It has been an anxious question for many among us whether this source of vacillation, with its attendant misfortunes, is to continue in the future.

* * * * *

The early history of the South African Colony has become, by this time, pretty well known by means of the numberless books lately written on the subject.  I will only briefly recapitulate here a few of the principal facts, these being, in part, derived from the annals and reports of the Aborigines Protection Society, which may be considered impartial, seeing that that Society has had a keen eye at all times for the faults of British colonists and the British Government, while constrained, as a truthful recorder, to publish the offences of other peoples and Governments.  I have also constantly referred to Parliamentary papers, and the words of accredited historians and travellers.

The first attempt at a regular settlement by the Dutch at the Cape was made by Jan Van Riebeck, in 1652, for the convenience of the trading vessels of the Netherlands East India Company, passing from Europe to Asia.  Almost from the first these colonists were involved in quarrels with the natives, which furnished excuse for appropriating their lands and making slaves of them.  The intruders stole the natives’ cattle, and the natives’ efforts to recover their property were denounced by Van Riebeck as “a matter most displeasing to the Almighty, when committed by such as they.”  Apologising to his employers in Holland for his show of kindness to one group of natives, Van Riebeck wrote:  “This we only did to make them less shy, so as to find hereafter a better opportunity to seize them—­1,100 or 1,200 in number, and about 600 cattle, the best in the whole country.  We have every day the finest opportunities for effecting this without bloodshed, and could derive good service from the people, in chains, in killing seals or in labouring in the silver mines which we trust will be found here.”

The Netherlands Company frequently deprecated such acts of treachery and cruelty, and counselled moderation.  Their protests however were of no avail.  The mischief had been done.  The unhappy natives, with whom lasting friendship might have been established by fair treatment, had been converted into enemies; and the ruthless punishment inflicted on them for each futile effort to recover some of the property stolen from them, had rendered inevitable the continuance and constant extension of the strife all through the five generations of Dutch rule, and furnished cogent precedent for like action afterwards,[7] After 1652, Colonists of the baser sort kept arriving in cargoes, and gradually the Netherlands Company allowed persons not of their own nation to land and settle under severe fiscal and other restrictions.  Among these were a number of French Huguenots, good men, driven from their homes by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1690.  Then Flemings, Germans, Poles, and others