themselves. It seems hard upon England that with all her territories she can find no spot of ground for the reception of her thieves and outcasts,—that she, with all her population, sending out her honest folks over the whole world, should be obliged to keep her too numerous rascals at home. But it seems that where the population is which creates the crime, there the criminals must remain. The Colonies certainly will not receive them.

Then came the fifth Kafir war, which of all these wars was the bloodiest. It began in 1850, and seems to have been instigated by a Kafir prophet. It would be impossible in a short sketch such as this to give any individual interest to these struggles of the natives against their invaders. Through them all we see an attempt, made at any rate by the British rulers of the land, to bind these people by the joint strength of treaties and good offices. "If you will only do as we bid you, you shall be better off than ever you were. We will not hurt you, and the land will be enough for both of us." That is what we have said all along with a clear intention of keeping our word. But it has been necessary, if we were to live in the land at all, that we should bind them to keep their word whether they did or did not understand what it was to which they pledged themselves. Lord Glenelg's theory required that the British holders of the land should recognise and respect the weakness of the Savage without using the strength of his own civilization. Colonization in such a country on such terms is impossible. He may have had abstract justice on his side. On that point I say nothing here. But if so, and if Great Britain is bound to reconcile her conduct to the rules which such justice requires, then she must abandon the peculiar task which seems to have been allotted to her, of peopling the world with a civilized race. In 1850

the fifth Kafir war arose, and the inhabitants of one advanced military village after another were murdered. This went on for nearly two years and a half, but was at last suppressed by dint of hard fighting. It cost Great Britain upwards of two millions of money, with the lives of about four hundred fighting men. This was the last of the Kafir wars,--up to that of 1877, if that is to be called a Kafir war.

After that, in 1857, occurred what seems to be the most remarkable and most unintelligible of all the events known to us in Kafir history. At this time Sir George Grey was Governor of the Colony,—a most remarkable man, who had been Governor of South Australia and of New Zealand, who had been once recalled from his office of Governor at the Cape and then restored, who was sent back to New Zealand as Governor in the hottest of the Maori warfare, and who now lives in that Colony and is at this moment, the beginning of 1878,-singularly enough Prime Minister in the dependency in which he has twice been the Queen's vicegerent. Whatever he may be, or may have been, in New Zealand, he certainly left behind him at the Cape of Good Hope a very great reputation. There can be no doubt that of all our South African Governors he was the most popular,--and probably the most high-handed. In his time there came up a prophecy among the Kafirs that they were to be restored to all their pristine glories and possessions not by living aid, but by the dead. Their old warriors would return to them from the distant world, and they themselves would all become young, beautiful, and invincible. But great faith was needed. They would find fat cattle in large caves numerous as their hearts might desire; and rich fields of flowing corn would spring up for them as food was required. Only they must kill all their own cattle,

and destroy all their own grain, and must refrain from sowing a seed. This they did with perfect faith, and all Kafirdom was well nigh starved to death. The English and Dutch around them did what they could for their relief;-had indeed done what they could to prevent the self-immolation; but the more that the white men interfered the more confirmed were the black men in their faith. It is said that 50,000 of them perished of hunger. Since that day there has been no considerable Kafir war, and the spirit of the race has been broken. Whence came the prophecy? There is a maxim among lawyers that the criminal is to be looked for among those who have profited by the crime. That we the British holders of the South African soil, and we only, were helped on in our work by this catastrophe is certain. No such prophecy,-nothing like to it,-ever came up among the Kafirs before. They have ever been a superstitious people, given to witchcraft and much afraid of witches. But till this fatal day they were never tempted to believe that the dead would come back to them, or to look for other food than what the earth gave them by its natural increase. It is more than probable that the prophecy ripened in the brain of an imaginative and strong-minded Anglo-Saxon. This occurred in 1857 when the terrible exigences of the Indian Mutiny had taken almost every redcoat from the Cape to the Peninsula. Had the Kafirs tried their old method of warfare at such a period it might have gone very hard indeed with the Dutch and English farmers of the Eastern Province.

During the last twenty years of our government there have been but two incidents in Colonial life to which I need refer in this summary,-and both of them will receive their own share of separate attention in the following chapters. These two are the finding of the Diamond

Fields, and the commencement of responsible government at the Cape Colony.

In 1867 a diamond was found in the hands of a child at the south side of the Orange River. Near to this place the Vaal runs into the Orange, and it is in the angle between the two that the diamonds have been found. The particular diamond went through various hands and was at last sold to Sir Philip Wodehouse, the Governor, for £500. As was natural, a stream of seekers after precious stones soon flowed in upon the country, some to enrich themselves, and many to become utterly ruined in the struggle. The most manifest effect on the Colony, as it has always been in regions in which gold has been found, has been the great increase in consumption. It is not the diamonds or the gold which enrich the country in which the workings of Nature have placed her hidden treasures, but the food which the diggers eat, and the clothes which the diggers wear, and, I fear, the brandy which the diggers drink. Houses are built; and a population which flows in for a temporary purpose gradually becomes permanent.

In 1872 responsible government was commenced at Capetown with a Legislative Council and House of Assembly, with full powers of passing laws and ruling the country by its majorities;-or at any rate with as full. powers as belong to any other Colony. In all Colonies the Secretary of State at home has a veto; but such as is the nature of the constitution in Canada or Victoria, such is it now in the Cape Colony. For twenty years previous to this there had been a Parliament in which the sucking legislators of the country were learning how to perform their duties. But during those twenty years the Ministers were responsible to the Governors. Now they are responsible to Parliament.

CHAPTER IV.

Population and Federation.

IN a former chapter I endeavoured to give a rough idea of the geographical districts into which has been divided that portion of South Africa which Europeans have as yet made their own. I will now attempt to explain how they are at present ruled and will indulge in some speculations as to their future condition.

How the Cape Colony became a Colony I have already described. The Dutch came and gradually spread themselves, and then the English becoming owners of the Dutch possessions spread themselves further. With the natives,—Hottentots as they came to be called,--there was some trouble but not very much. They were easily subjected,-very easily as compared with the Kafirs,—and then gradually dispersed. As a race they are no longer troublesome;-nor are they very profitable to the Cape Colony. The labour of the Colony is chiefly done by coloured people, but by people who have mainly been immigrants, the descendants of those whom the Dutch brought, and bastard Hottentots as they are called, with a sprinkling of Kafirs and Fingos who have come from the East in quest of wages. The Colony is divided into a Western and Eastern Province, and these remarks refer to the whole of the former and to the western portion of the latter district. In this large portion of the Colony there is not now nor has there been for many years anything to be feared from pugnacious natives. It is in the eastern half of the Eastern Province that Kafirs have been and still are troublesome. The division into Provinces is imaginary rather than real. There are indeed at this moment twenty-one members of the Legislative Council of which eleven are sup