financial condition of the country, as I have said, at the time of the
annexation, was one of utter bankruptcy. "After three years of British
rule, however, the total revenue receipts for the first quarter of 1879
and 1880 amounted to £22,773 and £47,982 respectively. That is to say,
that, during the last year of British rule, the revenue of the country
more than doubled itself, and amounted to about £160,000 a year, taking
the quarterly returns at the low average of £40,000."[2] Trade, also,
which in April, 1877, was completely paralysed, had increased
enormously. In the middle of 1879, the committee of the Transvaal
Chamber of Commerce pointed out that the trade of the country had in two
years risen to the sum of two millions sterling per annum. They also
pointed out that more than half the land-tax was paid by Englishmen and
other Europeans.

In 1881, the Transvaal (under Mr. Gladstone's administration) was
liberated from British control. It was given back to its own leaders,
under certain conditions, agreed to and solemnly signed by the
President. These are the much-discussed conditions of the Convention of
1881, one of these conditions being that Slavery should be abolished.
This condition was indeed, insisted on in every agreement or convention
made between the British Government and the Boers; the first being that
of 1852, called the Sand River Convention; the second, a convention
entered into two years later called the Bloemfontein Convention (which
created the Orange Free State); a third agreement as to the cessation of
Slavery was entered into at the period of the Annexation, 1877; a fourth
was the Convention of 1881; a fifth the Convention of 1884. I do not
here speak of the other terms of these Conventions, I only remark that
in each a just treatment of the native races was demanded and agreed to.

The retrocession of the Transvaal in 1881 has been much lauded as an act