ion shall be between a white employer and his half-savage,
half-childish retainers. Both branches of the Anglo-Celtic race have
grappled with the question, and in each it has led to trouble.

The British Government in South Africa has always played the unpopular
part of the friend and protector of the native servants. It was upon
this very point that the first friction appeared between the old
settlers and the new administration. A rising with bloodshed followed
the arrest of a Dutch farmer who had maltreated his slave. It was
suppressed, and five of the participants were hanged. This punishment
was unduly severe and exceedingly injudicious. A brave race can forget
the victims of the field of battle, but never those of the scaffold. The
making of political martyrs is the last insanity of statesmanship. It
is true that both the man who arrested and the judge who condemned the
prisoners were Dutch, and that the British Governor interfered on the
side of mercy; but all this was forgotten afterwards in the desire to
make racial capital out of the incident. It is typical of the enduring
resentment which was left behind that when, after the Jameson raid, it
seemed that the leaders of that ill-fated venture might be hanged,
the beam was actually brought from a farmhouse at Cookhouse Drift to
Pretoria, that the Englishmen might die as the Dutchmen had died in
1816. Slagter's Nek marked the dividing of the ways between the British
Government and the Afrikaners.

And the separation soon became more marked. There were injudicious
tamperings with the local government and the local ways, with a
substitution of English for Dutch in the law courts. With vicarious
generosity, the English Government gave very lenient terms to the Kaffir
tribes who in 1834 had raided the border farmers. And then, finally, in
this same year there came the emancipation of the slaves throughout the
British Empire, which fanned all smouldering discontents into an active
flame.

It must be confessed that on this occasion the British philanthropist
was willing to pay for what he thought was right. It was a noble
national action, and one the morality of which was in advance of its
time, that the British Parliament should vote the enormous sum of twenty
million pounds to pay compensation to the slaveholders, and so to remove
an evil with which the mother country had no immediate connection. It
was as well that the thing should have been done when it was, for h