Immigration Wanted to Counterbalance Boer Influence.

“You think Mr Rhodes has perhaps overlooked the advantage of putting forward these considerations?”

“Not only Mr Rhodes, but all the politicians of the Cape Colony and Natal. The best work the British Government ever did was in sending those five thousand English people to South-East Africa in the early part of this century. The experiment unfortunately has never been repeated. There is a different kind of population going out now. When they go to the Cape, they begin to spread themselves over every part of South Africa as far as Salisbury. It seems to me that there ought to be three or four hundred families going out every week to settle in new homes. There is a great political question in the background, and if Englishmen are not awake to it they must be instructed. The Boers, not alluding to any political party such as the Afrikander Bond, or the Krugerites, or the Republicans of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, but judging by their general conduct and the tone of their public utterances, seem to have determined to keep Englishmen out of South Africa in order to maintain the balance of power in their own favour. Their whole action tends to that. Supposing the Cape Colony had a grievance against the British Empire, and chose to form a Republic of its own, it would be a Boer Republic, because the Boers are more numerous than the English. It would be an addition to the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. Some great absorbing question might arise at any time; yet no one seems to have done anything to prepare for such a contingency, or to maintain the balance of power in favour of the English. The Dutch would naturally take sides with one another, as they did in the Jameson raid affair. Then all the Dutch population veered round in favour of the Transvaal, whereas before that, as in the Drifts question, the Cape Dutch rather thought that the Transvaal was wrong. The unjustifiable attack upon the Transvaal, so unexpected, like a bolt from the blue, gave the Dutch an impression that the British Government were at the back of the raiders, or if not the British Government, at least the British nation. They said to themselves, ‘the British people are ever hostile to us, and are determined to have this country English, and under the thumb of the British Government. We refuse to have the British Government vex us now as it has done in the past. They drove the Transvaal Dutch from the Cape Colony; and they may drive us away if we are not united in opposing this constant British hostility or meddlesomeness with our peculiar habits, principles, and ideas.’”

“It is perhaps more correct to say that the Dutch retired before the advance of the English rather than that the English drove them away by persecution.”