With the conflicts which arose between the British South African Company and the Portuguese—complicated by alliances with the natives, with the wars which arose therefrom, and with the final adjustments and treaties that followed—we have nothing to do in these pages. The one fact that is of interest to us in closing this chapter of conflict in statecraft is that at last the British succeeded in isolating the Africanders from the sea, and in throwing around them a perfect cordon of British territories and pre-emptions. By chartering the British South African Company to the north of the Transvaal the last link in the chain that inclosed the two Africander republics was completed. For there had been left no possibility of advance toward the sea eastward on the part of the Transvaal Republic—in the Arbitration Treaty of 1872 Great Britain had obtained pre-emption rights over the Portuguese colonial possessions. CHAPTER XIII. CAUSES OF THE AFRICANDERS’ SECOND WAR OF INDEPENDENCE. In one sense the causes of the Second War of Independence, like those of the first, were as remote as the British seizure of Cape Colony in 1795, and as the years between 1814 and 1836, which saw the accumulation of grievances that led to the “Great Trek.” Seeds of dislike to the English were then sown in the Africander mind which have never ceased to propagate themselves—an ominous heredity—from father to son through all the intervening generations. The immediate causes of that war were of a more recent date. Tracing backward, the war was brought about by the alleged grievances of a multitude of foreigners—vastly outnumbering the citizens—who, for their own purposes, had entered the territory of the South African Republic within a single decade; these foreigners went there in the pursuit of wealth; the wealth that enticed them there was in the rich gold deposits of the Witwatersrand district of the Transvaal. If the gold had not been there, or had not been discovered, the excess of foreigners would not have pressed into the country; if the foreigners had not flocked into it in great excess of numbers over the citizens, there would have been no alleged grievances to redress, and therefore no war, unless one or both of the parties to it had predetermined to bring about a conflict at this time and found some other pretext.