In the history of the next thirty years we see not a vacillating, but rather a tentative policy, behind which was always an inflexible purpose to establish British rule in South Africa, peaceably, if possible, or by force, if compelled. The British Government was trying to bring to terms the most intractable race it had ever dealt with in all its colonizing experience. The thing which embarrassed the English was that flaw in their claim; and the trouble with {179} the Boers was that they were archaic in their ideals, and obstructive to all policies which belonged to a modern civilization. They had stopped growing when they left Holland. The emancipation and the philanthropies forced upon them by a people who were stealing their land, exasperated them, and outraged their sense of justice; and when the English punished them for cruelties to the native savages, by executing four Boers, vitriol was poured upon an open wound, and peace was forever impossible. In 1852 England, in placating mood, yielded the local control of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal Republic. But in less than five years the Boers had thrown away their opportunity by strife and discord among themselves, and had separated into four small hostile Republics, which Paul Stephanus Kruger, then President of the Transvaal, was vainly striving to bring together. The only time they were not at war with each other was when they were all fighting the natives, with whom they never established friendly relations. Perhaps it {180} is asking too much of a people so many times emptied from one region into another, to have established internal conditions, economic and political, such as belong to ordinary civilized states. But the condition of disorder had become such that the British Government believed, or at least claimed to believe, that as a measure of safety to their own Colonies, the Transvaal should be annexed to the Colony at the Cape. The people were cautiously approached upon this subject, and even some of the leaders among the burghers advocated the measure as the best, and, indeed, only thing possible in the present state of demoralization. So, in 1877, the annexation was effected. The Transvaal Republic was taken under the sovereignty of Queen Victoria. By a treaty drawn up in 1881, it was declared to be a self-governing, although not an independent State. In all its foreign relations it was subject to the Suzerainty of Her Majesty Queen Victoria. In other words, it was a vassal State. {181}