which all questions of South African politics--social, moral,
racial, and economic--are fought out; and this new country, so lately
reclaimed from the wilderness, with a white population of less than
300,000 souls, already reproduces in perfect miniature all those dark,
tangled, and conflicting problems usually to be found in populous and
old-established European States. The case of the Transvaal differs
fundamentally from the case of the Orange River Colony. The latter
has been in the past, and will be again in the future, a tranquil
agricultural State, pursuing under a wise and tolerant Government a
happy destiny of its own. All I have to say about the Orange River
Colony this afternoon is this--that there will be no unnecessary delay
in the granting of a Constitution; and that in the granting of that
Constitution we shall be animated only by a desire to secure a fair
representation of all classes of inhabitants in the country, and to
give effective expression to the will of the majority.

When we came into office, we found a Constitution already prepared for
the Transvaal by the right hon. Member for St. George's, Hanover
Square.[1] That Constitution is no more. I hope the right hon.
gentleman will not suspect me of any malevolence towards his
offspring. I would have nourished and fostered it with a tender care;
but life was already extinct. It had ceased to breathe even before it
was born; but I trust the right hon. gentleman will console himself by
remembering that there are many possibilities of constitutional
settlements lying before him in the future. After all, the Abbe
Sieyes, when the Constitution of 1791 was broken into pieces, was very
little younger than the right hon. gentleman, and he had time to make
and survive two new Constitutions.

Frankly, what I may, for brevity's sake, call the Lyttelton
Constitution was utterly unworkable. It surrendered the machinery of
power; it preserved the whole burden of responsibility and
administration. Nine official gentlemen, nearly all without
Parliamentary experience, and I daresay without Parliamentary
aptitudes, without the support of that nominated majority which I am
quite convinced that the right hon. Member for West Birmingham had
always contemplated in any scheme of representative government, and
without the support of an organised party, were to be placed in a
Chamber of thirty-five elected members who possessed the power of the
purse. The Boers would eithe