cannot fairly be said that such was the case here. A nation with a popular parliament can only be held to express its opinion to another nation by the voice of its parliament;—and the Volksraad of the Transvaal was altogether opposed to the interference of Great Britain. I will touch upon this matter again presently when alluding to the words of the Commission given to the British Commissioner by the Secretary of State at home;—but I think it must be acknowledged that no other expression of opinion, unless it be a general rising of a people, can be taken as national. In nine cases out of ten petitions ought to be held to mean nothing. They cannot be verified. They show the energy of the instigators of the petition and not of the petitioners. They can be signed by those who have and by those who have not an interest in the matter. The signatures to them can be readily forged. At home in England the right of petitioning is so dear to us from tradition that we still cling to it as one of the bulwarks of our freedom; but there cannot be a statesman, hardly a Member of Parliament among us, who does not feel that pen and ink and agitating management have become so common that petitions are seldom now entitled to much respect.
It may perhaps be said that we have repeatedly done the same thing in India. But a little thinking will show that our Indian annexations have been quite of a different nature. There we have gone on annexing in opposition to the barbarism and weakness of native rule against which our presence in India has, from the first, been a protest. Each annexation has been the result of previous conquest and has
