e 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 they were buying for 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 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 he could
conceive that after the founding of the United States the Dutch
inhabitants of the State of New York had trekked to the westward and
established fresh communities under a new flag. Then, when the American
population overtook these western States, they would be face to face
with the problem which this country has had to solve. If they found
these new States fiercely anti-American and extremely unprogressive,
they would experience that aggravation of their difficulties with which
British statesmen have had to deal.

At the time of their transference to the British flag the
colonists--Dutch, French, and German--numbered some thirty thousand.
They were slaveholders, and the slaves were about as numerous as
themselves. The prospect of complete amalgamation between the British
and the original settlers would have seemed to be a good one, since they
were of much the same stock, and their creeds could only be
distinguished by their varying degrees of bigotry and intolerance. Five
thousand British emigrants were landed in 1820, settling on the Eastern
borders of the colony, and from that time onwards there was a slow but
steady influx of English-speaking colonists. The Government had the
historical faults and the historical virtues of Brit