wn
chiefs, but carefully supervised by imperial officers, has proved
successful. A warlike, unstable, and turbulent, although intelligent
people, while increasing fast in wealth and material comfort, has also
become more peaceful and orderly, and by the abandonment of its more
repulsive customs is passing from savagery to a state of
semi-civilization. Still the situation has its anxieties. The very
prosperity of the country has drawn into it a larger population than the
arable and pastoral land may prove able to support. The Free State
people are not friendly to it, and many politicians in Cape Colony would
like to recover it for the Colony, while many white adventurers would
like to prospect for mines, or to oust the natives from the best lands.
The natives themselves are armed, and being liable, like all natives, to
sudden fits of unreason, may conceivably be led into disorders which
would involve a war and the regular conquest of the country. The
firmness as well as the conciliatory tactfulness which the first
Commissioner, Sir Marshal Clarke, and his successor, the present Acting
Commissioner, have shown, has hitherto averted these dangers, and has
inspired the people with a belief in the good will of the British
Government. If the progress of recent years can be maintained for thirty
years more, the risk of trouble will have almost disappeared, for by
that time a new generation, unused to war, will have grown up. Whoever
feels for the native and cares for his future must wish a fair chance
for the experiment that is now being tried in Basutoland, of letting him
develop in his own way, shielded from the rude pressure of the whites.

[Footnote 67: The word "Ba Sot'ho" is in strictness used for the people,
"Se Sot'ho" for the language, "Le Sot'ho" for the country: but in
English it is more convenient to apply "Basuto" to all three.]

[Footnote 68: Gungunhana however had a sort of council of chiefs and
confidential advisers which he called together at intervals, and which
bore some resemblance to the Homeric Boule and to the earliest form of
our own Curia Regis.]

PART IV

_SOME SOUTH AFRICAN QUESTIONS_

CHAPTER XXI

BLACKS AND WHITES

Everywhere in South Africa, except in the Witwatersrand and Cape Town,
the black people greatly outnumber the whites. In the Orange Free State
they are nearly twice as numerous, in Cape Colony and the Transvaal more
than thrice as numerous, in Natal ten times as nu