The events by which this forecast was so closely realised are not likely to be effaced from the memory of this generation. Frere had scarcely left the Colony from which he had been recalled by the joint efforts of Mr. Krüger and Lord (then Mr.) Courtney before the former, with his fellow triumvirs, had raised the Vier-kleur upon the still desolate uplands of the Witwatersrand. The attempt to put down by force the Boer revolt of 1880-81 failed. Mr. Gladstone's cabinet recoiled before the prospect of a war in which the Boers might have been supported by their kinsmen in the Free State and the Cape Colony. The retrocession of the Transvaal under the terms of the Pretoria Convention (1881) was followed by further concessions embodied in the London Convention of 1884. It is absolutely established as fact that Mr. Gladstone's Government intended, by certain articles contained in both conventions, to secure to all actual and potential British residents in the Transvaal the enjoyment of all the political rights of citizenship possessed by the Boers. But it is equally certain that the immediate contravention of Article XVI. of the Pretoria Convention, when in 1882 the period of residence necessary to qualify for the franchise was raised from two to five years, was allowed to pass without protest from the Imperial Government. And thus a breach of the Convention, which the discovery of the Witwatersrand gold-fields (1886) and the subsequent establishment of a great British industrial community made a matter of vital importance, was condoned. A few years more and the country which prided itself upon being the home of liberty and of free institutions was confounded by the spectacle of a South Africa of its own making, in which a British majority denied the franchise in a Dutch Republic, contrasted with a Dutch minority dominating and controlling the machinery of responsible government in a British colony. This situation brings us (to use a military phrase) within striking distance of the objective of the present work--the personality and efforts of the man who administered South Africa in the momentous years of the struggle for equal rights for all white men from the Zambesi to Capetown.