rs were committed. Many precious opportunities for
establishing British authority on a secure basis were lost. Many things
were done imperfectly, and therefore had to be done over and over again,
which it would have been cheaper as well as wiser to have finished off
at once. Many steps, prudent in themselves, and dictated by excellent
motives, were taken at a moment and in a way which made them
misunderstood and resisted. Reflecting on these mistakes, one sometimes
wonders that the country was not lost altogether to Britain, and thinks
of the saying of the old Swiss statesman: _Hominum negligentia, Dei
providentia, regitur Helvetia_. It may nevertheless be truly said for
the British Government that it almost always sought to act justly, and
that such advances as it made were not dictated by an aggressive spirit,
but (with few exceptions) compelled by the necessities of the case. And
it must not be forgotten that, as all home governments err in their
control of Colonies--Spain, Portugal, and France have certainly erred in
their day far more fatally than England--so many of the errors which now
most startle us in the annals of South Africa were all but inevitable,
because the wisest man could not have foreseen the course which things
have in fact taken. Who ever tries to look at the events of sixty,
thirty, or even twenty years ago with the eyes of those times, and
remembers that Colonial ministers in England had to consider not only
what they thought best, but what they could get the uninstructed public
opinion of their own country to accept, will be more indulgent than the
colonists are in their judgment of past mistakes. For instance, it is
apt to be forgotten that the Cape was not occupied with a view to the
establishment of a European Colony, in our present sense of the word.
The Dutch took it that they might plant a cabbage-garden; the English
took it that they might have a naval station and half-way house to
India. Not till our own time did people begin to think of it as capable
of supporting a great civilised community and furnishing a new market
for British goods; not till 1869 was it known as a region whence great
wealth might be drawn. Hence Britain, which during the first half of
this century was busy in conquering India, in colonising Australasia,
and in setting things to rights in Canada, never cared to bend her
energies to the development of South Africa, then a less promising field
for those energies, spent