repudiated the Orange Free State in 1854, believing that there was then a lack of patience at the Colonial Office and that we should have been better advised had we borne longer with the ways of the Dutch, I must still acknowledge here that they were a provoking people, and one hard to manage. Omitting small details and some few individual instances of misrule, I feel that when the Dutch complained of us they complained of what was good in our ways and not of what was evil. It was with this conviction that we repudiated both the Transvaal and the other younger but more stable Republic. Good excuses can be made for what we did,—not the worst of which is the fact that a people whom we desired to rule themselves, have ruled themselves well. But we did repudiate them, and I do not know with what face we can ask them to return to us. If the offer came from them of course we could assent; but that offer will hardly be made.
We could certainly annex the Republic by force,—as we have done the Transvaal. If we were to send a High Commissioner to Bloemfontein with thirty policemen and an order that the country should be given up to us, I do not know that President Brand and the Volksraad could do better than comply,—with such loudest remonstrance as they might make. "The Republic cannot fight Great Britain," President Brand might say, as President Burgers said when he apologised for the easy surrender of his Republic. But there are things which a nation can not do and hold up its head, and this would be one of them. There could be no excuse for such spoliation. It is not easy to justify what we
