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Updated: June 9, 2025
The Uitlander seems to have expected something very different from all that. I do not know why. Nothing different from it was rationally to be expected. A round man cannot be expected to fit a square hole right away. He must have time to modify his shape. The modification had begun in a detail or two, before the Raid, and was making some progress. It has made further progress since.
Whether such a solution would have been to the advantage of British interests in South Africa is quite another question. In more ways than one President Kruger has been a good friend to the empire. So much upon the general question of the reason why the Uitlander should agitate and why the Boer was obdurate.
The extraordinary boom in shares, land, and all kinds of property, which lasted throughout the year, no doubt operated against the maturing of this feeling, but it nevertheless continued to grow. The most dissatisfied section of the Rand was, naturally enough, that one which included the South African Uitlander.
Uitlander newspapers have been suppressed for mere political reasons, without even the allegation that there was incitement to violence or disorder, and it is therefore not unreasonable that the impunity with which the Dutch newspapers continue this campaign month after month should be taken as the measure of the Government's complicity.
Indeed, the Uitlander press agreed that it had become painfully evident that His Honour required a change in order to restore his nervous system.
The Volksstem, the Hollander-Boer organ, in an extremely violent article, described in detail the Slagter's Nek executions, and called upon the burghers to avenge on the persons of the Reformers their murdered countrymen; and it is a fact vouched for by persons by no means friendly to the Uitlander that certain Boers approached President Kruger, intimating to him that the beam had arrived, that it would not be necessary to bother about a trial, but that the four men should be hanged out of hand from the same scaffold which had served for their compatriots.
The incident should have been ignored under the exceptionally trying conditions of the time, but the Government determined to make much of it. Some arrests were effected, and men thrown into prison. Bail was refused; in fact, 'martyrs' were made, and the incident became indelibly stamped on the memory of both Boer and Uitlander.
The detested Hollander from over the water held all the public offices. The government was rank with corruption. The Uitlander had no vote, and must live in the State ten or twelve years before he could get one. Religion was not free. There were no schools where the teaching was in English, yet the great majority of the white population of the State knew no tongue but that.
It is the spirit of the Pretoria Convention which the Uitlander has invoked for many years, only to be told that the spirit is as it may be interpreted from the letter. But it is not so! Will it be suggested that the British Government contemplated such license when they granted the charter of self-government to the Transvaal or that they would have granted it had they foreseen the interpretation?
It grew out of the oppression of the Uitlander the alien by the Transvaal Government animated by Kruger, the President. Although these outsiders, principally English and Americans, outnumbered the Boers three to one, they were deprived of the rights of citizenship. The Reformers organized an armed campaign to capture Kruger and hold him as a hostage until they could obtain their rights.
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