WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS EDINBURGH AND LONDON MCMIII TO THE HONOURABLE HUGH ARCHIBALD WYNDHAM, IN MEMORY OF OUR AFRICAN HOUSEKEEPING. “The greatest honour that ever belonged to the greatest Monarkes was the inlarging their Dominions, and erecting Commonweales.”—Captain John Smith ....

On the last day of May 1902 the signature at Pretoria of the conditions of peace brought to an end a war which had lasted for nearly three years, and had among other things destroyed a government, dissolved a society, and laid waste a country. In those last months of fighting some progress had been made with the reconstruction—at least with that not unimportant branch of it which is concerned with the machinery of government. A working administration had been put together, new ordinances in the

There are kinds of history which a modern education ignores, and which a modern mind is hardly trained to understand. We can interest ourselves keenly in the first vagaries of embryo humankind; and for savagery, which is a hunting-ground for the sociologist and the folk-lorist, we have an academic respect. But for savagery naked and not ashamed, fighting its own battles and ruling its own peoples, we reserve an interest only when it reaches literary record in a saga. Otherwise it is for us neith

The world’s changes, so philosophers have observed, spring from small origins, though their reason and their justification may be ample enough, and exercise the learned for a thousand years. A sailor’s tale, a book in an old library, may set the adventurer off on his voyages, and presently empires arise, and his fatherland alters its history. The world moves to no measured tune; everywhere there are sudden breaks, paradoxes, high enterprises which end in smoke, and pedestrian beginnings which is

Every race has its Marathon into which the historian does not inquire too closely who has a reverence for holy places and a fear of sacrilege. It may be a battle or a crusade, a creed, or perhaps only a poem, but whatever it is, it is part and parcel of the national life, and it is impossible to reach the naked truth through the rose-coloured mists of pious tradition. A Sempach or a Bannockburn cannot be explained by a bare technical history. The spirit of a nation was in arms, the national spir

It is a fair working rule of life that the behaviour of a man in his sports is a good index to his character in graver matters. With certain reservations the same holds true of a people. For on the lowest interpretation of the word “sport,” the high qualities of courage, honour, and self-control are part of the essential equipment, and the mode in which such qualities appear is a reflex of the idiosyncrasies of national character. But this is true mainly of the old settled peoples, whose sports

The Boer character has suffered by its simplicity. It has, as a rule, been crudely summed up in half a dozen denunciatory sentences, or, in the case of more curious students, it has been analysed and defined with a subtlety for which there is no warrant. A hasty condemnation is not the method for a product so full of difficulty and interest, and a chain of laborious paradoxes scarcely enables us to comprehend a thing which is pre-eminently broad and simple. The Boer has rarely been understood by

We leave the broken highway, channelled by rains and rutted by ox-waggons, and plunge into the leafy coolness of a great wood. Great in circumference only, for the blue gums and pines and mimosa-bushes are scarcely six years old, though the feathery leafage and the frequency of planting make a thicket of the young trees. The rides are broad and grassy as an English holt, dipping into hollows, climbing steep ridges, and showing at intervals little side-alleys, ending in green hills, with the acco

We left Klerksdorp in a dust-storm so thick and incessant that it was difficult to tell where the houses ended and the open country began. The little town, which may once have been a clean, smiling place, has been for months the corpus vile of military operations. A dozen columns have made it their destination; the transport and supplies of the whole Western Army have been congested there, with the result that the town lands have been rubbed bare of grass, the streets furrowed into dust-heaps, a

Some thirty miles east of Pietersburg, the most northerly railway station in the Transvaal, the Leydsdorp coach, which once a-week imperils the traveller’s life, climbs laboriously into a nest of mountains, and on the summit enters an upland plateau, with shallow valleys and green forest-clad slopes. Twenty miles on and the same coach, if it has thus far escaped destruction, precipitously descends a mountain-side into the fever flats which line the Groot Letaba and the Letsitela. The Leydsdorp r

