"LEST WE FORGET!" 5145

responsible for the peace of South Africa. To interfere on behalf
of their own ideological convictions and simultaneously to refuse
to take any long view of imperial policy on the ground that
imperialism was expensive and morally wrong was to light a
.fire on the veldt and leave it. Yet this was the habit of the
English humanitarian Left for more than a century.

This hiatus in the application of moral principle to the
government of an Empire again and again vitiated the history
of British South Africa. In 1852 an attempt was made by a
treaty with the Boers to stabilise the situation. Britain agreed
to "meddle no more beyond the Orange River and to leave the
Dutch and the natives to settle their differences among them-
selves." Yet seventeen years later Gladstone's first administration,
yielding to the pressure of humanitarian supporters, intervened
in breach of treaty to protect the Basutos against the Boers of
the Orange Free State. Two years later it broke faith with the
Dutch again, annexing Griqualand to satisfy not missionaries
but prospectors. The diamond diggings—the richest in the
world—which had been discovered on a Dutch farm beside the
Vaal river, were named after the Liberal Colonial Secretary^
Lord Kimberley. But, despite the production of a highly dubious
treaty with a native chief, the annexation was repudiated
by the Dutch electors of the Cape. To complete the circle of
ill-will, the natives in the new occupied territory were armed
by the British against the local* farmers.

Alfnost as imperfectly informed about the internal situation
of South Africa as Gladstone's government,1 but animated by
-a different ideal, Disraeli's administration of 1874-80 applied
imperial instead of humanitarian principles. The Colonial
"Secretary, Lord Carnarvon, satisfied that the union of Dutch and
English was the only solution of the African problem, paid
compensation to the Orange Free State for the loss of Griqualand
and admitted the wrong doue. But ill-advised as to the local
facts ajid impatient to effect a federation of South Africa before
the swing of the political pendulum should put a term to his
office, he sent Sir Bartle Frefe to the Cape with a premature
mandate to unite the two races. Ignoring the accumulated
animosities of generations and without waiting for the reviving
trust of the Dutch to mature, he allowed its peril from Zulu

According to Froude, Lord Cardweil, who bad been a former Liberal Colonial
Secretary, thought in 1875 that Cape Colony was purely British in population and
that all the Dutch had migrated to the Orange Free State,—Oceana, $.

E.S. B