colonists--Dutch, French, and German--numbered some thirty
thousand. They were slaveholders, and the slaves were about as
numerous as themselves. The prospect of complete amalgamation
between the British and the original settlers would have seemed to
be a good one, since they were of much the same stock, and their
creeds could only be distinguished by their varying degrees of
bigotry and intolerance. Five thousand British emigrants were
landed in 1820, settling on the Eastern borders of the colony, and
from that time onwards there was a slow but steady influx of
English speaking colonists. The Government had the historical
faults and the historical virtues of British rule. It was mild,
clean, honest, tactless, and inconsistent. On the whole, it might
have done very well had it been content to leave things as it found
them. But to change the habits of the most conservative of Teutonic
races was a dangerous venture, and one which has led to a long
series of complications, making up the troubled history of South
Africa. The Imperial Government has always taken an honourable and
philanthropic view of the rights of the native and the claim which
he has to the protection of the law. We hold and rightly, that
British justice, if not blind, should at least be colour-blind. The
view is irreproachable in theory and incontestable in argument, but
it is apt to be irritating when urged by a Boston moralist or a
London philanthropist upon men whose whole society has been built
upon the assumption that the black is the inferior race. Such a
people like to find the higher morality for themselves, not to have
it imposed upon them by those who live under entirely different
conditions. They feel--and with some reason--that it is a cheap
form of virtue which, from the serenity of a well-ordered household
in Beacon Street or Belgrave Square, prescribes what the relation
shall be between a white employer and his half-savage,