y the
aggressive native policy pursued by the Boers after the pattern adopted
from the previous Dutch _regime_, which admitted of slavery, whilst
English law had abolished and forbade that practice as contrary to a
soundly moral method of civilizing natives and inimical to prosperous
and peaceable colonial progress. Broils and wars between Boers and
Kaffirs had been almost incessant, and intervals of peace only proved
their mutually latent hostility. Besides being occasionally engaged in
unavoidable wars with neighbouring tribes themselves, it became
frequently incumbent upon the British military authorities to intervene
in conflicts induced by the Boers, alternately protecting them against
natives and natives against the Boers, and all that at the unnecessary
expenditure of much blood and treasure.

The Boer occupation of Natal was found to be wholly prejudicial to
British interests on aforesaid accounts, and was, besides, contrary to
the express declaration of the Boer emigrants at the time of their
exodus from the Cape Colony, which was that their new settlements should
be located north of the Orange River. Stepping in to the eastward and
claiming part of the littoral constituted a rivalry in conflict with
that understanding, and England therefore considered it within her
rights to expel the Boers from Natal, and to proceed with the
colonization there with British settlers instead. That temporary
occupation of Natal had been fraught to the Boers with most stirring
episodes--some of the most melancholy description, and others
representing records of really unsurpassed heroism, which can but arouse
deepest emotions and admiration in any reader of their history. There
was the treacherous massacre of Retief and Potgeiter and his party by
the Zulu king Dingaan at his military kraal, followed by other wholesale
massacres of men, women, and children at Weenen and other Boer camps in
Natal. Then came the punitive expedition of 450 Boers, armed with
flint-locks only, who utterly defeated Dingaan's most redoubtable impi
of 10,000 warriors, and resulted in the complete overthrow of that Zulu
monarch.

When that punitive Boer commando was about to start upon its mission it
was solemnly vowed to observe a day of national thanksgiving each year
if Divine aid were vouchsafed to accomplish the object. That brilliant
victory had occurred on the 16th December, 1838, and the day has ever
since been religiously observed as had been vo