This seems the fittest place for a few words on the public life of Natal, the British Colony which has been the latest to receive responsible self-government. This gift was bestowed upon it in 1893, not without some previous hesitation, for the whole white population was then about 46,000, and the adult males were little over 15,000. However, the system then established seems to be working smoothly. There is a cabinet of five ministers, with two Houses of Legislature, an Assembly of thirty-seven, and a Council of eleven members, the former elected for four years at most (subject to the chance of a dissolution), the latter appointed by the Governor for ten years. No regular parties have so far been formed, nor can it yet be foreseen on what lines they will form themselves, for the questions that have chiefly occupied the legislature are questions on which few differences of principle have as yet emerged. All the whites are agreed in desiring to exclude Kafirs and newcomers from India from the electoral franchise. All seemed in 1895 to be agreed in approving the tariff, which was for revenue only; and Natal had then one of the lowest among the tariffs in force in British Colonies. (The ordinary ad valorem rate was five per cent.) In 1898, however, Natal entered the South African Customs Union previously consisting of Cape Colony, the Orange Free State, Basutoland, and Bechuanaland, and the tariff of that Union, as fixed in 1898, was higher and to some extent protective. Even between the citizens of English and those of Dutch origin, the latter less than one-fourth of the whole, and living chiefly in the country, there has been but little antagonism, for the Dutch, being less numerous than in Cape Colony, are much less organized. Among the English, British sentiment is strong, for the war of 1881 with the Transvaal people not merely re-awakened the memories of the Boer siege of Durban in 1842, but provoked an anti-Boer feeling, which was kept in check only by the necessity of conciliating the Transvaal government in order to secure as large as possible a share of the import trade into that country. As the Natal line of railway is a competitor for this trade with the Cape lines, as well as with the line from Delagoa Bay, there is a keen feeling of rivalry toward Cape Colony, which is thought to have been unfriendly in annexing the native territories of Griqualand East and Pondoland, which lie to the west of Natal, and which the latter Colony had hoped some day or other to absorb. When her hopes of territorial extension were closed on that side, Natal began to cast longing eyes on Zululand, a hilly region of rich pastures which is at present directly administered by the Imperial Government, and which contains not only some gold-reefs of still unascertained value, but also good beds of coal. Ultimately in 1897, the home government consented to allow Natal to absorb both Zululand and the Tonga country all the way north to the Portuguese frontier.
The political life of Natal flows in a tranquil current, because the population is not merely small, but also scattered over a relatively wide area, with only two centres of population that rise above the rank of villages. The people, moreover, lead an easy and quiet life. They are fairly well off, occupying large cattle-farms, and with no great inducement to bring a great deal of land under tillage, because the demand for agricultural produce is still comparatively small. Not much over one-fortieth part of the surface is cultivated, of which about two hundred thousand acres are cultivated by Europeans, of course by the hands of coloured labourers. Sugar is raised along the coast, and tea has lately begun to be grown. The Natalians have, perhaps, become the less energetic in developing the natural resources of their country because thrice in their recent history the equable course of development has been disturbed. In 1870 many of the most active spirits were drawn away to the newly-discovered diamond-fields of Kimberley. In 1879 the presence of the large British force collected for the great Zulu war created a sudden demand for all sorts of food-stuffs and forage, which disappeared when the troops were removed; and since 1886 the rapid growth of the Witwatersrand gold-fields, besides carrying off the more adventurous spirits, has set so many people speculating in the shares of mining companies that steady industry has seemed a slow and tame affair. At present not many immigrants come to Natal to settle down as farmers; and the Colony grows but slowly in wealth and population. Nevertheless, its prosperity in the long run seems assured. It is more favoured by soil and by sky than most parts of Cape Colony. It has an immense resource in its extensive coal-fields. Its ocean trade and railway traffic are increasing. In proximity to these coal-fields it has deposits of iron which will one day support large industrial communities. And its inhabitants are of good, solid stuff, both English, Dutch, and German, for there are many German immigrants. No British Colony can show a population of better quality, and few perhaps one equally good.
