The Grant of Responsible Government to the Transvaal: More Notes on a Myth

Abstract

THE article by Dr Ronald Hyam, 'Smuts and the Decision of the Liberal Government to Grant Responsible Government to the Transvaal', in the recent number of the Historical Journal1 proposes and amply documents the solution to a problem that has troubled historians for some years. Even with the best and most generous spirit, how could Prime Minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, within weeks of taking office, have accepted the arguments of an acknowledged dangerous enemy of his nation, the Boer Jan Christian Smuts, and persuaded his Cabinet colleagues to reverse their own considered policy and grant self-government to the citizens of the Transvaal? In fact was the grant of responsible government that, as Smuts put it, 'settled the future of Africa', entirely the work of one man? Dr Hyam suggests that it was no such thing. Smuts, he feels, overestimated his own influence on the prime minister. Throughout his life Smuts assumed that the series of events that culminated in I909 in the formation of the Union of South Africa had been set in train by his interview with the Liberal leader a few days before the Cabinet meeting of 8 February I906, which made the final decision for responsible government. Dr Hyam shows that the Liberals had been committed for many months to a policy leading to some form of responsible government. For some time members of the administration had been at work on modifications of the representative constitution issued under letters patent by the Unionist Colonial Secretary Alfred Lyttleton on 3I March I905. Campbell-Bannerman's contribution, he feels, was at most to compel a decision to discard the so-called 'Lyttleton Constitution' and to prepare instead a new document. The story that C.B. converted his Cabinet colleagues from some other more harsh policy he dismisses as a 'myth'. The question under consideration in this brief note is simply the origin of this myth. There is among the Spender Papers a letter from H. H. Asquith to his friend, the journalist J. A. Spender, suggesting that as late as I9I2 the question of whether Campbell-Bannerman should have been personally and solely credited with the grant of self-government was by no means settled. When read together with Lloyd George's statement to Lord Riddell, which came only about nine months later, the Asquith letter suggests that for a time two almost directly conflicting stories were in circulation. Then within a few years, certainly well before the end of his life, Asquith chose no longer to press his own version of the 8 February Cabinet meeting while Lloyd George promoted assiduously the story that Campbell-Bannerman alone was responsible for self-government in South Africa. Asquith's letter to Spender, sent from Downing Street on I5 June I9I2, offers the most convincing evidence that