most part in isolated homesteads, gained a scanty subsist ence by the pastoral industries and hunting. There were no roads, there was no trade, no system of education, and the government was at once tyrannical and ineffective.

At the same time the Company had spread a European population over a district as large as the United Kingdom, and, if we confine our notion of a colony to the narrow limits of what would be the Company's definition, we must admit that they had been successful. They had accomplished the special object which they had in view. They had established a convenient post of call where supplies could be obtained for their fleets, and they had made this naval station self-supporting by means of the European settlers whom they introduced. Moreover, the policy which they pursued towards the natives was both humane and prudent. If, however, we take a wider view of the responsibilities of the Company, we must decide that they signally failed. It is not merely that their system of government was bad, and their trade policy uneconomic. Regarded from this point of view, it is not enough to say of the Company's system, as the late Judge Watermeyer has said, that "in all things political it was purely despotic; in all things commercial it was purely monopolist." If we hold them responsible for the well-being of the community to which they gave birth, the directors of the Dutch East India Company were guilty of a political crime of the gravest character; they allowed a European community to become degraded and decivilised. And it is this decivilised European community that England lightly essayed to govern at the commencement of the present century.

*

In comparison with the magnitude and variety of the interests involved in the South Africa of to-day, this account of the actual foundation of the Cape Settlement must necessarily appear somewhat trivial. But the

* "Three Lectures."

traveller will gladly turn aside to visit the little stream which is the source of some great river, grudging neither the time nor the labour which he expends. Neither should we, who have embarked upon the study of the past history and present circumstances of South Africa, regret the time which we devote to a study of the details of this early period. For a knowledge of the period of Dutch occupation is a condition precedent to the adequate comprehension of those great questions of South African administration which will hereafter claim our attention.

Not only do almost, if not all, of these questions arise, but they appear in their simplest and most intelligible form. In the controversy between Van Riebeck and the directors of the Company, with reference to the course to be pursued in punishing the murderer of David Janssens, we have the prototype of those endless " 'divergences of opinion" between H.M.'s Government and the colonial administrators which have filled the pages of innumerable blue-books. In the reasoning of the Hottentot prisoner, who "spoke tolerable Dutch," we have an epitome of those arguments which were afterwards employed with such grave results by the great philanthropic societies of England. And in the mingled despotism and weakness of the Company's government we see the explanation of that unreasoning aversion to law and order which has unhappily characterised the rural settlers of Dutch origin, and intensified the difficulties of South African administration.

I have spoken of South African history under the figure of a river. The analogy is one which will bear pressing, for there is a curious similarity between the progress of South Africa and the course of a South African river. It is no smooth stream, flowing in a single channel down a gently falling incline. On the contrary, its brief course is diversified by every variety of incident, its waters are diverted into separate and

distinct channels, and its current is alternately checked by obstacles, and precipitated onwards by abrupt descents.

And if this be a true description of the nature of South African history and progress, there is no need to add that the study of such a subject will repay the student. With its native question, its nationality difficulty, and its consolidation problem, is it too much to say that in South Africa we have an epitome of those problems upon the solution of which the stability of the Empire depends?

CHAPTER II.

THE KAFIR WARS.

IN that beautiful ode,* in which Euripides dwells with loving fulness on the graces of his native Attica, he places in the forefront of his enumeration the fact that her citizens dwell in a "sacred and unravaged" land. With how much greater propriety could an English poet point to that immunity from the ravages of war which has characterised the life of later generations of Englishmen. But there are some who maintain that the discipline of war is necessary for the perfecting of national character. Such persons can find a quick consolation in the reflection that this immunity is by no means the universal experience of the Anglo-Saxon race. Putting the United States on one side-where, in the course of four years, one million lives were lost, and property and labour to the estimated value of two thousand million pounds sterling were squandered-and confining ourselves to the AngloSaxon communities within the Empire, there is abundant evidence to show us, who read the history of England as it is written in Canada, in India, in New Zealand, and in South Africa, that the gates are seldom entirely closed upon our British Janus. Of all the Anglo-Saxon communities which have been exposed to the ravages of war -I speak, of course, not of professional soldiers but of non-combatants, civilians, women, and children-none have been exposed more continuously or more fatally to this baneful influence than the English in South Africa. *In the Medea.

But why speak of English? We have traced the growth of a European community at the Cape, but it was a community exclusively of Dutch and French origin. How is it that we speak of English?

The permanent English occupation of the Cape commenced in the year 1806. At first our possession rested upon the mere naked right of conquest, but subsequently our position was legitimised by the Convention of London, when, in 1814, the Cape of Good Hope, Ceylon, and a part of Guiana, were formally ceded by Holland to England. For the first twenty years-the reason for this limit will appear afterwards-the Cape Colony was governed in the arbitrary manner usual at that time and under like circumstances. There was, however, no "series of ignorant and absurd governors at the Cape, to use the rather harsh language of Sidney Smith in his second essay on Botany Bay. The Cape was preserved from such a fate by two circumstances; its strategic importance, as commanding the maritime route to India, and the natural difficulty of administering the government of an alien population. The early governors of the Cape were men of high character and ability. They governed arbitrarily, no doubt-how arbitrarily may be seen from those two lines of Pringle, in which he sums up his experience of life at Capetown

"Oppression, I have seen thee face to face,

And met thy cruel eye and clouded brow

but they were all marked by that sense of responsibility which happily characterises Englishmen of their class. And it was to Lord Charles Somerset, the most arbitrary of them all, that the first introduction of a considerable body of Englishmen was due. Lord Charles Somerset was so pleased with the appearance of the country immediately to the west of the Great Fish River that he recommended the district to the Home Government as