in the ethics of States—of the 'small nation,' corrupt and inefficient in itself, but with no ambition beyond the preservation of its nationality, and no desire except to be left alone. When the establishment of the great gold industry introduced a new industrial element, mainly British, into their population, the Boer Government had no hesitation in admitting it. The primitive, pastoral ideal of their voortrekker fathers gave way at once to a new ideal of national wealth and importance, to be acquired at the expense of these Uitlanders. So far as its internal administration went, the downfall of the Republican Government was due, not to its exclusion of the foreigner, but to its failure to absorb him.
A second and far more serious consideration is that the whole of South Africa was intimately concerned in the settlement of the Uitlanders' grievances. It was never a purely Transvaal affair. 'South Africa,' wrote Lord Milner before the war, 'can never prosper under two absolutely conflicting social and political systems—perfect equality for Dutch and British in the Dutch Colonies side by side with permanent subjection of British to Dutch in one of the Republics.' The success, in fact, of the Transvaal Government in flouting British prestige had attracted to them all the malcontents and waverers in our own Colonies. A definite anti-British ideal had taken shape—the creation of an independent Dutch South Africa, with its focus at Pretoria and its limits at the sea. Everywhere, from the Cape Peninsula to the Limpopo, the Boer star was in the ascendant. British-born citizens of Cape Colony were daily making obeisance before their Dutch fellow-subjects, and the latter looked to Pretoria for their political guidance. It is hardly too much to say that in the years immediately preceding the war the paramount Power in South Africa was no longer the British Empire, but President Kruger.
Finally—this is the third and most serious consideration of all—far more was at stake in the Boer War even
