The conflict is usually solved for practical purposes by an understanding which is approximately general, namely that, in cases not provided for by treaty, no state shall protect those whom it claims as its nationals while residing in the territory of another state which claims them as its own nationals by any title, whether jus soli, jus sanguinis, naturalization, or the refusal to allow expatriation.
In spite of the admission of their co-religionists to high office in the government, the Mussulmans, it is true, still complained of continuous ill-treatment having for its object their expatriation; but these complaints were declared by Sir Edward Grey, in answer to a question in parliament, to be exaggerated.
Worse even than this was the system of wholesale expatriation adopted as a punishment for those who had shown a friendly attitude to the invading Serbian army.
The men who followed it knew that they were restoring humanity to its birthright after the expatriation of ten centuries.
These, then, were the direct causes of the voluntary expatriation of the majority of the first trekkers, who included some of the best families in the colony, but they fail to explain the profound hostility to Great Britain which thereafter animated many, but not all, of the emigrants, nor do they account for the easy abandonment of their homes by numbers of the trekkers.