affront, when the irritation of the large ma- | districts, who now return the majority of jority of its inhabitants was at its highest, to force upon the Colony a system of responsible government. The experience of Ireland in the last century might have shown us that the relations between the mother-country and its dependencies are not improved when negligence or oppression are sought to be atoned for by the concession of self-government. That severe lesson, however, seems to have been more than thrown away. The prohibitive duties against Irish manufactures were repealed before the establishment of the Constitution of 1782. The moment of the grant of a similar Constitution to the Cape Colony was selected, as if deliberately, for a proceeding which taught our Dutch fellowsubjects to regard us as a people whom neither equity nor treaties could bind. It is to be presumed that Great Britain desires to retain the Cape of Good Hope. The reasons which led to its occupation in 1806 have lost little of their force. The Suez Canal may be closed against us, and the Cape may become again the key of British India. An enemy in possession of Simon's Bay would command our ocean commerce with China and Australia; while it may be regarded as certain that South Africa, if left to itself, would be neither able nor would attempt to maintain its independence, and that the Dutch party would invite the protection of some other European Power. They are for the most part a quiet people, disinclined to political agitation, and content to remain under the British flag as long as they are fairly treated. But they remember that the country once belonged to them; that it was lost by them for no fault of their own; and that they have not received from us the consideration to which a population, whose nationality has been taken from them for political reasons, are so peculiarly entitled. And if we are to escape grave complications in the future, it is time for us to exert ourselves to recover the confidence which our last and worst act of aggression has seriously shaken. Each colony has its own history, by which its political characteristics are determined. Events are large or small to us, as they affect our immediate interests. The mothercountry, occupied with great Imperial concerns, forgets the details of the development of its dependencies. The colonist whom these details have touched more nearly does not forget. Recollections, which have disappeared from the traditions of Downing Street, are fresh and living in the farmhouses of Stellenbosch and Swellendam. If the inhabitants of these and the other Dutch the Cape Parliament, are to become the attached members of the British Empire, which we still hope to see them, we must try to look at their story as they look at it themselves. The Peninsula of Table Mountain was occupied by the Dutch East India Company in 1652. The history of the Settlement was the history of all settlements of civilised men in a country inhabited by savages. There were the usual alliances with native chiefs, the usual quarrels, the usual wars. The Dutch were neither worse nor better than other European intruders in similar situations. They gradually extended their authority as far as the Great Fish River to the east of Grahamstown, the native races receding or dying out before them. At the close of the last century the population consisted of 22,000 whites, 26,000 slaves, and about 15,000 Hottentots. The Hottentots were under a law of settlement, receiving wages, but confined to special locations, and obliged to work for their livelihood. The slaves were almost entirely born and reared in the families of their owners, being descendants of Malays, or of negroes imported at an earlier period. The external slave-trade had been laid under restrictions which amounted nearly to prohibition. The value of a slave increasing in proportion to his capacity, he was trained generally to some useful art or handicraft. He was never worked in gangs, but enjoyed the practical comforts of a free domestic; and the Dutch Government, though slow and languid about it, professed to hope for complete emancipation at no distant time. At The conquest of Holland by Napoleon creating a sudden danger that the Cape might be seized by France, the British Government took temporary possession of it in 1795 in the name and at the request of the Stadtholder. The Young Hollanders in Cape Town had been infected by the revolution, and had French sympathies. But the British were in overpowering force. A fleet sent out by Napoleon to support them was taken in Saldanha Bay, and the Colony submitted without further resistance. the Peace of Amiens it was restored to Holland, but in 1806 the danger recurred. Sir David Baird was despatched to recover possession. He landed through the surf at the northern point of Table Bay, and though the Dutch this time made a brave struggle for their freedom, they were defeated at Blauberg. Cape Town surrendered, and the Colony became again provisionally a British possession. The conquest was effected the more easily, perhaps, because 1 the plough. A second generation is born. The old people become the patriarchs of the family hamlet. The younger gather round them at the evening meal, which is preceded by a long, solemn grace, as the day's work in the morning is commenced with a Psalm. The authority of age is absolute. The old lady sits in a chair in the hall, extending her hand to a guest, but never rising to receive him. The young generation, trained to obedience, fetch and carry at her command: the people expected that the British occupa- | first. A few more acres are brought under tion would again be only temporary; but at the Treaty of Paris, Holland accepted other territories in exchange for her South African possessions; and in 1815 the Dutch of the Cape were finally informed that their nationality was lost, and that they were thenceforward to consider themselves British subjects. No brave men submit willingly to a transfer of allegiance to which their own consent has not been asked. The Dutch colonists regarded the country as theirs, and resented the sacrifice which had been made of them. A few of the more violent attempted a rebellion, which was severely repressed. The rest yielded to necessity, but under a silent protest which deserves rather to be respected than condemned. The Dutch farmer or Boer of the interior of the Cape Colony may be described in a few words. In every community there are bad exceptions; and the exceptions being all that we hear of at a distance, the South African Boer has till lately been regarded in England as little better than a savage. We must learn to know his fairer side. The type is unchanging. As he was in 1806 in the Colony so he is in 1876 in the republics of the interior. Ile is uncultivated. He is unprogressive, but he possesses qualities which even here will be regarded as not without value. 