THE KAISER AND THE TRANSVAAL.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] SIR,—May not the present attitude of the Kaiser towards us in South Africa be very simply explained ? Three years ago, the Jameson Raid, coming like a bolt from the blue, had all the appearances of a wanton aggression, and at the same time the Transvaal Government was effectively enabled to adopt the role of the Injured Innocent. It was under such circumstances that the famous telegram to President Kruger was sent, nor can it really be wondered at. Now, however, the aggression has come from the other side ; now it is the Orange Free State that, unprovoked, has wantonly joined bands with the Transvaal, not to repel attack, but in order to invade Natal and drive the English into the sea. The two Dutch Republics' have made common cause, and have announced their object to the world by the proclamation annexing British Bechuanaland to the Transvaal, and Kim- berley and part of the Cape to the Free State. These are things that well may give the Kaiser pause. If the confederate. Boer armies win the day, and the English are thrust out of South Africa, there can be only one result,—the rise there of a powerful, turbulent, and ambitious Republic of Dutch burghers, whose territory would embrace the whole of South Africa up to the Zambesi, with the sole exception of Delagoa Bay and German South - West Africa. But this means that for nearly a thousand miles the new- born Atrikander Republio would find itself cut off from
the Atlantic along its western border by the colonial possessions of a European Power. How long would that situation last P It may be argued that the greater part of that particular German colony is untempting; is, in the phrase once used by Lord Salisbury of another part of Africa, "rather light land "; yet it is not so poor but it would cut up into farms by no means undesirable in Boer eyes. Awl if enterprising Boer farmers " trekked " into it, as they once did into Stellaland and tried to do into Rhodesia, is it likely that President Kruger (or his successor) would "damp the trek"? Hardly. Manifest destiny would be all on the side of the Boers. The new Republic within a few years could probably put one hundred thousand men in the field, while the German army needed to defend the colony would be six thousand miles from its base. Is that a position that the Kaiser is likely to contemplate with equanimity ? I do not for a moment undervalue the tremendous power of the mailed fist, but to fight against one hundred thousand men on their own ground at the other side of the world is no child's play. The alternatives before him would be either gracefully to surrender a German colony without a struggle, or to have it torn from him violently after a desperate conflict. However much as a Teuton the German Emperor may be inclined to sympathise with the Boers, as a statesman he must know that their victory in the present war would inevitably prove in the end to be a disaster for Germany.—I am, Sir, &c., R. B. T.
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