Besides the railway question, which is bound up with the problem of the port of Durban and its bar, the question which has most interest for the people of Natal is that of the coloured population, Kafir and Indian. The Kafirs, mostly of Zulu race, number 460,000, about ten times the whites, who are estimated at 50,000. Nearly all live under tribal law in their own communities, owning some cattle, and tilling patches of land which amount in all to about 320,000 acres. The law of the Colony wisely debars them from the use of European spirits. A few of the children are taught in mission schools,—the only educational machinery provided for them,—and a very few have been converted to Christianity, but the vast majority are little influenced by the whites in any way. They are generally peaceable, and perpetrate few crimes of violence upon whites; but however peaceable they may have shown themselves, their numerical preponderance is disquieting. A Kafir may, by the Governor's gift, obtain the electoral suffrage when he has lived under European law for at least seven years; but it has been bestowed on extremely few, so that in fact the native does not come into politics at all. The Indian immigrants, now reckoned at 50,000, are of two classes. Some are coolies, who have been imported from India under indentures binding them to work for a term of years, chiefly on the sugar plantations of the coast. Many of these return at the expiration of the term, but more have remained, and have become artisans in the towns or cultivators of garden patches. The other class, less numerous, but better educated and more intelligent, consists (besides some free immigrants of the humbler class) of so-called "Arabs"—Mahommedans, chiefly from Bombay and the ports near it, or from Zanzibar—who conduct retail trade, especially with the natives, and sometimes become rich. Clever dealers, and willing to sell for small profits, they have practically cut out the European from business with the native, and thereby incurred his dislike. The number of the Indians who, under the previous franchise law, were acquiring electoral rights had latterly grown so fast that, partly owing to the dislike I have just mentioned, partly to an honest apprehension that the Indian element, as a whole, might become unduly powerful in the electorate, an Act was in 1894 passed by the colonial legislature to exclude them from the suffrage. The home government was not quite satisfied with the terms in which this Act was originally framed, but in 1897 approved an amended Act which provides that no persons shall be hereafter admitted to be electors "who (not being of European origin) are natives or descendants in the male line of natives of countries which have not hitherto possessed elective representative institutions founded on the parliamentary franchise, unless they first obtain from the Governor in Council an order exempting them from the provisions of this Act." Under this statute the right of suffrage will be withheld from natives of India and other non-European countries, such as China, which have no representative government, though power is reserved for the government to admit specially favoured persons. In 1897 another Act was passed (and approved by the home government) which permits the colonial executive to exclude all immigrants who cannot write in European characters a letter applying to be exempted from the provisions of the law. It is intended by this measure to stop the entry of unindentured Indian immigrants of the humbler class.
I have referred particularly to this matter because it illustrates one of the difficulties which arise wherever a higher and a lower, or a stronger and a weaker, race live together under a democratic government. To make race or colour or religion a ground of political disability runs counter to what used to be deemed a fundamental principle of democracy, and to what has been made (by recent amendments) a doctrine of the American Constitution. To admit to full political rights, in deference to abstract theory, persons who, whether from deficient education or want of experience as citizens of a free country, are obviously unfit to exercise political power is, or may be, dangerous to any commonwealth. Some way out of the contradiction has to be found, and the democratic Southern States of the North American Union and the oligarchical Republic of Hawaii (now (1899) annexed to the United States), as well as the South African Colonies, have all been trying to find such a way. The problem has in 1899 presented itself in an acute form to the United States, who having taken hold of the Philippine Isles, perceive the objections to allowing the provisions of their Federal Constitution to have effect there, but have not yet decided how to avoid that result. Natal, where the whites are in a small minority, now refuses the suffrage to both Indians and Kafirs; while Cape Colony, with a much larger proportion of whites excludes the bulk of her coloured people by the judicious application of an educational and property qualification. The two Boer Republics deny the supposed democratic principle, and are therefore consistent in denying all political rights to people of colour. The Australian Colonies have taken an even more drastic method. Most of them forbid the Chinese to enter the country, and admit the dark-skinned Polynesian only as a coolie labourer, to be sent back when his term is complete. France, however, is more indulgent, and in some of her tropical Colonies extends the right of voting, both for local assemblies and for members of the National Assembly in France, to all citizens, without distinction of race or colour.
