on their merits, and without the complications produced by charges of insubordination, lawlessness, and rebellion, which have confused and embittered it hitherto. It is really time to say that to talk of anarchy in the Church is a misleading and dangerous exaggeration. The clergy as a body, even those few who differ sharply and painfully with their bishops, are honestly loyal, and earnestly desirous both to receive guidance and to render obedience; and this is not anarchy. In the strong cases of difference, where clergymen have acted on their own responsibility and taken the consequences, real and important constitutional questions are raised, on which they may be right or wrong; but these questions could be fought out in no other way, in our present circumstances, than in the way of resistance; and in spite of the vehement and often inexcusable language used on all sides, there has been no intention, in the great majority of these cases, of impairing episcopal authority, or of setting at nought the law. It is indeed one of the wants of our time to strengthen episcopal government; but this must be done by reasonable methods; and the vow of canonical obedience must not be taken, any more than the woman's vow in marriage, to mean unlimited submission in judgment and conduct. But if appeals to law go on, we must remember that law is for all of us. It will not do to be throwing about charges of lawlessness while we ourselves ignore the law. Even on the theory of the opponents of the Ritualists we none of us knew what the law was, till the Court of Appeal declared it. If that law is accepted, it must be accepted in earnest; it must be accepted by all, in high station or low; it must curtail the liberty which some of us prize of being content with elastic customs which are not law, but which it would be disagreeable to change. And more than this, this view introduces a principle of strict and rigorous exactness in carrying out rubrical law, which may create unexpected embarrassment, from the peremptoriness of some directions, and the looseness and imperfection of others. And the persons who will have to enforce this legal strictness will be, not aggrieved parishioners, but our ecclesiastical superiors.

R. W. CHURCH.

THE TRANSVAAL.

THE Transvaal is singular, even in the most unhistoric regions of South Africa, from having no authentic history beyond the memory of men now living; it has nevertheless, during such brief period, passed through more revolutions than many ancient states during their whole existence, involving four almost complete changes of ruling races, Bechuanas, Zulus, Dutch, and English.

Men now alive can remember when the greater part of the Transvaal was thickly peopled by Bechuanas, a nation far in advance of their Kaffir and Zulu brethren of the great Bantu family, as regards all the arts of life. Fifty years ago the Bechuanas had been so harassed by Zulu invasions, especially by the great inroad of Moselekatze, that those who escaped massacre had fled towards the Kalahari Desert to Secocoeni's country and to Basutoland. English sportsmen, in 1836, saw elephants, rhinoceroses, and giraffes in the fertile valleys among the recent ruins of populous Bechuana villages where now stand Pretoria and Potchefstrom. They visited the camp of Moselekatze, the Zulu chief, 'the Attila of South Africa' as he was called, the cause of the more recent devastation, just as he was encountering the 'Vortrekkers,' the leaders of the great Boer emigration, who, after many reverses and much severe fighting, finally drove him to the north-east, where he died, leaving his son to rule over his people, the Matabele (Zulus), who had finally settled in the land where they now dwell, 600 miles north of Zululand.

The tendency of the Dutch Boers in the Cape Colony to emigrate beyond the colonial boundary appears to date from the earliest years of Dutch settlement. There are on the statute book of the Dutch governors various regulations which aimed at repressing this tendency. Some of the colonists, after settling for years on what was then the frontier of the colony, were in the habit of seeking, in the then unexplored regions beyond the colonial boundary, a land of less administrative restraint on their wanderings. Efforts were made to restrain this tendency, by legal penalties; but nevertheless a steady emigration of the more enterprising inhabitants of the colony had been going on for generations when it received a sudden fresh impulse from the emancipation of the slaves in the old colony. Little discretion

