not too serious for laughter. That Great Britain should ever have been so situated as to have declined, in the first instance, to extend British protection to German residents upon the African coast, because that coast was not British territory; then to have protested against the annexation by Germany of the regions, the ownership of which she had so emphatically repudiated; and finally, to have yielded submissively to the imperious language of Prince Bismarck, – that to such a situation the weak shilly-shally diplomacy of Lord Granville should have brought his country, is in itself a condemnation of the Minister which it needs no argument to enforce. A Minister who has not only held the seals of the Foreign Office more than once, but has also been Colonial Minister, should surely have had sufficient knowledge and experience to have escaped the snare so cleverly laid for him by the German diplomatist. It is doubtless true that Lord Granville's tenure of office as Colonial Secretary was short, and that he never showed such an interest in the Colonies as should be felt by any one who undertakes that important office. But it argues incapacity or indolence to an extraordinary degree if Lord Granville was unacquainted with the important bearing which German colonisation in South Africa must have upon the future of our British colonies in that quarter of the globe; and the manner in which the question has been dealt with by the British Government may well be resented by every one who estimates these colonies at their proper value. Common sagacity, moreover, without special knowledge, and ordinary firmness, without superhuman courage, should have enabled the Foreign Minister of Great Britain to have taken a tone to which the Government of Germany could not have objected, and which would have secured without difficulty to Great Britain and her colonies a position which it may now be difficult, if not impossible, to obtain without grave complications. Unhappily both the firmness and the sagacity appear to have been wanting in Lord Granville, and the whole affair must be considered most damaging to his reputation as a Statesman and a Minister.
It must be borne in mind that this South African difficulty did not come upon Lord Granville by any means as a surprise. So long ago as the summer of 1880, Lord Kimberley, then Colonial Secretary, transmitted to the Foreign Office a translation from an article in a Berlin newspaper, which not only discussed the proposed establishment of a German colony in South Africa, but claimed the Transvaal Boers as "nearly allied to Germans by speech and habits," declared that Germany should have opposed the annexation of the Transvaal, suggested the desirability of her acquiring Delagoa Bay, and was couched throughout in a spirit of hostility to Great Britain. Unable to grasp the importance of the subject to British South Africa, Lord Granville appears to have confined himself to an inquiry of the British Ambassador at Berlin as to the "probable success" of a German colony in South Africa, and to have been perfectly satisfied with the reply that "the German Government feel more the want of soldiers than of colonists, and consequently discourage emigration." This, no doubt, was perfectly true at the moment; but it does not diminish
