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restored by the favour of Her Majesty's Govern- ment in the year 1882. The compact into which the Boers entered with certain Zulus was itself a violation of those conditions, and was virtually directed against those conditions. The Boers embraced the cause of a party in Zululand, who were striving to upset certain territorial limita- tions which were part of the conditions laid down by Her Majesty's Government; and by their action the Boers assisted in upsetting the conditions and limitations. Nominally they did so, and this is the ground which they advance in justification of their interference, in the cause of peace and order; really they did so, as no one will now deny, in order to obtain a concession of land for them- selves. They sold their services to the leaders of a party in Zululand, and they obtained in return for those services certain concessions, upon which they have built the position which they claim and assume to possess. A position, therefore, acquired in this way, in disregard of and directed against the conditions laid down by Her Majesty's Government, and conflicting, moreover, as it does both with the interests of the Zulu people and with our own interests, is one to which we had and still have a right to object. It is, perhaps, even now open to us to say that we altogether decline to recognise a position so acquired, and which is injurious aud inimical to our own interests and to the interests of the Zulu country.
9. On the other hand we must not forget that we suffered these transactions to take place. We did not prevent or do anything to prevent or stay the interference of the Boers in the affairs of Zululand at the time when the interference ac- tually took place. We did not protest against and repudiate that interference and its consequences. We did not exercise the rights of which we were presumedly, and, as I think, indisputably, pos- sessed in respect of the Zulu country-the rights of such interposition as we might hold to be expedient when the conditions which we attached to the restoration were broken. We allowed, so to speak, the case to go by default. And, there- fore, we do not now approach the situation with precisely the same prescriptive right with which we should have interposed at the proper time for interposing; and as we cannot go back upon the ground of vantage on which we once stood, it is expedient that we should accept the fact of an alteration in the situation, and endeavour, in the exercise of the undoubted rights which we still possess as directly interested in the Zulu country on behalf of the interests of Natal and of the Reserve Territory, and as the Government to whom the Zulus of Central Zululand have appealed, to make that altered situation as little hurtful to the interests in which we are con- cerned.
These rights we unquestionably possess, and we
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