From the foot of the Catberg we ran into Fort Beaufort, to which town I carried my reader in a previous chapter. It was over this road that I had poured into my ears the political harangue of that late member of the Legislature. He belonged to a school of politicians which is common in South Africa, but which became very distasteful to me. The professors of it are to be found chiefly in the Eastern Province of the Cape Colony, in which I was then travelling, though the West is by no means without them. Their grand doctrine is that the Kafirs should be "ruled with a rod of iron." That phrase of the rod of iron had become odious to me before I left the country. "Thieves!" such a professor will say. "They are all thieves. Their only idea is to steal cattle." Such an one never can be made to understand that as we who are not Savages have taken the land, it is hardly unnatural that men who are Savages should think themselves entitled to help themselves to the cattle we have put on the land we have taken from them. The stealing of cattle must of course be stopped, and there are laws for the purpose; but this appealing to a "rod of iron" because men do just that which is to be expected from men so placed was always received by me as an ebullition of impotent and useless anger. A farmer who has cattle in a Kafir country, on land which has perhaps cost him 10s. or 5s., or perhaps nothing, an acre for the freehold of it, can hardly expect the same security which a tenant enjoys in England, who pays probably 20s. an acre for the mere use of his land.
As I have now finished the account of my travels in the
