The title-deeds to the estate are, as I have said, good ones, but there is one singular and ominous flaw in their provisions.  The ocean has marked three boundaries to it, but the fourth is undefined.  There is no word of the ‘Hinterland;’ for neither the term nor the idea had then been thought of.  Had Great Britain bought those vast regions which extended beyond the settlements?  Or were the discontented Dutch at liberty to pass onwards and found fresh nations to bar the path of the Anglo-Celtic colonists?  In that question lay the germ of all the trouble to come.  An American would realise the point at issue if he could conceive that after the founding of the United States the Dutch inhabitants of the State of New York had trekked to the westward and established fresh communities under a new flag.  Then, when the American population overtook these western States, they would be face to face with the problem which this country has had to solve.  If they found these new States fiercely anti-American and extremely unprogressive, they would experience that aggravation of their difficulties with which our statesmen have had to deal.

At the time of their transference to the British flag the colonists—­Dutch, French, and German—­numbered some thirty thousand.  They were slaveholders, and the slaves were about as numerous as themselves.  The prospect of complete amalgamation between the British and the original settlers would have seemed to be a good one, since they were of much the same stock, and their creeds could only be distinguished by their varying degrees of bigotry and intolerance.  Five thousand British emigrants were landed in 1820, settling on the Eastern borders of the colony, and from that time onwards there was a slow but steady influx of English speaking colonists.  The Government had the historical faults and the historical virtues of British rule.  It was mild, clean, honest, tactless, and inconsistent.  On the whole, it might have done very well had it been content to leave things as it found them.  But to change the habits of the most conservative of Teutonic races was a dangerous venture, and one which has led to a long series of complications, making up the troubled history of South Africa.  The Imperial Government has always taken an honourable and philanthropic view of the rights of the native and the claim which he has to the protection of the law.  We hold and rightly, that British justice, if not blind, should at least be colour-blind.  The view is irreproachable in theory and incontestable in argument, but it is apt to be irritating when urged by a Boston moralist or a London philanthropist upon men whose whole society has been built upon the assumption that the black is the inferior race.  Such a people like to find the higher morality for themselves, not to have it imposed upon them by those who live under entirely different conditions.  They feel—­and with some reason—­that it is a cheap form of virtue which, from the serenity of a well-ordered household in Beacon Street or Belgrave Square, prescribes what the relation shall be between a white employer and his half-savage, half-childish retainers.  Both branches of the Anglo-Celtic race have grappled with the question, and in each it has led to trouble.