“It is natural,” replied Mr Stanley, “that the English of Cape Colony should be anxious for the future of the country in case of a separation from Great Britain, and that they should fear the establishment of a Boer Republic. I see in this a very strong reason why someone with power, wealth and influence should step forward and try to lead them to do something to prepare for maintaining the balance of power. Rhodesia, the Transvaal, the Orange Free State and Natal draw away from the Cape Colony a large number of enterprising Englishmen, and consequently the Boers, not being so enterprising, nor so very fond of running from one home to another unless a great political principal is at stake, prefer to stay on their farms and multiply there, whereas the English are all the time thinned down by those everlasting discoveries and developments in the north and north-east, so that they remain numerically inferior to the Dutch. If there was a Company with a man like Mr Rhodes at the head of it, which would buy land and settle on it new colonists of English birth, they would be all the time keeping up the equality that is necessary to prevent the English from being Boer-ridden.”
“Do you think Rhodesia would adapt itself to such a policy as well as the Cape Colony.”
“Quite as well. With the opening of all those mines reported to be so promising, and with the vast advertisement of the opening of the railway, Mr Rhodes ought to see that more miners have been coming into the country than agriculturalists, and something ought to be done to provide for the provisioning of so many people and keeping the prices of food down by multiplying the producers of food. The country is just as well adapted for them as any other in South Africa. If the Government of Rhodesia neglect this, the Boers will go on filtering through the Transvaal to Rhodesia, and the same mistakes will recur that have been made in the Cape Colony and the Transvaal, where the settled population is Dutch and the moving English.”
Australians Available.
“What are the principal countries outside South Africa from which such settlers could be drawn?”
“There are plenty of people in Australia, for instance, who would be very glad of the opportunity to settle in nice places in Rhodesia if they were tempted to do so. You must show that Rhodesia is better than Australia, where you have the fringes of the coast and the best parts of the interior already taken up. You have only to go to Melbourne, Sydney, and other large Australian towns, to find that they have a very large population who do not know what to do with themselves or where to go, who would be valuable to a new country like Rhodesia. Take, for example, the people who went from Australia to Paraguay. These would be far better in Rhodesia amongst Englishmen than in Paraguay surrounded by Spanish Americans, whose ideas and modes of life are so entirely different. When I was in Melbourne I had an offer from fifteen hundred Australians to settle in East Africa. I advised them not to do so until the railway was built. They wanted to start ranches and raise cattle there, but I said their stock would die before they could reach the pastures. In Rhodesia to-day, however, you have a country, to which such people would be very advantageous. Cape Colony has an enormous area that requires to be populated, and so has Natal. How are you to reach the class of people required for this? What are you to offer them? It must be something better than where they are now.”
“In your opinion Rhodesia is well adapted for cattle raising?”
“Yes; the Matabele found it so, and there are still many cattle there despite the rinderpest. New cattle will do well enough, I think, if you take them rapidly by railway across the malarial belt.”
“And seeing that the Cape is so much nearer to England than Australia, there is no reason why an export trade should not be developed in time?”