imperial rule, we shall be swept away in a swelling current of Afrikander patriotism. There is no room for a roi fainéant south of the Zambesi."

I am given to understand that not a few people in this country are under the impression that Mr Cecil Rhodes has vast politicial ambition, and I have heard it gravely asserted by men of light and leading, that if Mr Cecil Rhodes has any obstacles placed in the path that he has marked out for himself, he is quite prepared to "cut the painter" and erect a South African Republic which shall extend from Cape Town to Cairo. It is not, of course, for me to say how much or how little truth there may be in rumours of this nature; I am fully aware that public men and even quasi public men are often misrepresented and maligned, and have motives and opinions attributed to them which they not only do not entertain but never even dreamt of. But a man in Mr Rhodes's position, especially in view of recent events, ought to be circumspect, and he ought to see that those under him and those associated with him in a confidential capacity are likewise; and in all seriousness, I would ask whether opinions such as the following ought to be publicly propounded by the Secretary of the Chartered Company of which Mr Cecil Rhodes is the moving spirit? In the article in the New Review, Mr Harris took upon himself to express the opinion, that "all the South African States must eventually form a federation, either of United States independent of, and hostile to, Great Britain, or a Dominion like that of Canada,

with either England or Germany for its sovereign power;" and he agrees with those who consider that "on the Transvaal, or rather on the fate of the Uitlanders in that State, depends the solution of the problem. At present 14,000 male Boers, a pastoral people and opposed to all progress, rule absolutely an Uitlander population of some 120,000 people, the majority of whom are either British born or of British descent, speaking the English language as their mother-tongue. They comprise the intelligence, the wealth, the energy, and all that makes for progress and civilisation in a country as large as Italy. By their resources and determination they have increased the export of gold from nothing, until it now amounts to 8,000,000 sterling per annum, and by the end of this century, now only four years distant, the development of their 'deep levels' will increase this export of gold to twenty millions sterling, and thereafter for the next thirty or forty years they will maintain their production at that figure. The Transvaal will, therefore, furnish in the near future two-thirds of the yellow metal of the world, and with this increase of prosperity, the present population of 120,000 Uitlanders must increase also until, by the year 1900, it may safely be put at 240,000, and a few years later at half a million. At the present moment the Uitlanders own, by actual purchase of the soil, more than one half of the Transvaal, and contribute ninetenths of the entire revenue, yet they have no share in the Government of their country. It is

not to be supposed that such a position can last."

Of the morality of such sentiments as these it is not for me to judge, but my readers who have got thus far will, I feel sure, clearly comprehend that in view of all the circumstances which have led to these poor hunted farmers settling in the Transvaal, the fact that gold has, unfortunately for them, been found there, cannot justify their vineyards being seized by the greedy plutocrats of the Rand. I conclude as I commenced, by saying that the Chartered Company has done a great work in Africa, and that a great work lies before it, but if the Chartered Company is to perform that work adequately and efficiently, it must devote all its energies, and all the energies of all its officials and servants, to its proper sphere of operations, and hold strictly aloof from matters political and otherwise that do not properly appertain to it.

CHAPTER XV

THE ALLEGED WRONGS OF THE UITLANDERS

THE Boers, including the first emancipated section of the Orange River, have throughout, as I have already endeavoured to make my readers understand, only sought to wander farther and farther away from the English settlers by successively "trekking" to the outermost confines of the colony (and beyond its actual boundaries to the north-castward), in search of an isolation such as they have always coveted, either by displacing native tribes or by squatting in unoccupied wildernesses, such as was, firstly, Graaffreynet, secondly, the Orange River Settlement, thirdly, the interior (and unsettled part of Natal), fourthly, the howling wilderness of the Transvaal. In all these movements, they were but seeking to remove themselves from contact with the English colonists, and to dwell in new lands apart and to themselves. They went to regions, one after another, to which the English settlers were then quite averse from going, in order to be by themselves, and to enjoy their own habits and pursuits, uncongenial as

they were to Englishmen, in absolutely new and segregated settlements of their own making exclusively. They, in effect, were emigrants who renounced the British connection altogether and formed new settlements of their own, and which they wished and hoped to preserve for themselves as emancipated communities, in the independence of total severance from any other European concessions. Owing to their effectual co-operation against the Basutos, those amongst them who had squatted beyond the Orange River, parcelling out the whole territory amongst themselves in the large farms or holdings which it is one of their marked characteristics to long for, were recognised (in 1854), politically, in the independence which they had enjoyed by their total segregation from the rest of Cape Colony. Those who were excluded from that settlement by the appropriation of all the territory amongst the first settlers, "trekked" further to the eastward, until, ultimately, finding themselves crowded out in interior Natal even, by the influx thither also of more English settlers, who had then been attracted chiefly by the sugar cultivation nearer to the coast, and had spread themselves beyond the Quaklamba Ranges, even to Pietermaritzburg and along the Tugela, they (the Boers) sought refuge, for isolation again, in the wilderness beyond the Vaal. They, like the Orange River people, were the first possessors (of European origin) of the whole country. They had occupied it when no other European race had the least idea of colonising it