'Sabellis docta ligonibus The estate produces almost everything which the family consumes. There is no haste to get rich. There is no desire of change. The Boer has few wants but those which he can himself supply, and he asks nothing but to be let alone. The obedience which he expects from his children he expects equally from his servants. He is a strict Calvinist. The stream of time, which has carried most of us so far and fast, has left him anchored on the old ground. The only knowledge which he values is contained in his Bible. His notions of things in heaven and things in earth are very much what would have been found in Scotland in the days of the Covenant. He is constitutionally republican, yet of liberty in the modern sense he has no idea. He considers work the first duty of man, and habits of work the only fitting education. Native questions and all other questions he regards from this point of view. Without tenderness, without enthusiasm, and with the narrowest intellectual horizon, he has a stubpracticality well suited for the work which he has chosen as the pioneer of African civilisation. He is domestic, but not gregarious. When he settles, he procures from six to twenty thousand acres of undulating grass plain. He takes possession in his wagon, with his wife and children, his scanty furniture, his family Bible, which is all his literature, and his sheep and cattle. He selects a spring of water as the site for his home; ten miles, perhaps, from his nearest neigh-born bour. His house consists of a central hall, with a kitchen behind it, and three, four, or five bedrooms opening out of it, all on one floor. He builds kraals for his cattle. He fences in a garden which he carefully irrigates. And so rapid is the growth in that soil and climate, that in four or five years it will be stocked with oranges, lem ons, citrons, peaches, apricots, figs, apples, pears, and grape-vines. He encloses fifty or a hundred acres, which he ploughs and sows with wheat or Indian corn. His herds and flocks multiply with little effort. If he is ambitious, he adds a few ostriches, whose feathers he sells at Port Elizabeth. Thus he lives in rude abundance. His boys grow up and marry; his daughters find husbands, and when the land is good they remain at his side. For each new family a house is built a few gun-shots from the | ists were located in and about the neighbour- that they had not merited a proceeding hood of Grahamstown as a barrier against which made every family a scene of confufurther invasions, and the space intervening sion and suspicion. Three millions were between the Fish River and the Keiskamma the value set upon the slaves in the estimate was declared neutral. of the indemnity which was to be paid for them. The three millions were cut down to 1,200,0007., and the money actually granted was made payable only at the Bank of England. The Boers petitioned that they might receive what was due to them in Treasury drafts payable in the Colony; but their request, for some official reason, was refused. Being foreigners, they had no friends or agents in London, and they were obliged to sell their certificates to contractors, who bought them up at from 20 to 30 per cent discount. The consequence was that families whose estates were mortgaged were utterly ruined, while many wealthy Dutch settlers refused, in silent pride, to receive the miserable sum which was allotted to them. They dismissed their slaves without any indemnity at all, and began to look beyond the Northern Border of the Colony for some more distant home, where they would be safe from a philanthropy which forgot justice in the warmth of its benevolence. After a severe struggle with bad seasons, the new settlement began to thrive. The relations between the Boers and the English farmers were perfectly satisfactory. The Eastern Province was now well inhabited. Strength gave security, and an active trade in wool began with England. The first return of trouble was in 1828, when the law of settlement was repealed which restrained the Hottentots. Perfectly sincere in their detestation of oppression, perfectly convinced that what they called freedom was essential to the improvement of the character of the coloured races, the missionaries represented at home that the Hottentots were kept in a state of predial bondage which was no better than slavery. They were released from restraint, and left free to go where they pleased. They wandered about in drunkenness and idleness. The Colony became infested with thieves, and a severe vagrant law soon became necessary, if the country was to continue habitable. A Hottentot police was formed on the Eastern Border; and such of them as professed to be Christians were collected by the missionaries in a settlement on the Kat River. Neither of these remedies answered. The Hottentot police in the late Kafir wars deserted to the enemy, taking their arms along with them. The settlement, which from the first was a nest of disaffection, at last openly revolted. The final result of the emancipation of the Hottentots from a condition no worse than that of our own labourers at the beginning of the present century has been the complete disappearance of the entire race; all have perished but a few hundreds, who may be found scattered