=Source.=--_Parliamentary Papers_, "Transvaal," C 3,947 of 1884, p.
47.
_A Convention between Her Majesty the Queen of the United Kingdom
of Great Britain and Ireland, and the South African Republic._
Whereas the Government of the Transvaal State, through its
delegates, consisting of Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger,
President of the said State, Stephanus Jacobus Du Toit,
Superintendent of Education, and Nicholas Jacobus Smit, a member
of the Volksraad, have represented that the Convention signed at
Pretoria on the 13th day of August, 1881, and ratified by the
Volksraad of the said State on the 25th October, 1881, contains
certain provisions which are inconvenient, and imposes burdens
and obligations from which the said State is desirous to be
relieved, and that the south-western boundaries fixed by the said
Convention should be amended, with a view to promote the peace
and good order of the said State and of the countries adjacent
thereto; and whereas Her Majesty the Queen of the United Kingdom
of Great Britain and Ireland has been pleased to take the said
representations into consideration.
Now, therefore, Her Majesty has been pleased to direct, and it is
hereby declared, that the following articles of a new Convention,
signed on behalf of Her Majesty by Her Majesty's High Commissioner
in South Africa, the Right Honourable Sir Hercules George Herbert
Robinson, Knight Grand Cross of the most distinguished Order
of St. Michael and St. George, Governor of the Colony of the
Cape of Good Hope, and on behalf of the Transvaal State (which
shall hereinafter be called the South African Republic) by the
above-named delegates, Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger, Stephanus
Jacobus Du Toit, and Nicholas Jacobus Smit, shall, when ratified
by the Volksraad of the South African Republic, be substituted for
the articles embodied in the Convention of 3rd August, 1881; which
latter, pending such ratification, shall continue in full force and
effect.
[NOTE.--The word "Preamble" is not prefixed to the opening passage
of this Convention. When the suzerainty question arose in 1898 the
British argument was that the 1884 Convention only altered the
articles of the 1881 Convention, and left the Preamble in force;
the Boer argument was that the 1884 Convention had a preamble, and
therefore the earlier one must have been superseded.]