MR. GLA.DSTONE AND THE TRANSVAAL.
[To TILE EDITOR Or THE "SPECTATOR."] SIR,—I should wish to corroborate your view on the Glad- stone policy of the retrocession of the Transvaal as expressed in a note to a letter by "X." in the Spectator of Septem- ber 16th, and may I quote from my own work, "Our South African Empire," written in 1884 and published in 1885? I had lived continuously in South Africa from 1876-83, and was in a position to gauge local and Colonial opinion. Here are the words of General Joubert at Mount Prospect as given to the special correspondent of the Cape Argus, March 13th, 1881':—" We have believed in the righteousness of the British Government. We sent a deputation to the Queen of England to lay our case clearly before her, but all to no purpose. I want to know, and the people of England will also like to know, why Mr. Glad- stone, the Prime Minister of England, has not carried out his promise to return the Transvaal to its rightful owners because he considers the annexation a disgraceful act. When we read these words we relied upon the great English states- man doing us justice. He has not done so. We desire to know why." In answer to this question by General Joubert, the Cape Argus correspondent suggested that perhaps Mr. Gladstone's attention had been kept so engrossed in the East and Ireland that the Transvaal difficulty had been allowed to stand over. To this General Joubert answered that "he could not see that this was probable, as a telegram to Lanyon would have been sufficient." It must be remembered that at Peebles, April 1st, 1880, Mr. Gladstone was reported to have said that if the recent acquisitions of the Govern- ment (alluding to the Transvaal and Cyprus) were as valuable as they were valueless, he would repudiate them because they were obtained by means dishonourable to the character of our country. This was Mr. Gladstone out of office; bat listen to him when once installed in office. In the Speech from the Throne (January, 1881), where we might have looked for some intimation of that righteous spirit of repudiating dishonourable transactions entered into by an evil Government, the following paragraph occurs :—" A rising in the Transvaal has recently imposed upon me the duty of taking military measures with a view to the prompt vindica- tion of my authority, and has of necessity set aside for the time every plan for securing to the European settlers that full control over their own local affairs, without prejudice to the interests of the natives, which I have been desirous to confer." Then followed our defeats, and after that the awakening of the sense of bloodguiltiness. No, I fear that the Gladstone retrocession of the Transvaal was, to put it mildly, a sacrifice to political expediency. We residents in South Africa were heartily ashamed of it all, and I ventured to describe some of our feelings in my book on South Africa
(Vol. II., pp. 37-41).—I am, Sir, &C., WILLIAM GRES WELL.
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