MR GLADSTONE ON THE TRANSVAAL QUESTION.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 2484, 7 March 1881, Page 4

MR GLADSTONE ON THE TRANSVAAL QUESTION.

It may bo profitable at this moment to recall the precise language in which Mr Gladstone spoke of that part of his predecessor’s policy of which the Boers, thinking no donbt to render him a service, are just now attempting the “ reversal ” for themselves. In his first Midlothian speech, on November 25; IS7O, Mr Gladstone is thus reported in his own authorised edition : —“lhey (the Conservatives) have annexed in Africa the Transvaal territory, inhabited by a free European Christian republican community, which the} r have thought proper to bring within the limits of a monarchy, although out of 8.000 persons in that Republic qualified to vote on the subject we are told, and I have never seen the statement officially contradicted, that 6,500 protested against it. These are the circumstances under which we undertake to transform Ecpublicaus into subjects of a monarchy.” On the next day Mr Gladstone returned to the chim*®- — J k u.. t .. is no strength to 1.0 «dded to your country by governing the Transvaal.” A week later he declared that the Annexation of the Transvaal was the invasion of a free people. And lastly, on March 18, when the elections were already beginning to turn, against the Conservatives, and his own return to office was probable, he spoke as follows:—“ He (Lord Beaconslield) omitted Africa, and did not say we (the 'Radicals) had created any difficulties for him there. But there he has contrived, without so far as I am able to judge, the smallest necessity or excuse, to spend L 5,000,000 of your money in invading u people (the Zulus) who had done him no wrong ; and now he is obliged to spend more of your money in establishing the supremacy of the Queen over a community Protestant in religion, Hollanders inoiigin, vigorous obstinate, and tenacious in character even as wo ourselves—namely the Dutchmen of the Transvaal.’ It is true that Mr Grant Duff afur Aar. s attempted in Parliament to explain away the significance of Mr Gladstone’s remark about the G,500 protests from 8,000 persons .in tb% Transvaal ; and true to that attempts have been made in official despatches to South Africa to warn people there against supposing that Mr Gladstone meant what he said in, “the beat of an election contest,” but we have no right to condemn the Boers very severely if they preferred to act upon the platform speeches and neglect the Ministerial dcclaimers.—“ St- James’s Budget.”