d-fashioned, but left plenty of vacant space to be
occupied by new immigrants from Europe. New immigrants, however, came
slowly, because at that time the tide of British emigration was setting
mainly to America, while German emigration had hardly begun. The Kafir
wars had, moreover, given South Africa a bad name, and the settlers of
1820 (see above, p. 111) had suffered several years of hardship before
prosperity came to them. However, between 1845 and 1850 four or five
thousand British immigrants were brought in, with the aid of the
government, and a little later a number of Germans who had served
England in the German Legion during the Crimean War. Again, in 1858,
more than two thousand German peasants were settled on the south coast
in lands which had been previously held by Kafirs. These people made
good colonists, and have now become merged in the British population,
which began to predominate in the eastern province as the Dutch still
does in the western. As the country filled there was a steady, though
slow, progress in farming and in export trade. The merino sheep had been
introduced in 1812 and 1820, and its wool had now become a source of
wealth; so, too, had ostrich farming, which began about 1865 and
developed rapidly after the introduction of artificial incubation in
1869. The finances, which had been in disorder, were set right, roads
began to be made, churches and schools were established, and though the
Kafir raids caused much loss of life and of cattle on the eastern
border, the cost of these native wars, being chiefly borne by the home
government, did not burden the colonial revenue. In 1859 the first
railway was constructed, and by 1883 more than one thousand miles of
railway were open for traffic. There were, however, no industries except
stock-keeping and tillage until 1869-70, when the discovery of diamonds
(of which more anon) brought a sudden rush of immigrants from Europe,
stimulated trade so powerfully that the revenue of the Colony doubled
within five years, and began that surprising development of mineral
resources which has been the most striking feature of recent years.

With the growth of population, which had risen under British rule from
about 26,000 Europeans in 1805 to 182,000 in 1865 and 237,000 in 1875,
there came also changes in the form of government. At first the Governor
was an autocrat, except so far as he was controlled by the fear that the
colonists might appeal to the Colonial