it was, in fact, a serious interference with their "domestic concerns and internal economy." And as such it produced the extraordinary protest known to history as the "Rebellion" of Slaghter's Nek. There was no question as to the facts. Booy, the Hottentot, had completed his term of service with Frederick Bezuidenhout, the Boer, and was therefore entitled, under the Cape law, to leave his master's farm, and to remove his property. All this Bezuidenhout admitted; but when it came to a question of yielding obedience to the magistrate's order, the Boer said "No." In the words of Pringle, "He boldly declared that he considered this interference between him (a free burgher) and his Hottentot to be a presumptuous innovation upon his rights, and an intolerable usurpation of tyrannical authority."

And the danger of allowing the Boers to pursue their seventeenth-century dealings with the natives became rapidly greater when the European Colonists, Dutch and English, were brought, by their natural eastward expansion, into direct contact with the masses of military Bantu south and east of the Drakenberg chain of mountains—the actual dark-skinned "natives" of South Africa as it is known to the people of Great Britain. The Boer frontiersman, with his aggressive habits and ingrained contempt for a dark-skin, disintegrated the Bantu mass before we were ready to undertake the work of reconstruction. And therefore the local British authority soon learnt that non-interference in the case of the Boer generally meant the necessity of a much more serious interference at a subsequent date with both Boer and Kafir. And so non-interference, in the admirable spirit of the Duke of Portland's despatch, came to bear one meaning in Downing Street and quite another in Capetown.

D'Urban's policy.

The earliest of the three crucial "divergences of opinion," to which collectively the history of our South African administration owes its sombre hue, was that which led to the reversal of Sir Benjamin D'Urban's frontier policy by Charles Grant (afterwards Lord Glenelg) at the end of the year 1835. The circumstances were these. On Christmas Day, 1834, the Kafirs (without any declaration of war, needless to say) invaded the Cape Colony, murdering the settlers in the isolated farms, burning their homesteads, and driving off their cattle. After a six months' campaign, in which the Dutch and British settlers fought by the side of the regular troops, a treaty was made with the Kafir chiefs which, in the opinion of D'Urban and his local advisers, would render the eastern frontier of the Colony secure from further inroads. The Kafirs were to retire to the line of the Kei River, thus surrendering part of their territory to the European settlers who had suffered most severely from the invasion; while a belt of loyal Kafirs, supported by a chain of forts, was to be interposed between the defeated tribes and the colonial farmsteads. In addition to these measures, D'Urban proposed to compensate the settlers for the enormous losses[1] which they had incurred; since, as a contemporary and not unfriendly writer[2] puts it, the British Government had exposed them for fourteen years to Kafir depredations, rather than acknowledge the existence of a state of affairs that must plainly have compelled it to make active exertions for their protection.

The view of the home authority was very different. In the opinion of His Majesty's ministers at Downing Street the Kafir invasion was the result of a long series of unjustifiable encroachments on the part of the European settlers. D'Urban was instructed, therefore, to reinstate the Kafirs in the districts from which they had retired under the treaty of September, 1835, and to cancel all grants of land beyond the Fish River—the original eastern boundary of the Colony—which the Colonial Government had made to its European subjects from 1817 onwards; while, as for compensation, any indemnity was altogether out of the question, since the colonists had only themselves to thank for the enmity of the natives—if, indeed, they had not deliberately provoked the war with a view to the acquisition of fresh territory.

The divergence between these two opinions is sufficiently well marked. To trace the precise agencies through which two diametrically opposed views were evolved on this occasion from the same groundwork of facts would be too lengthy a business; but, by way of comment, we may recall two statements, each significant and authentic. Cloete, writing while the events in question were still fresh in his mind, says of Lord Glenelg's despatch: "A communication more cruel, unjust, and insulting to the feelings not only of Sir Benjamin D'Urban ... but of the inhabitants ... could hardly have been penned by a declared enemy of the country and its Governor." And Sir George Napier, by whom D'Urban was superseded, stated in evidence given before the House of Commons: "My own experience, and what I saw with my own eyes, have confirmed me that I was wrong and Sir Benjamin D'Urban was perfectly right; that if he meant to keep Kafirland under British rule, the only way of doing so was by having a line of forts, and maintaining troops in them."

The Great Trek.

This settlement of a South African question upon a basis of British, or rather non-South African, ideas was followed by events as notorious as they were disastrous. It must be remembered that in 1819-20 the first and only effort to introduce a considerable British population into South Africa had been successfully carried out when the "Albany" settlers, to the number of some five thousand, were established in this and other districts upon the eastern border of the Cape Colony. The colonial farmers who suffered from the Kafir invasion of 1834-5 were not exclusively Boers. Among them there were many members of the new British population, and the divergence of opinion between D'Urban and Lord Glenelg was all the more significant, since in this case the British settlers were in agreement with the Boers. It was no longer merely a divergence of views as between the local and the home authority, but as between the British in Britain and the British in South Africa. It must also be remembered that, in the same year as the Kafir invasion, a social revolution—the emancipation of slaves—had been accomplished in the Cape Colony by an Act of the British Parliament, in comparison with which the nationalisation of the railways or of the mines in England would seem a comparatively trifling disturbance of the system of private property to the Englishman of to-day. The reversal of D'Urban's arrangements for the safety of the eastern frontier was not only bad in itself, but it came at a bad time. Whether the secession of the Emigrant Farmers would in any case have taken place as the result of the emancipation of slaves is a matter which cannot now be decided. But, however this may be, the fact remains that two men so well qualified to give an opinion on the subject as Judge Cloete and Sir John Robinson, the first Prime Minister of Natal, unhesitatingly ascribe the determining influence which drove the Boers to seek a home beyond the jurisdiction of the British Government to the sense of injustice created by the measures dictated by