the Mecca of large financial interests, when the troubles between colonists and aborigines were looked upon by the Home Government as a nuisance, British Secretaries of State were disposed to display a. sense of impartiality in judging of such troubles and a freedom of expression in commenting upon them to which the present generation is quite unaccustomed. The older British Blue Books dealing with these native wars and the part played by the colonists in provoking them, are marked by a vigorous candour inconceivable in these days, except when it is a matter of State policy to paint the black records of an opponent even blacker than they are. Thus Lord Glenelg on the earlier "Kaffir" wars:
- "The Kaffirs had ample justification of the war into which they rushed with such fatal imprudence … urged to revenge and desperation by the systematic injustice of which they had been the victims … the original justice is on the side of the conquered, not of the victorious party."
Twenty years later we find the Committee of the Privy Council speaking of the warfare against the South African native peoples as "revolting to humanity and disgraceful to the British name." And thus the late Earl Grey in 1880:
- "Throughout this part of the British Dominions the coloured people are generally looked upon by the Whites as an inferior race, whose interest ought to be systematically disregarded when they come into competition with their own, and who ought to be governed mainly with a view to the advantage of the superior race. And for this advantage two things are considered to be specially necessary: First, that facilities should be afforded to the White colonists for obtaining possession of land heretofore occupied by the native tribes; and secondly, that the Kaffir population should be made to furnish as large and as cheap a supply of labour as possible."
That judgment is as true to-day as it was then.
No detailed narrative of the struggle between white and black in the colonisable parts of the Southern Continent is possible here. It is stained, so far as the British are concerned, with pages almost as dark as those which disfigure our earlier Indian records. Unhappily there has been no Burke to gather up the sinister threads, and weave them by his sublime eloquence into the national conscience. Lord Morley once said of our treatment of the native races of South Africa that:
