to pass that the purchases are no longer made I no not understand. Whether the trade should or should not have been stopped I am not prepared to say. We have not hesitated to prevent the possession of arms in Ireland when we have thought that the peace of the country might be endangered by them. I do not think that the peace of South Africa has been endangered by the guns which the Kafirs have owned, or that guns in the hands of Kafirs have been very fatal to us in the still existing disturbance. But yet the Kafirs are very numerous and the white men are comparatively but a handful! I would have a Kafir as free to shoot a buck as a white man. And yet I feel that the Kafir must be kept in subjection. The evil, if it be an evil, has now been done, for guns are very numerous among the Kafirs.
There can hardly be a doubt that Kimberley and the diamond fields have been of great service to the black men who obtain work. No doubt they are thieves,—as regards the diamonds,—but their thievery will gradually be got under by the usual processes. To argue against providing work for a Kafir because a Kafir may steal is the same as to say that housemaids should not be taught to write lest they should learn to forge. That argument has been used, but does not now require refutation. And there can be as little doubt that the finding of diamonds has in a commercial point of view been the salvation of South Africa. The Orange Free State, of which "The Fields" at first formed a part, and which is closely adjacent to them, has been so strengthened by the trade thus created as to be now capable of a successful and permanent existence,—a condition