in service in the various States. The Boers, who had suffered from the loss of their Hottentot farm-servants, found themselves threatened a year or two later with the loss of their slaves. For the abolition itself they were prepared; and they would have submitted without complaint to any arrangement which would have been moderately fair to them. Of all the slaveowners in the Empire the South African Dutch had least deserved to be hardly dealt with; but the negligence with which their interests were sacrificed, and the manner in which the Emancipation Act was carried out, created a sense of indignant resentment. The first step was to send persons about the Colony to hear the complaints of slaves against their masters. The masters knew The incipient discontent received a fresh impulse immediately after. The Kafir tribes had resented their exclusion from the strip of territory between the Keiskamma and the Fish River. The fast-increasing herds of the Border farmers were a perpetual temptation to them. They stole through the bush across the neutral belt, plundered the exposed stations, and retreated with the spoils into their mountains. Reprisals followed. Raids were made into the Kafir territory to recover the stolen cattle, and life on both sides was continually lost. The missionaries took the side of the natives in these quarrels. They had been struck with the finer points of the Kafir character, and were unwilling to recognise its darker traits. The Kafirs are brave and honourable according to their light; but possessing at that time no personal property they did not respect it in others. They are wildly superstitious, and when their blood is up they are reckless of human life beyond any savages with whom we have ever come in contact. Chaka, the chief who desolated Natal at the beginning of the century, is supposed to have destroyed nearly a million human beings. The missionaries, sanguine and enthusiastic, saw in them nothing but an innocent and interesting race, whom the advance of the white man threatened with extermination; and in every dispute which arose they assumed the white man to have been the aggressor. Thus encouraged, and being led to believe that the British Government would not support the colonists in the event of a war, they prepared, at the end of 1834, for a general rising. Through the merchants who traded at the mission stations, they obtained guns and powder. And on the 22nd of December (Midsummer-night in the Southern hemisphere) the Kafirs swarmed across the frontier along a line of 400 miles, burning, killing, and driving cattle. No distinction of race was made; but the Dutch suffered the most, from the tenacity with which they clung to their homes. The fugitives crowded in thousands into Grahamstown, while the black flight of human locusts swept past it almost to Port Elizabeth, carrying waste and ruin along with them. Sir Benjamin D'Urban was then Governor and Commander-in-Chief. He hurried to the rescue, accompanied by Colonel Smith (afterwards Sir Harry Smith), the conqueror at Aliwal. The invading Kafirs were driven back out of the Colony; Hintza, the Chief of Caffraria proper, and the real contriver of the inroad, affected to desire peace, and came in to Colonel Smith as a hostage. It was a mere ruse to draw the English forces into an ambush. The treachery was suspected. Hintza was killed in attempting to escape, and after a short, sharp war, the Kafirs submitted. Part of the stolen property was restored. The neutral territory between the Fish River and the Keiskamma was taken into the Colony. The native tribes, as far as the Kei, forty miles further, were made British subjects, and were placed under British magistrates. The murdered settlers could not be restored to life. Three hundred thousand pounds' worth of property had been destroyed; but the promptitude and energy of Sir Benjamin D'Urban gave confidence to the farmers of both races. Their common danger had tended to bind them together, and to attach both to the Government. The first Kafir war would probably have been the last, and the Colony would have received a vigorous lift forward from the spirit which it had shown, but that at this moment there was a change of dynasty in Downing Street. Lord Aberdeen left the Colonial Office, Lord Glenelg came into it. It was a day of dreams-dreams of millenniums coming in as the reward of Reform Bills; dreams of the regeneration of the human race-the black side of it especially -by liberty and love. Lord Glenelg took into his councils the African missionaries, Sir Benjamin D'Urban to Lord Glenelg. -June 9, 1836. and the result was a despatch upon the Kafir War, long forgotten in England, but for ever memorable in South African history. Admitting that it was the Governor's duty to resist the invasion, Lord Glenelg blamed Sir Benjamin D'Urban for the sharpness with which he had repressed it. He stated, as the opinion of the whole Cabinet, that the Kafirs had been amply justified' in going to war. They naturally desired to recover the lands of which they had been unjustly despoiled, and had a perfect right to hazard the experiment of extorting by force the redress which they could not expect otherwise to obtain.' Sir Benjamin D'Urban had told Lord Glenelg truly that the Kafirs were a fierce, dangerous race— Lord Glenelg declined to believe it. He understood rather that they were feeble and unwarlike, inclined to peaceful pursuits, and well disposed to Christianity. Their invasion of the Colony was the natural reaction against oppression. The havoc which they had made was but an imitation of the outrages which they had themselves suffered. The death of Hintza (Lold Glenelg afterwards generously admitted his mistake) was a gratuitous murder. The colonists were entitled to no compensation and to no assistance. The newly-annexed territory was to be instantly evacuated, and the tribes which had been made British subjects were to be restored to independence.