t, as
distinct from the interest created by the stories of missionary
enterprise and travel, and by the records of Kafir warfare--was the
discovery of diamonds in Griqualand West in 1870, and the subsequent
establishment of the diamond industry at Kimberley. It was the first
time that anything certain had occurred to show that the vast
"hinterland" of the Cape might prove to be a territory of industrial
possibilities. The earnings of the diamond mines provided the Cape
Colony with a revenue sufficient to enable it to link together its
main towns by a tolerable railway system. The industry, once
established, attracted British capital and British population, and by
so doing it did what Blue-books and missionary reports had failed to
do: it brought the every-day life of the British Colonist in South
Africa within the purview of the nation. Thanks to the Kimberley mines
the Cape ceased to be thought of as a country whose resources were
exclusively pastoral and agricultural.

The epoch of the next great divergence of opinion was a more hopeful
time from an Imperialist point of view. Lord Beaconsfield, who was the
first statesman to give practical expression to the belief that the
maintenance of empire was not inconsistent with the welfare of the
masses of the home population, was in power. British statesmen, and
the class from which British statesmen are drawn, had begun to study
Colonial questions in a more hopeful and intelligent spirit. Something
had been learnt, too, of the actual conditions of South Africa. And
yet it was at this epoch that what was, perhaps, the most ruinous of
all the divergences of opinion between Capetown and Downing Street
occurred.

[Sidenote: Sir Bartle Frere.]

When Sir Bartle Frere was sent out to South Africa to carry out a
definite scheme for the union of the Republics with the British
colonies in a federal system, British statesmen and the educated
classes in general had adopted the views expressed by Grey twenty
years before. Tardily they had learnt to recognise both the essential
unity of the Dutch population and the value of the country as an
industrial asset of the empire. But, in the meantime, the centre of
political power had shifted in England. The extension of the franchise
had placed the ultimate control of British policy in South Africa in
the hands of a class of electors who were, as yet, wholly uneducated
in the political and economic conditions of that country. The
divergen