ch nine-tenths were contributed by the taxpayers
at home, British and Irish.

[32] Full information may be found in "The Irish in Australia," by J.F.
Hogan.

[33] For an excellent historical description of the various Australian
land systems, see the official "Year-Book of the Commonwealth," 1909.

[34] "Life of Sir George Grey," Professor G.C. Henderson.

CHAPTER VII

SOUTH AFRICA AND IRELAND

In the years 1836-37, when Wentworth was agitating for self-government
in New South Wales, and when Canada was in rebellion for the lack of it,
thousands of waggons, driven by men smarting under the same sort of
grievance, were jolting northward across the South African veld bearing
Dutch families from the British Colony of the Cape of Good Hope to the
new realms we now know as the Orange River Colony and the Transvaal. The
"Great Trek" was a form of protest against bad government to which we
have no parallel in the Empire save in the wholesale emigrations from
Ireland at various periods of her history--after the Treaty of Limerick,
again after the destruction of the wool trade, again in 1770-1777, after
the Ulster evictions, and lastly after the great famine. The trekkers,
like the Irish emigrants, nursed a resentment against the British
Government which was a source of untold expense and suffering in the
future. Indeed, the whole history of South Africa bears a close
resemblance to the history of Ireland. In no other part of the Empire,
save in Ireland, was the policy of the Home Government so persistently
misguided, in spite of constantly recurring opportunities for the repair
of past errors. Fatality seems from first to last to have dogged the
footsteps of those who tried to govern there. Before the British
conquest the Dutch East India Company and the Netherlands Government
were as unsuccessful as their British successors, whose legal claim to
the Cape, established for the second time by conquest in 1806, was
definitely confirmed by the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The Dutch
colonists were a fine race of men, whose ancestors, like the Puritan
founders of New England, had fled in 1652 from religious persecution,
and who retained the virile qualities of their race. Though in many
respects they resembled the backward and intensely conservative
French-Canadian inhabitants, they differed from them, and resembled
their closer relatives in race, the New Englanders, in an innate passion
for free representative governme