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 to 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 no more money on it than she could help, and sought to avoid the acquisition of new territory, because that meant new troubles and new outlays.

The views of colonial policy which prevailed in England down till about 1870 were very different from those which most of us now hold. The statesmen of the last generation accepted that consilium coercendi intra terminos imperii which, according to Tacitus, Augustus held sound for an empire less scattered than is that of Britain. They thought that Britain had already more territory than she could hope to develop and (in the long run) to govern ; and they therefore sought to limit rather than increase her responsibilities. And they believed, reasoning somewhat too hastily from the revolt of the North American colonies, that as soon as the new English communities to which self-government had been, or was in due course to be granted, reached a certain level of wealth and population they would demand and receive their independence. That the fruit would fall off the old tree as soon as it was ripe was the favourite metaphor employed to convey

what nearly all publicists took to be an obvious. truth. No one stated it so trenchantly as Disraeli when he wrote: "These wretched colonies will all be independent too in a few years, and are a millstone round our necks;" but the dogma was generally accepted by politicians belonging to both the great parties in the state. Those, moreover, were days in which economy and retrenchment were popular cries in England, and when it was deemed the duty of a statesman to reduce as far as possible the burdens of the people. Expenditure on colonial wars and on the administration of half-settled districts was odious to the prudent and thrifty contemporaries or disciples of Sir Robert Peel and Richard Cobden. Accordingly, the chief aim of British statesmen from 1830 till 1870 was to arrest the tide of British advance, to acquire as little territory as possible, to leave restless natives and emigrant Boers entirely to themselves. Desperate efforts were made to stop the Kafir wars. We can now see that the tendency -one may almost call it a law of nature-which everywhere over the world has tempted or forced a strong civilised power to go on conquering the savage or half-civilised peoples on its borders, the process that has carried the English all over India, and brought the Russians from the Volga to the Pamirs in one direction and to the mouth of the Amur in another, was certain to compel the British Government to subdue and annex one Kafir tribe after another until either a desert or the territory of some other civilised state was reached. But fifty years

ago this was not clearly perceived; so the process, which might have inflicted less suffering if it had been steadily and swiftly carried through, went on slowly and to the constant annoyance of statesmen at home.

It was the same as regards the great plateau and the Boer emigrants who dwelt there. Not from any sympathy with their love of independence, but because she did not want the trouble of pursuing and governing them and the wide lands they were spread over, England resolved to abandon the interior to them. In 1852 and 1854 she made a supreme effort to check her own onward career, first by recognising the independence of the Transvaal emigrants whose allegiance she had theretofore claimed, then by actually renouncing her rights to the Orange River Sovereignty and to those within it who desired to continue her subjects. What more could a thrifty and cautious and conscientious country do? Nevertheless, these good resolutions had to be reconsidered, these self-denying principles forgone. Circumstances were too strong for the Colonial Office. 1869 it accepted the protectorate of Basutoland. In 1871 it yielded to the temptation of the diamond fields, and took Griqualand West. Soon after it made a treaty with Khama, which gave the British a foothold in Bechuanaland. In 1877 it annexed the Transvaal. By that time the old ideas were beginning to pass away, and to be replaced by new views of the mission and destiny of Britain. The wish of the British Government to stand still had been combated all along by powerful inducements

In

to move on.

The colonists always pressed for an advance of the frontier. The Governor usually pressed for it. The home government was itself haunted by a fear that if it abandoned positions of vantage its successors might afterwards have reason to rue the abandonment. These were the considerations that drove British statesmen to the most momentous forward steps that were taken. Two things, and two only, were really vital to British interests—the control of the coast, and the control of an open road to the north. Accordingly, the two decisive steps were the occupation of Natal in 1842-3, which shut off the Boers from the sea, and the taking of Griqualand West in 1871 (followed by the taking of southern Bechuanaland in 1884), which secured between the Transvaal on the one side and the Kalahari Desert on the other a free access to the great northern plateau.

The tide of English opinion began to turn about 1870, and since then it has run with increasing force in the direction of what is called imperialism, and has indeed in some cases brought about annexations that are likely to prove unprofitable, because the territory acquired is too hot and unhealthy to be fit for British settlement. The strides of advance made in 1884-5 and 1890 have been as bold and large as those of earlier days were timid and halting; and the last expiring struggles of the old policy were seen in 1884, when Lord Derby, who belonged to the departing school, yielded a new convention to the importunity of the Transvaal Boers and allowed Germany to establish herself in Damaraland. But

it is due to Britain, which has been accused, and so far as regards South Africa unjustly accused, of aggressive aims, to recall the fact that she strove for many years to restrict her dominion, and did not cease from her efforts until long experience had shown that it was hard to maintain the old policy, and until the advent on the scene of other European powers, whom it was thought prudent to keep at a distance from her own settled territories, impelled her to join in that general scramble for Africa which has been so strange a feature of the last two decades.

There have been moments, even since the occupation of two points so important as Basutoland (in 1869) and Griqualand West (in 1871) when it has seemed possible that South Africa might become Dutch rather than English, such is the tenacity of that race, and so deep are the roots which its language has struck. With the discovery of the Witwatersrand gold fields, drawing a new new body of English immigrants into the country, that possibility seems to have passed away. The process of territorial distribution is in South Africa now complete. Every colony and state has become limited by boundaries defined in treaties. Every native tribe has now some legal white superior, and no native tribe remains any longer formidable. The old race questions have passed, or are passing, into new phases. But they will be at least as difficult in their new forms as in their old I will devote the few remaining pages of this

ones.