Maritzburg is a cheerful little place, with an agreeable society, centred in Government House, and composed of diverse elements, for the ministers of state and other officials, the clergy, the judges, and the officers of the garrison, furnish a number, considerable for so small a town, of capable and cultivated men. There are plenty of excursions, the best of which is to the beautiful falls of the Umgeni at Howick, where a stream, large after the rains, leaps over a sheet of basalt into a noble cirque surrounded by precipices. Passing not far from these falls, the railway takes its course northward to the Transvaal border. The line climbs higher and higher, and the country, as one recedes from the sea, grows always drier and more bare. The larger streams flow in channels cut so deep that their water is seldom available for irrigation; but where a rivulet has been led out over level or gently sloping ground, the abundance of the crop bears witness to the richness of the soil and the power of the sun. The country is everywhere hilly, and the scenery, which is sometimes striking, especially along the banks of the Tugela and the Buffalo rivers, would be always picturesque were it not for the bareness of the foregrounds, which seldom present anything except scattered patches of thorny wood to vary the severity of the landscape. Toward the base of the great Quathlamba or Drakensberg Range, far to the west of the main line of railway, there is some very grand scenery, for the mountains which on the edge of Basutoland rise to a height of 10,000 feet break down toward Natal in tremendous precipices. At the little town of Ladysmith a railway diverges to the Orange Free State, whose frontier here coincides with a high watershed, crossed by only a few passes. A considerable coal-field lies near the village appropriately named Newcastle, and there are valuable deposits near the village of Dundee also, whither a branch line which serves the collieries turns off to the east at a spot called Glencoe, south of Newcastle. Travelling steadily to the north, the country seems more and more a wilderness, in which the tiny hamlets come at longer and longer intervals. The ranching-farms are very large,—usually six thousand acres,—so there are few settlers; and the Kafirs are also few, for this high region is cold in winter, and the dry soil does not favour cultivation. At last, as one rounds a corner after a steep ascent, a bold mountain comes into sight, and to the east of it, connecting it with a lower hill, a ridge or neck, pierced by a tunnel. The ridge is Laing's Nek, and the mountain is Majuba Hill, spots famous in South African history as the scenes of the battles of 1881 in the Transvaal War of Independence. Few conflicts in which so small a number of combatants were engaged have so much affected the course of history as these battles; and the interest they still excite justifies a short description of the place.
Laing's Nek, a ridge 5500 feet above the sea and rising rather steeply about 300 feet above its southern base, is close to the Quathlamba watershed, which separates the streams that run south into the Indian Ocean from those which the Vaal on the north carries into the Orange River and so to the Atlantic. It is in fact on the south-eastern edge of that great interior table-land of which I have so often spoken. Across it there ran in 1881, and still runs, the principal road from Natal into the Transvaal Republic,—there was no railway here in 1881,—and by it therefore the British forces that were proceeding from Natal to reconquer the Transvaal after the outbreak of December, 1880, had to advance to relieve the garrisons beleaguered in the latter country. Accordingly, the Boer levies, numbering about a thousand men, resolved to occupy it, and on January 27 they encamped with their waggons just behind the top of the ridge. The frontier lies five miles farther to the north, at the village of Charleston, so that at the Nek itself they were in the territory of Natal. The British force of about one thousand men, with a few guns, arrived the same day at a point four miles to the south, and pitched their tents on a hillside still called Prospect Camp, under the command of General Sir George Colley, a brave officer, well versed in the history and theory of war, but with little experience of operations in the field. Undervaluing the rude militia opposed to him, he next day attacked their position on the Nek in front; but the British troops, exposed, as they climbed the slope, to a well-directed fire from the Boers, who were in perfect shelter along the top of the ridge, suffered so severely that they had to halt and retire before they could reach the top or even see their antagonists. A monument to Colonel Deane, who led his column up the slope and fell there pierced by a bullet, marks the spot. Three weeks later (after an unfortunate skirmish on the 8th), judging the Nek to be impregnable in front, for his force was small, but noting that it was commanded by the heights of Majuba Hill, which rise 1500 feet above it on the west, the British general determined to seize that point. Majuba is composed of alternate strata of sandstone and shale lying nearly horizontal and capped—as is often the case in these mountains—by a bed of hard igneous rock (a porphyritic greenstone). The top is less than a mile in circumference, depressed some sixty or seventy feet in the centre, so as to form a sort of saucer-like basin. Here has been built a tiny cemetery, in which some of the British soldiers who were killed lie buried, and hard by on the spot where he fell, is a stone in memory of General Colley. The hill proper is nearly nine hundred feet above its base, and the base about six hundred feet above Laing's Nek, with which it is connected by a gently sloping ridge less than a mile long. It takes an hour's steady walking to reach the summit from the Nek; the latter part of the ascent being steep, with an angle of from twenty to thirty degrees, and here and there escarped into low faces of cliff in which the harder sandstone strata are exposed.
