Page:The Library, volume 5, series 3.djvu/49

IN SOUTH AFRICA. 37 reduction in the price of the newspaper and of all charges for mercantile advertisements, handbills, etc. Smith was, on the fourteenth instant, promised a situation in the office of the Government printer. Between the loth and igth of the month the press was removed from 35 Plein Street into the Castle, and from this date all printing in Cape Town was done by Government, until the arrival of George Grieg some twenty-two years later. The story of the battle for the freedom of the Press has been sufficiently well told in Pringle's ' Narrative of a Residence in South Africa/ and in Meurant's c Sixty Years Ago/ to need no repetition here. There are in the Cape Archives a series of accounts showing the expenditure and revenue of the Government press. Unfortunately, these con- tain no record of what publications were under- taken on behalf of the general public. In the list of emanations from the press given at the end of this paper, only the earliest items are included, and the list makes no pretension to be complete. The first publication of an unofficial nature was, as far as present knowledge goes, the religious pamphlet of 1801. It may have been in this year that Meent Borcherds, the predikant of Stellen- bosch, issued a poem dedicated to the Agricultural Society. This is said to be the first literary produc- tion of the press in South Africa, but no copy of it is known to me, and I do not even know its title. However, Meent Borcherds is also accorded the honour of being the author of the second literary product, a copy of which, unique it is supposed, is in the South African Public Library.