It is again the great question of coloured races,—the question which must dominate all other questions in South Africa. Confederation of adjacent Colonies may be very good for white men who can rule themselves, and yet not suit the condition of territories in which coloured men have to be ruled under circumstances which may be essentially different in different States.
Looking back at our dominion over South Africa which has now lasted for nearly three quarters of a century I think that we have cause for national pride. We have on the whole been honest and humane, and the errors into which we have fallen have not been greater than the extreme difficulty of the situation has made, if not necessary, at any rate natural. When we examine the operations of different Governors as they have succeeded each other, and read the varying instructions with which those Governors have been primed from the Colonial Office, it is impossible not to see that the peculiar bias of one Secretary of State succeeding to that of another has produced vacillations. There has been a want of what I have once before ventured to call "official tradition." The intention of Great Britain as to her Colonies as expressed by Parliament has not been made sufficiently plain for the guidance of the Colonial Office. This shewed itself perhaps more signally than elsewhere in Lord Glenelg's condemnation of Sir Benjamin D'Urban at the close of the third Kafir war in 1835, when he enunciated a policy which was not compatible with the maintenance of British authority in South Africa,—which had to be speedily revoked,—but which could not be revoked till every Kafir had been taught
