These extracts are not pleasant reading. They were written at the time when the Imperial spirit was at its nadir. In the plain language of the Secretary of State for the Colonies[6] in 1858, it was a time when ministers were "compelled to recognise as fact the increased and increasing dislike of Parliament to the maintenance of large military establishments in our colonies at Imperial cost." Yet one more passage must be cited, not so much because it is tinged by a certain grim humour—although this is a valuable quality in such a context—as because it affords an eminently pertinent illustration in support of the contention that the refusal of the Home Government to follow the advice of the "man on the spot" has been the operative cause of the failure of British administration in South Africa. The reply to the charge of "direct disobedience," which Grey formulates in one leisurely sentence, runs as follows:
"With regard to any necessity which might exist for my removal on the ground of not holding the same views upon essential points of policy as Her Majesty's Government hold, I can only make the general remark that, during the five years which have elapsed since I was appointed to my present office, there have been at least seven Secretaries of State for the Colonial Department, each of whom held different views upon some important points of policy connected with this country."
The discovery of diamonds.
Grey was not by any means the only Governor of the Cape to show the home authorities how impossible it was to govern South Africa from Downing Street, and to urge upon them the necessity of allowing their representative, the one man who was familiar with local conditions, to decide by what methods the objects of British policy could be most effectively advanced. But it was not until some considerable time after the Colonial Department had been placed under a separate Secretary of State, and the Colonial Office had been constituted on its present basis, with a staff of permanent officials, that these protests produced any appreciable effect. What really aroused an interest in South Africa—that is to say a practical interest, as distinct from the interest created by the stories of missionary enterprise and travel, and by the records of Kafir warfare—was the discovery of diamonds in Griqualand West in 1870, and the subsequent establishment of the diamond industry at Kimberley. It was the first time that anything certain had occurred to show that the vast "hinterland" of the Cape might prove to be a territory of industrial possibilities. The earnings of the diamond mines provided the Cape Colony with a revenue sufficient to enable it to link together its main towns by a tolerable railway system. The industry, once established, attracted British capital and British population, and by so doing it did what Blue-books and missionary reports had failed to do: it brought the every-day life of the British Colonist in South Africa within the purview of the nation. Thanks to the Kimberley mines the Cape ceased to be thought of as a country whose resources were exclusively pastoral and agricultural.
The epoch of the next great divergence of opinion was a more hopeful time from an Imperialist point of view. Lord Beaconsfield, who was the first statesman to give practical expression to the belief that the maintenance of empire was not inconsistent with the welfare of the masses of the home population, was in power. British statesmen, and the class from which British statesmen are drawn, had begun to study Colonial questions in a more hopeful and intelligent spirit. Something had been learnt, too, of the actual conditions of South Africa. And yet it was at this epoch that what was, perhaps, the most ruinous of all the divergences of opinion between Capetown and Downing Street occurred.
Sir Bartle Frere.
When Sir Bartle Frere was sent out to South Africa to carry out a definite scheme for the union of the Republics with the British colonies in a federal system, British statesmen and the educated classes in general had adopted the views expressed by Grey twenty years before. Tardily they had learnt to recognise both the essential unity of the Dutch population and the value of the country as an industrial asset of the empire. But, in the meantime, the centre of political power had shifted in England. The extension of the franchise had placed the ultimate control of British policy in South Africa in the hands of a class of electors who were, as yet, wholly uneducated in the political and economic conditions of that country. The divergence of opinion between the home and the local authority became in this case wider than ever. In short, it was the will of the nation that caused Frere to be arrested midway in the accomplishment of his task, and gave a mandate in 1880 to the Liberal party to administer South Africa upon the lines of a policy shaped in contemptuous indifference of the profoundest convictions and most solemn warnings of a great proconsul and most loyal servant of the Crown.
The facts of Frere's supersession and recall are notorious: the story is too recent to need telling at length. We know now that, apart from the actual discovery of the Witwatersrand gold-mines, all that he foresaw and foretold has been realised in the events which culminated, twenty years later, in the great South African War. The military power which at that time (1877-80) stood in the way of South African unity under the British flag was the Zulu people. The whole adult male population of the tribe had been trained for war, and organised by Ketshwayo into a fighting machine. With this formidable military instrument at his command Ketshwayo proposed to emulate the sanguinary career of conquest pursued by his grandfather Tshaka;[7] and he had prepared the way for the half-subdued military Bantu throughout South Africa to co-operate with him in a general revolt against the growing supremacy of the white man. Frere removed this obstacle. But in doing so he, or rather the general entrusted with the command of the military operations, lost a British regiment at Isandlhwana. This revelation of the strength of the Zulu army was, in fact, a complete confirmation of the correctness of Frere's diagnosis of the South African situation. His contention was that England must give evidence of both her capacity and her intention to control the native population of South Africa before she could reasonably ask the republican Dutch to surrender their independence and reunite with the British colonies in a federal system under the British flag. A native power, organised solely for aggressive warfare against one of two possible white neighbours, constituted therefore, in his opinion, not only a perpetual menace to the safety of Natal, but an insuperable obstacle to the effective discharge of a duty by the paramount Power, the successful performance of which was a condition precedent to the reunion of the European communities. The only point in dispute was the question whether the powers of Ketshwayo's impis had been exaggerated. To this question the disaster of Isandlhwana returned an emphatic "No."
The recall of Frere.
The divergence of opinion between Frere and Lord Beaconsfield's cabinet was trivial as compared with the profound gulf which separated his policy from the South African policy of Mr. Gladstone. After the return of the Liberal party to power in the spring of 1880, Frere was allowed to remain in office until August 1st, when he was recalled by a telegraphic despatch. But, as Lord Kimberley pointed out to him, there had been "so much divergence" between his views and those of the Home Government that he would not have been allowed to remain at the Cape, "had it not been for the special reason that there was a prospect of his being able materially to forward the policy of confederation." This prospect, of course, had then been removed by the failure of the Cape Government, on June 29th, to bring about the conference of delegates from the several States, which was the initial step towards the realisation of Lord Carnarvon's scheme of federal union.