246 ENGLISHSAGA

tribes to be made an opportunity to annex the bankrupt Boer
republic of the Transvaal. Shortly afterwards Britain became
involved in a costly war with the Zulus.

In the general election of 1880 the Liberals for the first time
professed sympathy with the Dutch and promised to reverse the
Transvaal annexation. This, however, they subsequently felt
themselves unable to do.1 The Boers, freed by British arms
from the fear of Zulu massacre, rose in defence of their freedom.
The government, torn between its aversion to imperial con-
quest and its desire to pursue its own native policy in the
former Boer territories, failed to give its commander-in-
chief sufficient support. On February ayth, 1881, Sir George
Colley with a small force was cut to pieces by the Boer farmers
at Majuba. Gladstone, with great moral courage but at a serious
sacrifice of prestige, thereupon agreed to grant virtual inde-
pendence to the Transvaal. The British at the Cape were left
smarting under a sense of humiliation and injured patriotism.
The Dutch both in the Boer republic and the Cape Colony and
Natal were left with an even more dangerous contempt for the
courage and tenacity of the British.

.* • » ••••

The difficulty of ruling an empire while disbelieving in the
virtues of imperial rule involved the Liberals in difficulties
nearer home and for which they were not to blame. Ireland
was the damnosa hereditas of British politics. Deep in the-Irish
heart, whether in Ireland itself or in England, America or the
Colonies, survived the memory of ancient and terrible wrongs.2
No kindly intentions or benevolent acts of English Liberals
could wipe out this all too persistent past. The pig-nosed paddies
in their high hats, tight breeches and ragged tail-coats who
ambushed evicting landlords and .chased their agents with
shillelaghs and shot-guns across the stony fields of Kerry and

1 *If Cyprus and the Transvaal," Gladstone-had declared during the election, "were
as valuable as they are valueless, I would repudiate them because they are obtained
by means dishonourable to -the character of the country.1* After the election, he
explained that he meant the -word "repudiate" in the sense of dislike.

1 Sir James Sexton, whose father was evicted from the Vale of Avoca in the 'forties
by an absentee landlord and whose maternal grandparents had been driven out of
Ireland into industrial Lancashire by the religious and political persecutions that
followed the Rebellion of 1798 wrote in his autobiography (17-18): "The story of
those days of terror was handed on to the children or all who endured their agony;
it ^spread all over the world, and engendered in the mind of every Irishman and
Irishwoman who heard it hatred—bitter and boundless hatred—of everything connect-
ed with Britain and the British. That, so far as my mind was concerned, was
my principal political and spiritual inheritance.*