he game and paying of the stakes, the Cape
Colony was added in 1814 to the British Empire.

In all our vast collection of States there is probably not one the
title-deeds to which are more incontestable than to this one. We had it
by two rights, the right of conquest and the right of purchase. In 1806
our troops landed, defeated the local forces, and took possession of
Cape Town. In 1814 we paid the large sum of six million pounds to the
Stadholder for the transference of this and some South American land.
It was a bargain which was probably made rapidly and carelessly in that
general redistribution which was going on. As a house of call upon the
way to India the place was seen to be of value, but the country itself
was looked upon as unprofitable and desert. What would Castlereagh or
Liverpool have thought could they have seen the items which we were
buying for our six million pounds? The inventory would have been a mixed
one of good and of evil; nine fierce Kaffir wars, the greatest
diamond mines in the world, the wealthiest gold mines, two costly and
humiliating campaigns with men whom we respected even when we fought
with them, and now at last, we hope, a South Africa of peace and
prosperity, with equal rights and equal duties for all men. The future
should hold something very good for us in that land, for if we merely
count the past we should be compelled to say that we should have been
stronger, richer, and higher in the world's esteem had our possessions
there never passed beyond the range of the guns of our men-of-war. But
surely the most arduous is the most honourable, and, looking back from
the end of their journey, our descendants may see that our long record
of struggle, with its mixture of disaster and success, its outpouring
of blood and of treasure, has always tended to some great and enduring
goal.

The title-deeds to the estate are, as I have said, good ones, but there
is one singular and ominous flaw in their provisions. The ocean has
marked three boundaries to it, but the fourth is undefined. There is
no word of the 'Hinterland;' for neither the term nor the idea had
then been thought of. Had Great Britain bought those vast regions which
extended beyond the settlements? Or were the discontented Dutch at
liberty to pass onwards and found fresh nations to bar the path of the
Anglo-Celtic colonists? In that question lay the germ of all the trouble
to come. An American would realise the point at issue if