At Bloemfontein Froude called on President Brand, “a resolute, stubborn-looking man, with a frank, but not over-conciliatory, expression of face.”  Brand was in no conciliatory mood.  He held that his country had been robbed of land which the British Government renounced in 1854, and only resumed now because diamonds had been discovered on it.  The interview, however, was neither unimportant nor unsatisfactory.  It was followed by an invitation to dinner, and frank discussion of the whole subject.  So firmly convinced was Froude of the President’s good faith and of the injustice done him that he pleaded the cause of the Free State with the Colonial Office, and Lord Carnarvon settled the dispute in a friendly manner by the payment of a reasonable sum.+ But that was not till 1876, after Brand had visited London, and seen Lord Carnarvon himself.

—­ * Short Studies, vol. iii. p. 537. + 90,000 lbs. —­

At the end of 1874 Froude returned to England, and reported to Lord Carnarvon what he had observed.  The Colonial Secretary, just, but punctilious, was unwilling to reverse Lord Kimberley’s policy, and Froude discovered that party politics, to which he traced all our woes, had much less to do with administration than he imagined.  Under the influence of Bishop Colenso, an intrepid friend of the natives, Lord Carnarvon had already interfered on behalf of Langalibalele, but that only involved overruling the Government of Natal.  After mature consideration he wrote a despatch to Sir Henry Barkly in which stress was laid upon the importance of arranging all differences with the Orange State.  Then he proceeded to the subject of Federation, which was always in his mind and at his heart.  Here he unfortunately failed to make allowance for the sensitive pride of Colonial statesmen.  He proposed the assemblage of a Federal Conference at Cape Town, at which Froude would represent the Colonial Office.  For Cape Colony he suggested the names of the Prime Minister, Molteno, and of Paterson, who led the Opposition.

In June, 1875, Froude went back to South Africa, this time as an acknowledged emissary of the Government, but by ill luck his arrival coincided with the receipt of the despatch.  The effect of this document was prodigious.  Molteno considered that he had been personally insulted.  The Legislative Assembly was defiant, and greeted the recital of Carnarvon’s words with ironical laughter.  A Ministerial Minute, signed by Molteno and his colleagues, protested against the Colonial Secretary’s intrusion, and especially against his rather ill advised reference to a proposed separation of the eastern from the western provinces of the Cape.  It was a fact that Port Elizabeth and Grahamstown, where there were very few Dutch, considered that they paid proportionately too much towards the colonial revenues, and desired separate treatment.  But the people of Cape Town strongly objected, and it was unwise for the Secretary of State