Such a discovery produced the inevitable effect.  A great number of adventurers flocked into the country, some desirable and some very much the reverse.  There were circumstances, however, which kept away the rowdy and desperado element who usually make for a newly opened goldfield.  It was not a class of mining which encouraged the individual adventurer.  There were none of those nuggets which gleamed through the mud of the dollies at Ballarat, or recompensed the forty-niners in California for all their travels and their toils.  It was a field for elaborate machinery, which could only be provided by capital.  Managers, engineers, miners, technical experts, and the tradesmen and middlemen who live upon them, these were the Uitlanders, drawn from all the races under the sun, but with the Anglo-Celtic vastly predominant.  The best engineers were American, the best miners were Cornish, the best managers were English, the money to run the mines was largely subscribed in England.  As time went on, however, the German and French interests became more extensive, until their joint holdings are now probably as heavy as those of the British.  Soon the population of the mining centres became greater than that of the whole Boer community, and consisted mainly of men in the prime of life—­men, too, of exceptional intelligence and energy.

The situation was an extraordinary one.  I have already attempted to bring the problem home to an American by suggesting that the Dutch of New York had trekked west and founded an anti-American and highly unprogressive State.  To carry out the analogy we will now suppose that that State was California, that the gold of that State attracted a large inrush of American citizens, who came to outnumber the original inhabitants, that these citizens were heavily taxed and badly used, and that they deafened Washington with their outcry about their injuries.  That would be a fair parallel to the relations between the Transvaal, the Uitlanders, and the British Government.

That these Uitlanders had very real and pressing grievances no one could possibly deny.  To recount them all would be a formidable task, for their whole lives were darkened by injustice.  There was not a wrong which had driven the Boer from Cape Colony which he did not now practise himself upon others—­and a wrong may be excusable in 1885 which is monstrous in 1895.  The primitive virtue which had characterised the farmers broke down in the face of temptation.  The country Boers were little affected, some of them not at all, but the Pretoria Government became a most corrupt oligarchy, venal and incompetent to the last degree.  Officials and imported Hollanders handled the stream of gold which came in from the mines, while the unfortunate Uitlander who paid nine-tenths of the taxation was fleeced at every turn, and met with laughter and taunts when he endeavoured to win the franchise by which he might peaceably set right the wrongs from which he suffered.  He was not an unreasonable person.  On the contrary, he was patient to the verge of meekness, as capital is likely to be when it is surrounded by rifles.  But his situation was intolerable, and after successive attempts at peaceful agitation, and numerous humble petitions to the Volksraad, he began at last to realise that he would never obtain redress unless he could find some way of winning it for himself.