In support of the charges against the Imperial Government, the emigrants dwelt largely upon the devastation of the eastern districts by the Kaffirs’ inroad of December, 1834, which was certainly unprovoked by the colonists.  Yet Lord Glenelg, who was then Secretary of State for the Colonies, justified the Kaffirs, and not only refused to punish them, but actually gave them a large slip of land, including the dense jungles along the Fish River, that had long been part of the colony; and made no other provision against the recurrence of a destructive invasion than a series of treaties with a number of barbarous chiefs, who had no regard for their engagements.  This event is the most prominent feature in the correspondence of the emigrants; it is fairly recorded, and the language used is in general much more moderate than that employed by the English frontier colonists when relating the same circumstance.

Next stands the removal of all restraint from the coloured population of the colony, without the protection to the whites of even a Vagrant Act.  Several of the colonial divisions had been for ten or twelve years overrun by fugitives from the Basuto and Betshuana countries, who had been driven from their own homes by the troubles already recorded.  These people were usually termed Mantatees or Makatees, from the supposition that they were all subjects of Ma Ntatisi.  Towards the eastern frontiers Kaffirs, and after the war Fingos, wandered about practically wherever they chose.  In the remainder of the colony Hottentots, free blacks, and mixed breeds came and went as they pleased.  How is it possible, said the farmers, for us to cultivate the ground, or breed cattle, with all these savages and semi-savages constantly watching for opportunities to plunder us—­with no police, and no law under which suspicious characters can be arrested and made to account for their manner of living?

Much is said of the reproofs of Sir Benjamin D’Urban by the Secretary of State, and, after 1838, of the dismissal of that Governor, (1) The emigrants asserted that he was the best Governor the colony had had since it became subject to England; they dwelt upon his benevolence, his ability, his strict justice, his impartiality to white and black, his efforts to promote civilization; and then they complained, in words more bitter than are to be found when they referred to any other subject, that the good Governor had been reproved, and finally deprived of his office, because he had told the plain truth, regardless of the London Missionary Society; and had endeavoured to mete out to black criminals the same justice that he would have meted out had they been white.  There is now no one in South Africa who does not agree with the emigrants in this matter.  Nearly half a century has passed away since Sir Benjamin D’Urban was forced into retirement by Lord Glenelg; and during that period the principal measures which he proposed have been approved of and adopted, while the successors of those missionaries who were his bitter opponents are at present among the strongest advocates of his system of dealing with the natives.