The British general started on the night of Saturday, February 26, from Prospect Camp, left two detachments on the way, and reached the top of the hill, after some hard climbing up the steep west side, at 3 A.M., with something over four hundred men. When day broke, at 5 A.M., the Boers below on the Nek were astonished to see British redcoats on the sky-line of the hill high above them, and at first, thinking their position turned, began to inspan their oxen and prepare for a retreat. Presently, when no artillery played upon them from the hill, and no sign of a hostile movement came from Prospect Camp in front of them to the south, they took heart, and a small party started out, moved along the ridge toward Majuba Hill, and at last, finding themselves still unopposed, began to mount the hill itself. A second party supported this forlorn hope, and kept up a fire upon the hill while the first party climbed the steepest parts. Each set of skirmishers, as they came within range, opened fire at the British above them, who, exposed on the upper slope and along the edge of the top, offered an easy mark, while the Boers, moving along far below, and in places sheltered by the precipitous bits of the slope, where the hard beds of sandstone run in miniature cliffs along the hillside, did not suffer in the least from the irregular shooting which a few of the British tried to direct on them. Thus steadily advancing, and firing as they advanced, the Boers reached at last the edge of the hilltop, where the British had neglected to erect any proper breastworks or shelter, and began to pour in their bullets with still more deadly effect upon the hesitating and already demoralized troops in the saucer-like hollow beneath them. A charge with the bayonet might even then have saved the day. But though the order was given to fix bayonets, the order to charge did not follow. General Colley fell shot through the head, while his forces broke and fled down the steep declivities to the south and west, where many were killed by the Boer fire. The British loss was ninety-two killed, one hundred and thirty-four wounded, and fifty-nine taken prisoners; while the Boers, who have given their number at four hundred and fifty, lost only one man killed and five wounded. No wonder they ascribed their victory to a direct interposition of Providence on their behalf.
The British visitor, to whom this explanation does not commend itself, is stupefied when he sees the spot and hears the tale. Military authorities, however, declare that it is an error to suppose that the occupants of a height have, under circumstances like those of this fight, the advantage which a height naturally seems to give them. It is, they say, much easier for skirmishers to shoot from below at enemies above, than for those above to pick off skirmishers below; and this fact of course makes still more difference when the attacking force are accustomed to hill-shooting, and the defenders above are not. But allowing for both these causes, the attack could not have succeeded had Laing's Nek been assailed from the front by the forces at Prospect Camp, and probably would never have been made had the British on the hill taken the offensive early in the day.
We reached the top of the mountain in a dense cloud, which presently broke in a furious thunderstorm, the flash and the crash coming together at the same moment, while the rain quickly turned the bottom of the saucer-like hollow almost into a lake. When the storm cleared away, what a melancholy sight was this little grassy basin strewn with loose stones, and bearing in its midst the graves of the British dead enclosed within a low wall! A remote and silent place, raised high in air above the vast, bare, brown country which stretched away east, south, and west without a trace of human habitation. A spot less likely to have become the scene of human passion, terror and despair can hardly be imagined. Yet it has taken its place among the most remarkable battlefields in recent history, and its name has lived, and lives to-day, in men's minds as a force of lamentable potency.
Crossing Laing's Nek,—the top of which few future travellers will tread, because the railway passes in a tunnel beneath it,—one comes out on the north upon the great rolling plateau which stretches to the Zambesi in one direction and to the Atlantic in another. Four or five miles further, a little beyond the village of Charleston, one leaves Natal and enters the South African Republic; and here is the actual watershed which divides the upper tributaries of the Orange River from the streams which flow to the Indian Ocean. The railway had just been completed at the time of our visit, and though it was not opened for traffic till some weeks later, we were allowed to run over it to the point where it joins the great line from Cape Town to Pretoria. The journey was attended with some risk, for in several places the permanent way had sunk, and in others it had been so insecurely laid that our locomotive and car had to pass very slowly and cautiously. The country is so sparsely peopled that if one did not know it was all taken up in large grazing-farms, one might suppose it still a wilderness. Here and there a few houses are seen, and one place, Heidelberg, rises to the dignity of a small town, being built at the extreme south-eastern end of the great Witwatersrand gold-basin, where a piece of good reef is worked, and a mining population has begun to gather. The country is all high, averaging 5000 feet above sea level, and is traversed by ridges which rise some 500 to 1000 feet more. It is also perfectly bare, except for thorny mimosas scattered here and there, with willows fringing the banks of the few streams.