[32] Full information may be found in “The Irish in Australia,” by J.F.  Hogan.

[33] For an excellent historical description of the various Australian land systems, see the official “Year-Book of the Commonwealth,” 1909.

[34] “Life of Sir George Grey,” Professor G.C.  Henderson.

CHAPTER VII

SOUTH AFRICA AND IRELAND

In the years 1836-37, when Wentworth was agitating for self-government in New South Wales, and when Canada was in rebellion for the lack of it, thousands of waggons, driven by men smarting under the same sort of grievance, were jolting northward across the South African veld bearing Dutch families from the British Colony of the Cape of Good Hope to the new realms we now know as the Orange River Colony and the Transvaal.  The “Great Trek” was a form of protest against bad government to which we have no parallel in the Empire save in the wholesale emigrations from Ireland at various periods of her history—­after the Treaty of Limerick, again after the destruction of the wool trade, again in 1770-1777, after the Ulster evictions, and lastly after the great famine.  The trekkers, like the Irish emigrants, nursed a resentment against the British Government which was a source of untold expense and suffering in the future.  Indeed, the whole history of South Africa bears a close resemblance to the history of Ireland.  In no other part of the Empire, save in Ireland, was the policy of the Home Government so persistently misguided, in spite of constantly recurring opportunities for the repair of past errors.  Fatality seems from first to last to have dogged the footsteps of those who tried to govern there.  Before the British conquest the Dutch East India Company and the Netherlands Government were as unsuccessful as their British successors, whose legal claim to the Cape, established for the second time by conquest in 1806, was definitely confirmed by the Congress of Vienna in 1815.  The Dutch colonists were a fine race of men, whose ancestors, like the Puritan founders of New England, had fled in 1652 from religious persecution, and who retained the virile qualities of their race.  Though in many respects they resembled the backward and intensely conservative French-Canadian inhabitants, they differed from them, and resembled their closer relatives in race, the New Englanders, in an innate passion for free representative government.  They had rebelled repeatedly against their Dutch oppressors, and had gone through a brief Republican phase.  It is an example, therefore, of the thoughtless inconsequence of our old colonial policy that we gave the French-Canadians, who were the least desirous of it, the form, without the spirit, of representative institutions, while we denied, until it was too late to avert racial discord, even the form to the Cape Dutch.  In truth, the Colony seems to have been regarded purely in the light of a naval station, while the British and Irish inflow