[61]. As far as Major Lanyon was personally concerned, future events proved that it had not mattered to him whether the bill passed or not.
[62]. See chapter 25.
[63]. And, as my readers will have noticed, of the Griqualand West legislative council as well.
[64]. To Englishmen this act contained a curious clause. No person within the province could sell or barter to any native (except under certain provisos) any liquor of an intoxicating nature, and my readers can at once realize the difficulty of logically reconciling the anomaly of allowing a man a voice in the government of his country and precluding him from the right of purchasing a glass of beer.
[65]. An expression applied to Griqualand West by the Hon. I. X. Merriman, a Cape colonial politician.
[66]. Curiously enough the sixteen petitions, signed by 1,218 persons, presented to the Volksraad praying for this law were couched in precisely the same terms; they all complained of the same nuisance, and each alleged that on the same day the same decision had been arrived at in the different places from which the petitions came, although in many of these districts not a single coolie or Arab was living. This law, as the Volkstem (the principal newspaper in the Transvaal) says, is not only “ineffectual, but pernicious and condemnable.” See copy of law in appendix.
[67]. This is the motive generally attributed to the late Sir Pomeroy Colley in making the ascent of Majuba during the absence of Sir Evelyn Wood.
[68]. In Great Britain the coal measures have an extent only of 11,859 square miles, in France of 1,719, and in Spain of 3,408.
[69]. In July, 1886, the Kimberley papers gave publicity to a rumor that a ring had been formed by the proprietors of collieries in England, alarmed at the growth of the coal mining industry in Natal, to undersell for an indefinite period, and by these means strangle competition.
[70]. Majuba is 6,000 feet above the sea and 3,000 feet above Mount Prospect.