make me feel that he ought not to be a tradesman at all. Probably, however, he has made his fortune, which he might not have done had he become a member of Parliament. It was here that the gentleman protested against drinking the health of The Bar at Durban, to the infinite delight of his hearers. Napier Broome, who was known to many of us in London, is now Colonial Secretary at Natal. I don't remember that he ever startled us by his eloquence at home; but on this occasion he made a speech which if made after a London public dinner would be a great relief. Everybody had something to say, and nobody was ashamed to say it.
I found 1,200 British soldiers in Pieter Maritzburg, for the due ordering of whom there was assembled there the rather large number of eight or nine Field Officers. But in Natal military matters have had a stir given to them by the necessity of marching troops up to Pretoria,—at a terrible cost, and now an additional stir by Zulu ambition. An Englishman in these parts, when he remembers the almost insuperable difficulty of getting a sufficient number of men in England to act as soldiers, when he tells himself what these soldiers cost by the time they reach their distant billets, and reminds himself that they are supported by taxes levied on a people who, man for man, are very much poorer than the Colonists themselves, that they are maintained in great part out of the beer and tobacco of rural labourers who cannot earn near as much as many a Kafir,—the Englishman as he thinks of all this is apt to question the propriety of their being there. He will say to himself that at any rate the Colony should pay for them.
