In All Our Vast Collection Of States There Is Probably Not One The
Title-Deeds To Which Are More Incontestable Than To This One.
We
had it by two rights, the right of conquest and the right of
purchase.
In 1806 our troops landed, defeated the local forces, and
took possession of Cape Town. In 1814 we paid the large sum of six
million pounds to the Stadholder for the transference of this and
some South American land. It was a bargain which was probably made
rapidly and carelessly in that general redistribution which was
going on. As a house of call upon the way to India the place was
seen to be of value, but the country itself was looked upon as
unprofitable and desert. What would Castlereagh or Liverpool have
thought could they have seen the items which we were buying for our
six million pounds? The inventory would have been a mixed one of
good and of evil; nine fierce Kaffir wars, the greatest diamond
mines in the world, the wealthiest gold mines, two costly and
humiliating campaigns with men whom we respected even when we
fought with them, and now at last, we hope, a South Africa of peace
and prosperity, with equal rights and equal duties for all men. The
future should hold something very good for us in that land, for if
we merely count the past we should be compelled to say that we
should have been stronger, richer, and higher in the world's esteem
had our possessions there never passed beyond the range of the guns
of our men-of-war. But surely the most arduous is the most
honourable, and, looking back from the end of their journey, our
descendants may see that our long record of struggle, with its
mixture of disaster and success, its outpouring of blood and of
treasure, has always tended to some great and enduring goal.
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.
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