A Short History of England, Ireland and Scotland

by Mary Platt Parmele

The Irish question is such a tangled web of wrong and injustice complicated by folly and outrage, that the wisest and best-intentioned statesmanship is baffled. Whether the conditions would be improved by giving them their own Parliament, could only be determined by experiment; and that experiment England is not yet willing to try.

CHAPTER XIV

A fitting companion to the Story of England's Empire in India, is that of her South African Colonial Possessions.

It was about the year 1652, while Oliver Cromwell's star was highest in the heavens, that the Dutch East India Company, needing a resting place on the way to the East, planted the germ of an Empire at the Cape of Good Hope. The Portuguese, those pioneers in exploration had only lightly touched this uninviting spot, and then were away chasing rumors of gold.

But the Hollanders were men of a different sort. They asked no indulgences from Nature; and when their roots had once grappled the soil, however disheartening the conditions, they were not to be lured away by glistening surfaces farther on. All they asked was a place on which to grow. And so with stolid persistence they worked away in a field the least promising ever offered to human endeavor.

But the fates befriended them, and after the Revocation of the "Edict of Nantes," a touch of grace and charm was brought into their sterile life by the arrival of three hundred Huguenot refugees. And there, in that austere land, for more than a century these children from Holland and France patiently toiled, and with mild content watched their grazing cattle as they gradually spread over a huge expanse of territory; their only reward the feeling that this barren resting place on the way to India was all their own, and that they had a sense of independence which answered the deepest craving in their hearts; they were safe, forever safe from the Old-World tyrannies.

But there was another nation which also needed a resting place on the way to India. Great Britain, following closely in the footsteps of Holland, now had a Greater East India Company, and a larger empire growing in the East. And clouds began to gather over the Dutch Colonists, as they saw their solitude invaded by Old-World currents. Perhaps the irritation from this made them quarrelsome; for temper and temperament have been two most important factors in the story of the Dutch in South Africa. At all events, there were various outbreaks and insurrections, becoming at last so serious that the English Government felt impelled to aid in their suppression. And this they did so effectually that after a battle with the local forces in 1806, they were virtual rulers of Cape Colony, which, in 1814, upon the payment of six million pounds to the Stadtholder, was formally ceded to Great Britain.

So, by right of conquest, and by right of purchase, England had come into possession (although at the time unaware of it) of the greatest diamond mines, and the richest gold mines in the world. And it had turned out that the Dutch Colonists for a century and a half had been subduing man and nature simply to enrich the English; and in return they were expected to live contentedly and peaceably in the land they had made habitable for human occupation!