“I, therefore, made no claims or demand whatever for land. I invited Cetshwayo to give me his views regarding a boundary, when I informed him from Pretoria that I should visit Utrecht on the tour I then contemplated making. When I met the Zulu prime minister and the indunas on the 18th October last” (six weeks before he discovered, in conversation with some Boers, the “evidence incontrovertible, overwhelming, and clear”), “on the Blood River, I was fully prepared, if it should be insisted on by the Zulus, as I then thought it might justly be, to give up a tract of country which had from thirteen to sixteen years been occupied by Transvaal farmers, and to whose farms title-deeds had been issued by the late Government; and I contemplated making compensation to those farmers in some way or another for their loss. I intended, however, first to offer to purchase at a fair price from the Zulu king all his claims to land which had for so many years been occupied and built upon by the subjects of the Transvaal, to whom the Government of the country was distinctly liable.”[65] Sir T. Shepstone, when he met the Zulu indunas at the Blood River, was prepared to abandon the line of 1861 (claimed by the Boers), for that of the Blood River and the Old Hunting Road (“if it should be insisted on by the Zulus,” as he “then thought it might justly be”), which, in point of fact, would have satisfied neither party; but he does not say by what right he proposed to stop short of the old line of 1856-7—viz. the Blood River—and insist upon the “Old Hunting Road.” If the half-concession were just, so was the whole—or neither. To these half-measures, however, the Zulus would not submit, and the conference failed of its object. “Fortunately, therefore, for the interests of the Transvaal,” says Sir T. Shepstone, “I was prevented by the conduct of the Zulus themselves from surrendering to them at that meeting what my information on the subject then had led me to think was after all due to them, and this I was prepared to do at any sacrifice to the Transvaal, seeing, as it then appeared to me, that justice to the Zulus demanded it.” In spite, however, of the concession to the Boers, made in Sir T. Shepstone’s altered opinion on the border question, they were by no means reconciled to the loss of their independence, although Captain Clarke says (C. 2316, p. 28), in speaking of the Boers in Lydenburg district, “they, in the majority of cases, would forget fancied wrongs if they thought they had security for their lives and property, education for their children, and good roads for the transport of their produce.”[66] The following “agreement signed by a large number of farmers at the meeting held at Wonderfontein,” and translated from a Dutch newspaper, the _Zuid Afrikaan_, published at Capetown on the 15th February (C. 2316, p. 1), gives a different impression of the state of feeling amongst the Boers: