The Story of an African Crisis Author:Fydell Edmund Garrett Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The Story of an African Crisis Chapter I "ON THE MOST FRIENDLY FOOTING" R. JAMESON entered the South African Republic at the head of over 500 mounted me... more »n and a strong force of Artillery . . . at a.time when the relations between the Government of the South African Republic and those of the other States and Colonies of South Africa were on the most friendly footing." So the Select Committee of the Cape House of Assembly declares in the first section of its report on the Raid. In the language of diplomacy all Powers not actually belligerent at the moment are supposed to be on " the most friendly footing," but to any one who remembers the extraordinary state of feeling at the close of 1895, trie tension in the Transvaal and in South Africa at large, the words quoted must carry a more than diplomatic flavour. Mr. Chamberlain's despatch which has served us as Introduction, gives a lucid sketch of the stages by which this ten sion of feeling had been brought about within the Transvaa) itself. He does not say anything as to the Republic's external relations. It may be well to glance back over a few years, taking both together. Perfect peace and serenity cannot be said to have prevailed in the Transvaal at the time of the Raid, but perfect peace and serenity had not prevailed much in the Transvaal in any year since its foundation. Mr. Chamberlain's Raad member who "so far forgot himself as to challenge theUitlanders to fighl for their rights," perhaps did not so much forget himself as he remembered the history of his country. A reader's first impression from that history might lead him to say that when the Transvaal Boers were not being raided themselves they were generally raiding other people, north, south, east or west, and that before the Uitlanders' revolutionary movem...« less