Machadodorp, that straggling village called after a Portuguese commander, is the most easterly outpost of the high veld. A few miles farther and there is a sheer fall into narrow mountain glens, down which the Elands River and the Delagoa Bay Railway make the best of their way to the lowlands. North lies the hill country of Lydenburg, to which the traveller may come in a coach after a day of heart-breaking hills and neck-breaking descents. But south for a good hundred miles sweeps the high veld

The romance which is inseparable from all roads belongs especially to those great arteries of the world which traverse countries and continents, and unite different zones and climates, and pass through extreme variations of humankind. For in them the adventurous sense of the unknown, which is found in a country lane among hedgerows, becomes an ever-present reality to the most casual traveller. And it is a peculiarity of the world’s roads that this breath of romance blows most strongly on the pat

The great days of South African sport are over, and there is no disguising the fact. Open any early record, such as Oswell or Gordon-Cumming, and the size and variety of the bag dazzles the mind of the amateur of to-day. Then it was possible to shoot lion in Cape Colony and elephant in the Transvaal, and to find at one’s door game whose only habitat is now some narrow region near the Mountains of the Moon. Turn even to the later pages of Mr Selous, and anywhere north of a line drawn east and wes

After a three years’ war, and at the cost of over 200 millions, Britain has secured for her own children the indisputable possession of the new colonies. In earlier chapters an attempt has been made to sketch roughly the historical influences which may help to shape the future and to describe the actual features of the land which charm and perplex the beholder. We have now to face the direct problems into which the situation can be resolved, and in particular that question of material wellbeing

To the Boer the land was the beginning and end of all things: a town was only a necessary excrescence, an industry an uitlander whim. A land policy is therefore one of the first burdens which attend our heritage. Happily we are not seriously impeded by the wreckage of systems which have failed. The Boer Government had no land legislation, and the few laws, such as the Occupation Law of 1886, which touched on the question, were less statutory enactments than administrative resolutions. The Boer f

No question is more fraught with difficulties for the home philosopher than this, but there is none on which practical men have made up their mind with such bitter completeness. The root of the trouble is that England and South Africa talk, and will continue to talk, in different languages on the matter. The Englishman, using the speech of conventional politics, seems to the colonist to talk academic nonsense; while the South African, speaking the rough and ready words of the practical man, appe

It is a delicate matter to indulge in platitudes about a city. For a city is an organism more self-conscious than a state, and a personality less robust than an individual. Comments which, if made on a nation, would be ignored, and on an individual would be tolerated, awaken angry reprisals when directed to a municipal area. The business is still more delicate when the city concerned is not yet quite sure of herself. Johannesburg is a city, though she has no cathedral to support the conventional

The constitutional requirements of a country are never determined solely by its political needs. Some account must be taken of its prior history, for theories of government are apt to sink deep into the mind of a people and to become unconsciously a part of its political outlook. No form of education is less conscious or more abiding in its effects. It may even happen that the fabric which such theories created has been deliberately overthrown with the popular consent, but none the less the theo

No South African problem is more long-descended than the question of Federation. It was a dream of Sir George Grey’s in the mid-century, and it was a central feature in the policy of Sir Bartle Frere—that policy which, after twenty years of obscuration, is at last seen in its true and beneficent light. Nor was it held only by English governors. Local statesmen in Cape Colony saw in it a panacea for the endless frontier difficulties which tried their patience and their talents. The ultra-independ

The foremost political lesson of the late war was the solidarity of military spirit throughout the Empire. But this cohesion is only in spirit, and the actual position of colonial forces is that of isolated units, connected in no system, and subject to no central direction. For a student of military law, or that branch of it which concerns the relation of military forces to the civil power, a survey of the British colonies has much curious interest. Speaking generally, since 1868 there have been

The problems discussed in the foregoing chapters have been concerned chiefly with the new colonies, for it is to them that we must look for the motive force to expedite union. They must long continue to be the most important factor in British South Africa, partly from their accidental position as the late theatre of war, and more especially from their wealth, the intricacy of their politics, the high level of ability among their inhabitants, the splendid chances of their future, and the delicacy