is, and has always been, to deprive them of their land, and so teach them that the course of wisdom lies in obeying the laws of the country." A contemporary issue of the Cape Times put the case in a nutshell:
We Whites want the Black man's land just as we did when we first came to Africa. But we have the decency in these conscience-ridden days, not to take it without excuse. A native rising, especially when there are inaccessible caves for the rebels to retire to, is a very tiresome and expensive affair; but it has its compensations, for it provides just the excuse wanted.
The distinction, and it is an important one, between ourselves and Continental nations in these matters is that, owing to the past labours of Burke and of the leaders of the ante Slave trade crusade, there is a public opinion in the homeland—worthily represented by the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, of which Mr. John H. Harris is the able Secretary—which can be appealed to, which genuinely resents the ill-treatment of native races, and which can sometimes intervene to prevent or to mitigate it.
•••••••
German intervention in the western portion of the colonisable southern part of the Continent, between the Kunene and Orange rivers, known as Ovamboland, Damaraland and Great Namaqualand with an estimated area of 322,450 square miles, began in 1883 and attained its fullest territorial limits in 1890. The presence of Germans in South Africa is not an event of yesterday. German missionaries were working in Great Namaqualand as far back as the early 'forties of last century, and ever since the British Government settled in Cape Colony the 2,000 Germans of the Foreign Legion, which it had raised for the Crimean War, South Africa has seen a steady trickle of German immigration. This missionary cum commercial enterprise was the origin of German political control in the western portion of South Africa [with the exception of Walfisch Bay, the only accessible port on the Western Coast, which Britain annexed]. From time to time the missionaries had complained of ill-treatment from the natives, and the German Government had on various occasions endeavoured to obtain from our Foreign Office a clear statement as to its attitude in regard to the protection of the lives and property of Europeans in the country. This, neither the Disraeli nor Gladstone
