‘I am quite bewildered,’ said my host, at the end of a long conversation.  ’I know more of South Africa than I knew before.  But we shall not believe you unless you pitch into someone.  You have not done that yet; you have only explained past history, and have had a good word for everybody.’

‘Then, Sir,’ I quickly answered, ’I pitch into you, and into your Governments, one after another, for not mastering the facts of South African life.  Why do you now refuse to protect your own highway into the Interior, and at the same time conserve the work of the missionaries whom you have supported for two generations, and thus put an end to the freebooting of the Boers, and of our own people who joined them?  At present there is a disarmed coloured population, disarmed by your own laws on account only of their colour; and there is an armed population, armed under your laws, because they are white; and you decline to interfere in any way for the protection of the former.  You will neither protect the natives nor give them fair play and an open field, so that they may protect themselves.’

‘Now, my dear,’ said the little wife, ’I wonder who deserves to be hanged now?  I am sure we are obliged to Mr. Mackenzie for giving us a clear view of things.’

‘No, no, you are always too hasty,’ said my host, quite gravely.  ’The thing gets very serious.  Do I rightly understand you, Mr. Mackenzie, that practically we Englishmen arm those freebooters (from the Transvaal,) and practically keep the blacks disarmed, and that when the blacks have called on us for protection and have offered themselves and their country to the Queen we have paid no heed?  Is this true?’

‘Every word true,’ I replied.

’Then may I ask, did you not fight for these people?  You had surely got a rifle,’ said my host, turning right round on me.

‘My dear, you forget Mr. Mackenzie has been a Missionary,’ said his wife.  ’You yourself, as a Director of the London Missionary Society, would have had him cashiered if he had done anything of the kind.’

’Nonsense, you don’t see the thing.  I assure you I could not have endured such meanness and injustice.  I should have broken such confounded laws.  I should have shouldered a rifle, I know,’ said the indignant man as he paced his room.

‘My dear, you would have got shot, you know,’ said his wife.

‘Shot! yes, certainty, why not?’ said my host; and added gravely, ’A fellow would know why he was shot.  Is it true, Mr. Mackenzie, that those blacks were kind to our people who fled to them from the Transvaal, and that they there protected them?’

‘Quite true,’ I rejoined.

‘Then by heaven,’ said Mr.——­, raising his voice—­

‘Let us go to supper,’ broke in the gentle wife, ’you are only wearying Mr. Mackenzie by your constant wishes to hang some one.’

“I trust my friends will forgive me for recalling this conversation, which vividly pictures the state of people’s mind concerning South Africa in 1882.  I found that most people were incredulous as to the facts being known at the Colonial Office, and there was a uniform persuasion that Mr. Gladstone was ignorant that such things were going on.”