily willing to afford ? Will he not rather feel convinced that his especial function is to avoid stirring the cesspools, and to let sleeping dogs lie ? We doubt his• activity very much, more especially as the oppression wilL usually take the form not of laws against natives, but. of passive refusals to do them justice. As we under- stand the conflicting statements on the subject, the Boers. do not recognise slavery, and they are about to sur render their right to make hostile expeditions in order to seize apprentices, but they compel natives to work against their will by physical force. If the natives resist, they are shot down as insurgents ; and if they appeal to the magistrates, the•
magistrates decline to interfere. How is the Resident, under. any scheme, however just or philanthropic, to prevent that ? He does not appoint the magistrates. He may, no doubt, gradu- ally acquire influence with the Boer leaders, some of whom at least, like President Brand, are reasonable persons ; he may have• a good many favours to grant in the financial way, and he may,. as Natal grows, and commerce and communication become- important, have an amazing power of worry. He may, too,. bo able to shelter men specially oppressed, and to enable them to reach their kinsfolk in the coded district, where, we trust,. most natives will be located, or even to emigrate into our own. territory. Still, we have only to read the evidence from Georgia. to see how completely a dominant and armed caste, filling all magistracies and all offices, can enforce its will by violence, and we cannot but fear that the lot of the Transvaal natives. will not be a happy one under the Protectorate. We should have greatly preferred the grant of self-government to the• Boers as the voting class of a free colony, for then the Execu- tive, even if wholly Boer, would have been responsible to Parliament and the Colonial Office, which in its abhorrence of slavery is as honest as the Anti-slavery Society. Still, we are• bound to admit that in our own South-African colonies it is most difficult to enforce justice, we cannot forget that in Griqualand a native was forbidden by law to possess a diamond, and we are• not satisfied with the explanations about apprenticing in Natal. Frightful statements are made on that point, and though they may be exaggerated, there must be much oppression of a bad kind. The Boers, if carefully watched and made aware that the• Paramount Power really cares about the subject, may not be• worse than our own people ; and, after all, could we have done• more ? The British Government has to look facts in the• face, and recognise that it has other oppressions to put down besides those in South Africa. If we had gone on fighting, what should we have accomplished for humanity ? After a long and desperate campaign, in which the Free State would have joined, and during which we should have been com- paratively powerless in Europe, we should have subjugated the Boers, and they would have " trekked," to re-establish their own. mode of government between the Limpopo and the Zambesi.. Neither the world nor Africa would have gained anything by that, and we might have lost very greatly, by the diminution• of British influence in every other direction. The Govern- ment, therefore, we concede, having all the facts before them,• including, it may be, secret arrangements about native tern- tory of which we know nothing, have probably decided rightly in making of the Transvaal a Protected State ; but we make the concession without heartiness, and in the teeth of a strong feeling that it would have been a nobler course to offer the Boers complete self-government as a Colony, and if they refused that, to take up the burden wearily again. War for prestige is utterly bad, but war to preserve the rights of men who have become our subjects is, at all events, not immoral. We feel keenly for the weariness of the overladen Titan ; but is not some of the weariness due to relaxation of fibre which will not be reatrung by concessions, partly to humane feeling, and partly to a yell real but not wholly defensible political expediency ? If the natives of the Transvaal now rise in arms and beat the Boers, we shall not feel wholly noble in our own eyes.
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