l give us little
trouble." If, on the other hand, native policy was to be directed
from home, or, in other words, if adequate precautions were to be
taken against slavery, a federal system would be useless, and South
Africa must be governed like an Indian province.

Pretoria Froude found full of English, loudly demanding annexation.
He told them, speaking of course only for himself, that it was
impossible, because the Cape was a self-governing Colony, and the
Dutch majority "would take any violence offered to their kinsmen in
the Republics as an injury to themselves." To annexation without
violence, by consent of the Boers, the great obstacle, so Froude
found, was the seizure, the fraudulent seizure, as they thought it,
of the Diamond Fields. He visited Kimberley, called after the
Colonial Secretary who acquired it, "like a squalid Wimbledon Camp
set down in an arid desert." The method of digging for diamonds was
then primitive.

"Each owner works by himself or with his own servants. He has his
own wire rope, and his own basket, by which he sends his stuff to
the surface to be washed. The rim of the pit is fringed with
windlasses. The descending wire ropes stretch from them thick as
gossamers on an autumn meadow. The system is as demoralising as it
is ruinous. The owner cannot be ubiquitous: if he is with his
working cradle, his servants in the pit steal his most valuable
stones and secrete them. Forty per cent of the diamonds discovered
are supposed to be lost in this way."* The proportion of profit
between employer and employed seems to have been fairer than usual,
though it might, no doubt, have been more regularly arranged.

At Bloemfontein Froude called on President Brand, "a resolute,
stubborn-looking man, with a frank, but not over-conciliatory,
expression of face." Brand was in no conciliatory mood. He held that
his country had been robbed of land which the British Government
renounced in 1854, and only resumed now because diamonds had been
discovered on it. The interview, however, was neither unimportant
nor unsatisfactory. It was followed by an invitation to dinner, and
frank discussion of the whole subject. So firmly convinced was
Froude of the President's good faith and of the injustice done him
that he pleaded the cause of the Free State with the Colonial
Office, and Lord Carnarvon settled the dispute in a friendly manner
by the payment of a reasonable sum.+ But that was not till 1876,
after Brand had