He sold his land, in his impatience, for a tenth of what he might have got had he cared to wait and bargain, mounted his wife and children into his waggon, and moved off into the wilderness.”  Froude’s sarcastic comment is not less characteristic than the story.  “Which was the wisest man, the Dutch farmer or the Yankee who was laughing at him?  The only book that the Dutchman had ever read was the Bible, and he knew no better."*

—­ * Short Studies, iii. 497. —­

The state of Natal, which was then perplexing the Colonial Office, puzzled Froude still more.  Four courses seemed to him possible.  Natal might be annexed to Cape Colony, made a province of a South African Federation, governed despotically by a soldier, or left to join the Dutch Republics.  The fifth course, which was actually taken, of giving it responsible government by stages, did not come within the scope of his ideas.  The difficulty of Federation lay, as it seemed to him, in the native problem.

“If we can make up our minds to allow the colonists to manage the natives their own way, we may safely confederate the whole country.  The Dutch will be in the majority, and the Dutch method of management will more or less prevail.  They will be left wholly to themselves for self-defence, and prudence will prevent them from trying really harsh or aggressive measures.  In other respects the Dutch are politically conservative, and will give us little trouble.”  If, on the other hand, native policy was to be directed from home, or, in other words, if adequate precautions were to be taken against slavery, a federal system would be useless, and South Africa must be governed like an Indian province.

Pretoria Froude found full of English, loudly demanding annexation.  He told them, speaking of course only for himself, that it was impossible, because the Cape was a self-governing Colony, and the Dutch majority “would take any violence offered to their kinsmen in the Republics as an injury to themselves.”  To annexation without violence, by consent of the Boers, the great obstacle, so Froude found, was the seizure, the fraudulent seizure, as they thought it, of the Diamond Fields.  He visited Kimberley, called after the Colonial Secretary who acquired it, “like a squalid Wimbledon Camp set down in an arid desert.”  The method of digging for diamonds was then primitive.

“Each owner works by himself or with his own servants.  He has his own wire rope, and his own basket, by which he sends his stuff to the surface to be washed.  The rim of the pit is fringed with windlasses.  The descending wire ropes stretch from them thick as gossamers on an autumn meadow.  The system is as demoralising as it is ruinous.  The owner cannot be ubiquitous:  if he is with his working cradle, his servants in the pit steal his most valuable stones and secrete them.  Forty per cent of the diamonds discovered are supposed to be lost in this way."* The proportion of profit between employer and employed seems to have been fairer than usual, though it might, no doubt, have been more regularly arranged.