d, the railway takes its course, often in steep inclines,
to the town of Pietermaritzburg, eighty miles distant, where the
Governor dwells, and a small British garrison is placed. Durban was from
the first an English town, and the white people who inhabit it are
practically all English. Maritzburg was founded by the emigrant Boers
who left Cape Colony in the Great Trek of 1836, and descended hither
across the Quathlamba Mountains in 1838. Its population is, however,
nowadays much more British than Boer, but the streets retain an
old-fashioned half-Dutch air; and the handsome Parliament House and
Government Offices look somewhat strange in a quiet and straggling
country town. Its height above the sea (2500 feet) and its dry climate
make it healthy, though, as it lies in a hollow among high hills, it is
rather hotter in summer than suits English tastes. The surrounding
country is pretty, albeit rather bare; nor is the Australian wattle, of
which there are now large plantations in the neighbourhood, a very
attractive tree.

This seems the fittest place for a few words on the public life of
Natal, the British Colony which has been the latest to receive
responsible self-government. This gift was bestowed upon it in 1893,
not without some previous hesitation, for the whole white population was
then about 46,000, and the adult males were little over 15,000. However,
the system then established seems to be working smoothly. There is a
cabinet of five ministers, with two Houses of Legislature, an Assembly
of thirty-seven, and a Council of eleven members, the former elected for
four years at most (subject to the chance of a dissolution), the latter
appointed by the Governor for ten years. No regular parties have so far
been formed, nor can it yet be foreseen on what lines they will form
themselves, for the questions that have chiefly occupied the legislature
are questions on which few differences of principle have as yet emerged.
All the whites are agreed in desiring to exclude Kafirs and newcomers
from India from the electoral franchise. All seemed in 1895 to be agreed
in approving the tariff, which was for revenue only; and Natal had then
one of the lowest among the tariffs in force in British Colonies. (The
ordinary _ad valorem_ rate was five per cent.) In 1898, however, Natal
entered the South African Customs Union previously consisting of Cape
Colony, the Orange Free State, Basutoland, and Bechuanaland, and the
tariff of tha