has had greater opportunities for
the oppressive exploitation of defenceless subjects. Yet the grave
abuse of these opportunities has been infrequent. There have been in
the history of modern British imperialism sporadic instances of
injustice, like the forced labour of Kanakas in the Pacific. But there
have been no Congo outrages, no Putumayo atrocities, no Pequena slave
scandals, no merciless slaughter like that of the Hereros in German
South-West Africa.

The principle of the protection of backward peoples has, however,
sometimes had an unfortunate influence upon colonial policy; and there
was no colony in which it exercised a more unhappy effect than South
Africa. Here the Boer farmers still retained towards their native
neighbours the attitude which had been characteristic of all the
European peoples in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: they
regarded the negro as a natural inferior, born to servitude. It is not
surprising that no love was lost between the Boers and the
missionaries, who appeared as the protectors of the negroes, and whose
representations turned British opinion violently against the whole Boer
community. This was in itself a sufficiently unfortunate result: it
lies largely at the base of the prolonged disharmony which divided the
two peoples in South Africa. The belief that the Boers could not be
trusted to deal fairly with the natives formed, for a long period, the
chief reason which urged the British Government to retain their control
over the Boers, even when they had trekked away from the Cape (1836)
and established themselves beyond the Orange and the Vaal rivers; and
the conflict of this motive with the desire to avoid any increase of
colonial responsibilities, and with the feeling that if the Boers
disliked the British system, they had better be left in freedom to
organise themselves in their own way, accounts for the curious
vacillation in the policy of the period on this question. At first the
trekkers were left to themselves; then the lands which they had
occupied were annexed; then their independence was recognised; and
finally, when, at the end of the period, they seemed to be causing a
dangerous excitement among the Zulus and other native tribes, the
Transvaal was once more annexed; with the result that revolt broke out,
and the Majuba campaign had to be fought.

Again, tenderness for the natives led to several curious and not very
successful experiments in organisation. The