and past Zulu events. Whether a gentleman twenty years ago when firing a pistol intended to wound or only frighten? Such, and such like, are the points which the teller of the story would have to settle if he intended to decide upon the rights and wrongs of the question. Is it not probable that a man having been called on for sudden action, in a great emergency, may himself be in the dark as to his own intention at so distant a period,—knowing only that he was anxious to carry out the purpose for which he was sent, that purpose having been the establishment of British authority? And then this matter was one in which the slightest possible error of judgment, the smallest deviation from legal conduct where no law was written, might be efficacious to set everything in a blaze. The natives of South Africa, but especially the natives of Natal, have to be ruled by a mixture of English law and Zulu customs, which mixture, I have been frequently told, exists in its entirety only in the bosom of one living man. It is at any rate unwritten,—as yet unwritten though there now exists a parliamentary order that this mixture shall be codified by a certain fixed day. It is necessarily irrational,—as for instance when a Zulu is told that he is a British subject but yet is allowed to break the British law in various ways, as in the matter of polygamy. It must be altogether unintelligible to the subject race to whom the rules made by their white masters, opposed as they are to their own customs, must seem to be arbitrary and tyrannical,—as when told that they must not carry about with them the peculiar stick or knobkirrie which has been familiar to their hands from infancy. It is opposed to the ideas of justice which prevail
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