too much to say that he is regarded on both sides as a safe adviser; and I believe that it would be hardly possible to pass any measure of importance through the Cape Legislature to which he offered a strenuous opposition. He reminded me of two other men whom it has been my privilege to know and who have been determined to seize and wear parliamentary honours in the teeth of misfortunes which would have closed at any rate that profession against men endowed with less than Herculean determination. I mean Mr. Fawcett who in our own House at home has completely vanquished the terrible misfortune of blindness, and my old friend John Robertson of Sydney,—Sir John I believe he is now,—who for many years presided over the Ministry in New South Wales, leading the debates in a parliamentary chamber, without a palate to his mouth. I regard these three men as great examples of what may be done by perseverance to overcome the evils which nature or misfortune have afflicted.
The people of Capetown think of the two chambers in which the two Houses sit with something of shame, declaring that they are not at all what they ought to be,—that they are used as makeshifts, and that there has never yet been time, or perhaps money at hand, for constructing proper Houses of Parliament. Had I not heard this I should have thought that each of them was sufficiently commodious and useful, if not quite sufficiently handsome or magnificent.
