their farms; and with the same idea, when it looked as if the chief Free Staters might stand aloof from the majority in favour of peace, he and General J. H. De La Rey persuaded the irreconcilable Free State leader, Christian De Wet, to bring in his people too for the sake of national unity.
‘We are good friends now,’ said Kitchener on 31 May 1902, as he shook hands with the general whom he had learned to respect as a formidable and straight antagonist. Kitchener’s countrymen very soon came to the same opinion. Botha’s great purpose for the remainder of his life was doubtless to ‘save his nation’; but by that he meant not merely to restore its material prosperity and to preserve its national consciousness, but also to observe faithfully the troth plighted at Vereeniging, when it agreed to become a member of the British Empire. Nothing confirmed this resolution of Botha so much as his kindly and informal reception by King Edward (17 August 1902), when he went over to England to plead for the Boer orphans and widows. Botha then acquired a respect and devotion to the king who showed such courtesy to a recent foe, and also to the nation whom this king represented. But this mission, undertaken with De Wet and De La Rey, failed in its principal object of obtaining through charity large funds for his country’s needs. On his return to South Africa he abandoned his Vryheid farm, Waterval, which had been destroyed during the war, and bought another at Rusthof, near Standerton; but he spent most of his time in his house at Pretoria, where he was accessible at all hours to his people, listening to their complaints and giving them advice and more material help for the restoration of their farm life. His attitude towards Crown Colony government was one of reserve: he consistently refused to give any formal advice or accept a seat on the legislative council, on the ground that the imperial government should take full responsibility for its actions; on the other hand he did not stay apart in sullen resentment. When Mr. Joseph Chamberlain [q.v.] came out, he met him socially and was never backward in making representations to him or to Lord Milner on what he considered grievances of his countrymen (principally the question of Dutch teaching in the schools), and on the question of assistance to the returned burghers. In January 1905, on the eve of the promulgation of the Lyttelton constitution, with other leading Boers he founded ‘Het Volk’, an organization intended to keep up the national feeling of the Boers and to secure their effective co-operation. In this organization he brought together for the first time the ‘hands up’ and ‘bitter end’ sections of his countrymen. At the inaugural meeting Botha once more emphasized the fact that the flag question had been irrevocably settled, but he demanded in return enough trust from the imperial government to give them responsible government at once.
Within two years this had been granted by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s government (31 July 1906), and Botha found himself not only with a majority in the new parliament but called upon to form a ministry under the British Crown. One of his first actions was a striking illustration of the attitude he intended to adopt towards the mother-country. In 1907 on behalf of the Transvaal he presented to Queen Alexandra the Cullinan diamond, the largest hitherto found, to be incorporated in the crown jewels. In domestic politics also he showed his determination to govern not merely as the leader of the Boers but as the responsible minister for both the white races in the Transvaal. Though he sent home the Chinese labourers on the Rand, whose importation he had opposed from the outset, he repatriated them gradually, so as to cause as little disorganization as possible in the industry, and helped to secure a more plentiful supply of native labour. But his main achievement during his ministry was to persuade the Transvaal to go whole-heartedly into the movement for closer union. At the Union Convention of 1908-1909 he naturally headed the Transvaal delegation, which was far better equipped with information and more decided on its policy than any of the other three. In this Convention the strength of the combination of Botha with his chief lieutenant, General Johannes Smuts, first showed its force in South African politics. To this remarkable combination Smuts contributed intellectual range, ingenuity of resource, suppleness of demeanour, and considerable sympathy with the English no less than the Boer mind; Botha for his part was no scholar and relied much on the knowledge of ‘Jan’, as he called the younger man; many of the problems of civil administration with which he had to deal were strange to him at the outset; and, though he could speak English in private talk, he nearly always made his public speeches in Dutch; on the other hand, he had a
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