The career of the Transvaal Republic was much less successful in its early days. The territory was vaster, in many places not so healthy; and the native population, especially in the eastern districts[96], was turbulent, and strongly averse to accepting Boer rule. The existence of gold, though occasionally hinted at by unheeded pioneers, was unknown to the world at large, and absolutely ignored by the Boers; there was little or no trade, and the European population was scanty. By 1877 the condition of this state had become so hopeless, with a bankrupt treasury and the menace of a Zulu invasion, that it was annexed, somewhat abruptly, by the Imperial representative, Sir Theophilus Shepstone. No doubt this step was consonant with the enlightened policy then favoured by the Imperial Government and subsequently by Sir Bartle Frere, who was to become Governor of the Cape during the latter part of the late Earl Carnarvon’s tenancy of the Colonial Office. Lord Carnarvon himself was resolutely intent on carrying out in Africa south of the Zambezi a scheme of federation similar to that which had in 1866 consolidated the Dominion of Canada. But the actual method by which the Transvaal was taken over was not a well considered one; and unhappily it was followed by the appointment of an officer to rule over that country whose demeanour was wholly unsympathetic to the Boer nature. At the end of 1880 the Boers revolted. After a short military campaign, conspicuous for its utter lack of generalship on the part of the English, and for the disastrous defeats inflicted on our forces by the Boers at Lang’s Nek and Majuba Hill, the British Government of the day (which a few months before had absolutely refused the Boers’ appeal for the reversal of the annexation) concluded a hurried armistice, and gave back (1881) its independence to the Transvaal, subject to a vague suzerainty on the part of the British Crown, and later on to a British veto which might be exercised on treaties with foreign powers. The best plea that can be urged on behalf of this surrender, which subsequent British Governments have had such cause to regret, was the belief that a stern prosecution of the war, and the eventual Boer defeat, would lead to the uprising of the Dutch settlers in Cape Colony and the intervention of the Orange Free State. It is doubtful whether there was much foundation for this fear, or whether it would not have been much easier at that time to settle British supremacy once and for all over all Africa south of the Zambezi, even if it led to some degree of internecine fighting; the more so as there would have been no danger of European intervention at that date. But the chance was let slip, and the Boers acquired an independence the more justly won