-unnatural when the small number of English emigrants who have gone there is considered,—has been produced by the continued desire of the Dutch farmers to take themselves out of the reach of English laws, and English feelings. The abolition of slavery was the great cause of this, though not the only cause; and the abolition of slavery in British dominions is now only forty years old. Since that time Natal, the Transvaal, the Orange Free State, and Griqualand West have sprung into existence, and they were all, in the first instance, peopled by sturdy Dutchmen running away from the to them disgusting savour of Exeter Hall. They would encounter anything, go anywhere, rather than submit to British philanthropy. Then we have run after them with our philanthropy in our hands,—with such results as I have endeavoured to depict in these pages.

--

This is the first thing that we shall have to understand, but as the mind comes to dwell on the subject it will not be the chief thing. It must be the first naturally. To an Englishman the Cape of Good Hope, and Natal, and now the Transvaal are British Colonies,—with a British history, short or long. The way in which we became possessed of these and the manner in which they have been ruled; the trouble or the glory which have come to us from them; the success of them or the failure in affording homes for our ever-increasing population;-these are the questions which must affect us first. But when we learn that in those South African Colonies, though we may not have succeeded in making homes for many English, not even comparatively for many Europeans,we have become the arbiters of the homes, the masters of the destinies, of millions of black men; when we recognize the fact that here we have imposed upon us the duty of civilizing, of training to the yoke of labour and

releasing from the yoke of slavery a strong, vital, increasing and intelligent population; when this becomes plain to us, as I think it must become plain, then we shall know that the chief thing to be regarded is our duty to the nations over which we have made ourselves the masters.

And, as

South Africa is a country of black men, and not of white men. It has been so; it is so; and it will continue to be so. In this respect it is altogether unlike Australia, unlike the Canadas, and unlike New Zealand. it is unlike them, so should it be to us a matter of much purer gratification than are those successful Colonies. There we have gone with our ploughs and with our brandy, with all the good and with all the evil which our civilization has produced, and throughout the lands the native races have perished by their contact with us. They have withered by commune with us as the weaker weedy grasses of Nature's first planting wither and die wherever come the hardier plants, which science added to nature has produced. I am not among those who say that this has been caused by our cruelty. It has often been that we have struggled our very best to make our landing on a shore an unmixed blessing to those to whom we have come. In New Zealand we strove hard for this; but in New Zealand the middle of the next century will probably hear of the existence of some solitary last Maori. It may be that this was necessary. All the evidence we have seems to show that it was so. But it is hardly the less sad because it was necessary. In Australia we have been successful. We are clothed with its wools. Our coffers are filled with its gold. Our brothers and our children are living there in bounteous plenty. But during the century that we have been there we have caused the entire population of a whole conti

nent to perish. It is impossible to think of such prosperity without a dash of suffering, without a pang of re

morse.

In South Africa it is not so. The tribes which before our coming were wont to destroy themselves in civil wars have doubled their population since we have turned their assagais to ploughshares. Thousands, ten thousands of them, are working for wages. Even beyond the realms which we call our own we have stopped the cruelties of the Chiefs and the no less fatal superstitions of the priests. The Kafir and the Zulu are free men, and understand altogether the privileges of their freedom. In one town of 18,000 inhabitants, 10,000 of them are now receiving IOS. a week each man, in addition to their diet. Here at any rate we have not come as a blighting poison to the races whom we have found in the country of our adoption. This I think ought to endear South Africa.

to us.

But it must at the same time tell us that South Africa is a black country and not a white one;-that the important person in South Africa is the Kafir and the Zulu, the Bechuana and the Hottentot;-not the Dutchman or the Englishman. On the subject of population I have already shewn that the information at my command is a little confused. Such confusion cannot be avoided when only estimates are made. But if I take credit for 340,000 white people in South Africa, I certainly claim as many as the country holds;-and I am probably within the mark if I say that our direct influence extends over 3,000,000 of Natives. What is the number of British subjects cannot even be estimated, because we do not know our Transvaal limits. There are also whole tribes to the North-West, in Bechuanaland, Damaraland, and Namaqualand anxious to be annexed but not yet an

nexed. To all those we owe the duty of protection, and all of them before long will be British subjects. As in India or Ceylon, where the people are a coloured people, Asiatic and not European, it is our first duty to govern them so that they may prosper, to defend them from illusage, to teach them what we know ourselves, to make them free, so in South Africa it is our chief duty to do the same thing for the Natives there. The white man is the master, and the master can generally protect himself. He can avail himself of the laws, and will always have so many points in his favour that a paternal government need not be much harassed on his account. Compared with the Native he is numerically but one to ten. But in strength, influence, and capacity he has ten to one the best of it.

What is our duty to the Kafir or Zulu? There are so many views of our duty! One believes that we have done the important thing if we teach him to sing hymns. Another would give him back,—say a tenth of the land that has been taken away from him, and then leave him. A third, the most confident of them all, thinks that everything hangs on "a rod of iron,"-between which and slavery the distance is very narrow. The rod of iron generally means compelled work, the amount of wages to be settled by the judgment of the master. A fourth would give him a franchise and let him vote for a Member of Parliament,—which of course includes the privilege of becoming a Member of Parliament, and of becoming Prime Minister if he can get enough of his own class to back him.

I am afraid that I cannot agree altogether with any of these four. The hymns, which as I speak of them include all religious teaching, have as yet gone but a very little way. Something has been done,--that something

having shewn itself rather in a little book-learning than in amelioration of conduct as the result of comprehended Christianity. But the work will progress. In its way it is good, though the good done is so little commensurate with the missionary labour given and the missionary money spent!

The land scheme,-the giving-up of locations to the people, is good also to some extent if it be unmixed with such missionary attempts as some which I have attempted to describe as existing in the western province of the Cape Colony. There is a certain justice in it, and it enables the people to fall gradually into the way of working for wages. It has on the other hand the counterbalancing tendency of teaching the people to think that they can live idle on their own land,-as used to be the case with the Irishmen who held a couple of acres of ground.

"The iron rod" is to me abominable. It means always some other treatment for the coloured man than that which is given to the white man. There can be no good done till the two stand before the law exactly on the same ground. The "iron-rodder" desires to get work out of the black man;-and so do I, and so does every friend of the black man. The question is how the work shall be got out of them. "Make him work," says the iron-rodder. "There he is, idle, fat as a pig on stolen mutton, and doing nothing; with thews and sinews by which I could be made so comfortable, if only I could use them." "But how are you entitled to his work?" is the answer readiest at hand. "Because he steals my cattle," says the iron-rodder, generally with a very limited amount of truth and less of logic. Because his cattle have been stolen once or twice he would subject the whole race to slavery,--unconscious that the slave's work,