Who, in the days of the Murrays, Mr. F. Y. St. Leger, and subsequently of Mr. F. E. Garrett, could have thought that the `Cape Times' would in this manner have destroyed its great traditions, built up during the nineteenth century, by sanctioning a law under which Cape Magistrates would be forced to render homeless the Natives of the Cape in their own Cape of Good Hope? The one Colony whose administration, under its wise statesmen of the Victorian era, created for it that tremendous prestige that was felt throughout the dark continent, and that rested largely upon the fact that among its citizens, before its incorporation with the northern states, it knew no distinction of colour, for all were free to qualify for the exercise of electoral rights. The old Cape Colony of our boyhood days, whose administration, despite occasional lapses, managed during a hundred years to steer clear of the familiar massacres and bloodshed of punitive expeditions against primitive tribes, massacres and bloodshed so common in other parts of the same continent; the old Cape Colony whose peaceful methods of civilization acted as an incentive to the Bechuana tribes to draw the sword and resist every attempt at annexation by Europeans other than the British: a resistance so determined that it thwarted the efforts to link German South West Africa with the Transvaal Republic, and so kept open the trade route to Rhodesia for the British. All this done without any effort on the part of the British themselves, and done by the Natives out of regard for Cape Colony ideals. But alas! these Natives are now debarred from tilling the soil of the Cape, except as Republican serfs. What would Sir George Grey, or Bishop Gray, or Saul Solomon, say of this? What would these Empire builders say if they came back here and found that the hills and valleys of their old Cape Colony have ceased to be a home to many of their million brawny blacks, whose muscles helped the conqueror to secure his present hold of the country? What would these champions of justice say if they saw how, with her entrance into the Union, Cape Colony had bartered her shining ideals for the sombre history of the northern states, a history defiled with innocent blood, and a territory soaked with native tears and scandalized by burying Natives alive; and that with one stroke of the pen the so-called federation has demolished the Rhodes's formula of "equal rights for all civilized men, irrespective of colour"? How are the mighty fallen!
But while we sing the funeral dirge of Cape ideals, the Republicans sing songs of gladness. Thus, when Mr. Sauer, a noted disciple of the late Mr. Saul Solomon, died, the `Bloemfontein Friend', the leading Ministerial daily of the "Free" State, said:
== He stood uncompromisingly for Rhodes's ideal of complete equality, and it was an open secret that Mr. Sauer, who piloted the Natives' Land Act through Parliament last session, would, had circumstances been different, have been its strongest opponent. It was the irony of fate that made him Minister of Native Affairs when a law had to be passed which appeared to be in entire conflict with his cherished lifelong convictions. The Act he passed embodied the hated northern principles which he had consistently opposed during the whole of his political career, and, as in the case of the Act of Union, it was only Mr. Sauer's influence that allayed the feelings of the intransigent section of the native population.
Mr. Sauer was a convinced disciple of the teachings of Saul Solomon, who founded and preached the gospel of the Cape native policy. In our view that was a mistaken policy. Its principal modern exponent has now been taken away, and if God, and not man, shapes the destinies of nations, we may be pardoned the belief that Mr. Sauer's death at this juncture means something more than the mere passing from the finite into the infinite of one human being. ==
If this is a brutal utterance, it is at any rate more frank, and therefore more manly, than the vacillating policy of the `Cape Times', the Ministerial organ of the Cape Colony. It is said that "politics make strange bed-fellows", but not even the shrewdest of our political seers could have predicted that in 1913 the `Cape Times' would be found in the same camp as its Republican contemporaries which sing glees over the demolished structure of Cape traditions, and over the passing away of Victorian statesmen and the principles they stood for — Victorian principles, which the `Cape Times' of other days helped to build up in another political camp! How are the mighty fallen!
Dear lovely bowers of innocence and ease,
Seats of my youth when every sport could please,
How often have I loitered o'er thy green,
Where humble happiness endeared each scene!
How often have I paused on every charm:
The shelter'd cot, the cultivated farm,
The never failing brook, the busy mill,
The decent church that topt the neighbouring hill,
The hawthorn bush with seats beneath the shade
For talking age and whisp'ring lovers made!
How often have I blest the coming day,
When toil remitting lent its turn to play!
And all the village train, from labour free,
Led up their sports beneath the spreading tree;
With bashful virgins' sidelong looks of love,
The matron's glance that would these looks reprove.
These were thy charms, sweet Province, sports like these,
With sweet succession, taught e'en toil to please;
These round thy bowers their cheerful influence shed,
These were thy charms — but all these charms are fled.