* The principle underlying Lord Glenelg's judgment would condemn altogether the colonisation by a civilised people of any country already occupied, however sparsely, by barbarous tribes. Wherever the white and coloured races come in contact, the laws of civilised man are inevitably violated by savages who do not understand them. Equally inevitably, where there is no organised police, the colonists defend themselves and their property by such means as are nearest to hand. The savage is eventually driven back, and is punished by successive losses of territory. It may be hard, but it is the rule of the world. There was no proof that the Dutch and English farmers on the Fish River had been guilty of any unprovoked excesses. They had punished cattle thefts, perhaps too severely; but a Government which, from motives of economy, had left them unprotected by an adequate police, was not in a position to animadvert with such extreme severity on the rough-andready methods which are the necessary alternative. That Lord Glenelg had been misled as to * Lord Glenelg to Sir Benjamin D'Urban.— December 26, 1835. the character of the Kafirs the British nation had soon painfully to learn. The Fish River bush became immediately filled by the most daring of the tribes, who had been virtually invited to repeat their aggression, and the frontier of the Kei had to be recovered in a few years at a cost of several thousand lives, and two or three millions of money. Meanwhile, it was the day of illusions. Sir Benjamin D'Urban refused to accept his rebuke without a protest. Ile was recalled, and Sir George Napier took his place. A Committee of the House of Commons, of which Mr. Gladstone was a member, approved Lord Glenelg's despatch, reaffirmed that the war had arisen from systematic forgetfulness of the principles of justice on the part of the colonists, and laid down as an axiom-of which it would be interesting to know Mr. Gladstone's present opinion-that in all the British colonies, whatever might be the nature of the local legislas ture, the aborigines must be withdrawn from its control. A local legislature, if properly constituted, must be the representative of the opinions of the people for whom it acted, and in proportion as it was qualified for its proper functions it was unfit for the duty of protecting the aborigines.' The Cape Colonists found themselves held up before the Empire as special objects of humiliation and disgrace, and they resented the treatment which they could not admit that they had deserved. The English settlers demanded a Commission of Inquiry, which the Government refused. The indignation of the Dutch farmers displayed itself in a more serious form. Despairing now of protection, finding themselves, as they supposed, plundered and insulted by alien invaders, and believing that in their own way they could establish more wholesome relations with the native tribes than under the uncertain dominion of Great Britain, which allowed itself to be misled by interested information, they determined to seek a new home in the plains of the interior. They had already made acquaintance with the chiefs beyond the Orange River. They had ascertained that across that river lay a far extending plateau of admirable grazing-land unoccupied by the natives, who resided themselves in the rocky ranges by which the plains are intersected and surrounded. They made treaties with the Bechuanas, the Basutos, and the Griquas, and they broke up from their old homes in the Eastern Province of the colony with a passionate unanimity without parallel in modern history. They abandoned their farms, and mounted their families and their little properties in their ox-waggons. More than a thousand families took wing at once, and were followed by successive flights, which were caught by the enthusiasm as by an epidemic. They were well received on the whole in the districts to which they migrated. The Matabeles deceived them by pretended hospitality, cut off a party of them, and plundered their camp. But the Boers gallantly defended themselves. The Matabeles were not supported by the other tribes, and the new-comers found, for the most part, a generous welcome. The testimony of Sir George Clerk, who was sent as Commissioner among them in 1853, is, on this important point, conclusive. forth, owing to dissatisfaction with the 'When the Dutch Boers after wandering British administration, came and settled here many years ago, they lived in peace with their native neighbours. Their occupation of the central position of this territory displaced no one except the half-human Bushmen squatted here and there, roofless, among the rocks. No other class of natives had ever cared for The wild Bushmen sustained themselves on so arid and unproductive a tract of country. the flesh of the abundant herds of large game. But advancing towards the Kafirs' borders, the Boers found natives who willingly gave them access to better lands, because the stranger spontaneously tendered homage for it. In those days cattle-lifting was of rare occurrence, although the Boers were, as now, a pastoral community.' * Natal (so named by Vasco da Gama, who landed there on Christmas Day, 1498), divided from the Cape Colony by independent Kafir land, is separated from the Orange River territory only by the Drachenberg Mountains, through which there are easy passes. The lower and richer portion of Natal was at this time a desert, having been completely depopulated by the ferocious Chaka. Chaka having been murdered, negotiations for another settlement were opened by the Boers with his brother and successor, Dingaan; and, at Dingaan's invitation, several hundred of the emigrants moved down, under the leadership of the chivalrous young Peter Retief. Retief himself, with sixty of his people, was invited to Dingaan's camp to receive the grants which he had been promised. Under circumstances of the grossest treachery, they were all massacred; and on the same day an attempt was made to surprise the rest of the party, and destroy the women and children. The surprise failed. The Boers, fighting within a ring of waggons, defended themselves against a hundred times their num *Sir George Clerk to the Duke of Newcastle. December 3, 1853. 1 |