ish rule. It was
mild, clean, honest, tactless, and inconsistent. On the whole, it might
have done very well had it been content to leave things as it found
them. But to change the habits of the most conservative of Teutonic
races was a dangerous venture, and one which has led to a long series of
complications, making up the troubled history of South Africa.

The Imperial Government has always taken an honourable and philanthropic
view of the rights of the native and the claim which he has to the
protection of the law. We hold, and rightly, that British justice, if
not blind, should at least be colour-blind. The view is irreproachable
in theory and incontestable in argument, but it is apt to be irritating
when urged by a Boston moralist or a London philanthropist upon men
whose whole society has been built upon the assumption that the black is
the inferior race. Such a people like to find the higher morality for
themselves, not to have it imposed upon them by those who live under
entirely different conditions.

The British Government in South Africa has always played the unpopular
part of the friend and protector of the native servants. It was upon
this very point that the first friction appeared between the old
settlers and the new administration. A rising with bloodshed followed
the arrest of a Dutch farmer who had maltreated his slave. It was
suppressed, and five of the participants were hanged. This punishment
was unduly severe and exceedingly injudicious. A brave race can forget
the victims of the field of battle, but never those of the scaffold. The
making of political martyrs is the last insanity of statesmanship.
However, the thing was done, and it is typical of the enduring
resentment which was left behind that when, after the Jameson Raid, it
seemed that the leaders of that ill-fated venture might be hanged, the
beam was actually brought from a farmhouse at Cookhouse Drift to
Pretoria, that the Englishmen might die as the Dutchmen had died in
1816. Slagter's Nek marked the dividing of the ways between the British
Government and the Africanders.

And the separation soon became more marked. With vicarious generosity,
the English Government gave very lenient terms to the Kaffir tribes who
in 1834 had raided the border farmers. And then, finally, in this same
year there came the emancipation of the slaves throughout the British
Empire, which fanned all smouldering discontents into an active flame.

It must be