or consideration for the feelings or interests of the Dutch masters was shown in giving effect to the English Emancipation Act. In a great majority of instances the slaves of the Dutch farmer at the Cape had been better treated than in most of our other colonies, and a strong sense of injustice and unnecessary harshness towards the masters was, in the case of the wealthier and more respectable families, frequently added to the inevitable pecuniary loss caused by restrictions on the supply of labour to which they had been accustomed. Hence, when the cry went forth among the Dutch farmers that they must seek a home beyond the British boundary where they would be free from the interference of the humanitarian English Government,' the crowd of Trekkers,' or emigrants, was swelled by many families of comparative wealth and respectability, who left what had been their homes for many generations in the best parts of the old Cape Colony, hoping to find freedom from interference beyond the Orange River. They were by descent men of a proud and determined race-Dutchmen and French Huguenots, whose ancestors had left their homes in Europe rather than submit to religious tyranny. They had been within comparatively recent times subjected to English rule, and their own religious fanaticism often added to the inevitable irritation of their position, as an incentive to found a new and more free territory beyond the English boundary. Some made their way, in 1835-38, by a direct route to the Transvaal; but others travelled beyond the sources of the Orange River, and finally descended into Natal, which, after the cold and exposed uplands on the other side of the mountains, seemed to them a veritable land of promise.

Natal had then been almost emptied of its inhabitants by successive visitations from Zulu 'impis.' In many parts the scattered native inhabitants had been reduced to such straits that cannibalism was rife among them, and thrilling stories may yet be heard, from old people in Natal, as well as in Basutoland, of the cannibalism of which they had themselves been the threatened victims and, in some instances, the partakers. Here, as elsewhere in South Africa, the depopulation was quickly followed by an increase of beasts of the forest, and most of the old inhabitants of Natal can tell of herds of elephants they had themselves seen; one of the surest proofs of the general depopulation of the country.

Dingaan, the Zulu chief, appears at first to have been, like his predecessor Chaka, well inclined to the white men who visited him, and to have thought that he might turn their firearms to his own advantage. In reply to an application from Piet Retief and others of the Boer leaders for land to settle on, he set them a task to recover some cattle which had been carried off from his people by a neighbouring chief. This task was duly performed, and as a reward

he ceded to the Boers a large tract of territory, for the most part void of human beings, and now forming the best districts of the Colony of Natal. But the speed and accuracy with which they had performed a difficult service seem to have aroused Dingaan's jealous fears of what these white men might hereafter do, and the ink was literally barely dry on the document by which he ceded to them the territory they asked for, when he invited the Boer deputation to a parting feast, and had them all massacred on the spot, sending out 'impis' in various directions to surprise and destroy their families wherever they were found encamped. The memorable story of this massacre of Piet Retief and his gallant band of followers, and the subsequent massacres of Boer families on the Bloody Sunday,' in 1838, will ever be the starting-point of Boer history, and the foundation, in Boer estimation, of their claims to whatever land they have since conquered from the Zulus and other native tribes.

But the Boers in Natal found a more formidable obstacle than Dingaan in the constitutional claims of the English Government at the Cape. By that Government the Boers were looked on as runaway subjects, and as having broken the colonial laws by emigrating from the colony and setting up a rival dominion in Natal, where a few English settlers had previously obtained grants from the Zulu chiefs Chaka and his successor Dingaan. Hostilities between the Boers and the English Government ensued, which, as in most cases of the kind, may be narrated from two points of view, according as the narrator is a Dutchman or an Englishman. But the result was that the territory of Natal was taken over by the British Government, and finally erected into a separate colony, in 1844, whilst those Boers who were not content to remain under the new dominion trekked to fresh homes in the Transvaal and Orange Free State territory.

The pages of Livingstone's earlier travels show how the Boers, when they settled in the Transvaal, encroached on their weaker native neighbours.

All these things, be it remembered, are matters of living memory. Some of the men who are now leading the Boer malcontents can remember their original home in the Cape Colony. Many more have heard of those homes from their parents, and most can tell of their weary wanderings for thousands of miles, of their descent into the rich valleys of Natal, of the Zulu massacres of their friends and families, of the strict operation of English law, and of their own final settlement in lands of which the wild beasts of the field were then the actual possessors, and which, as they believe, they rendered their own by building civilised habitations, and substituting flocks and herds for the elephant and the antelope.

It is well to take note of these things in judging of the present feeling of the Boers towards us, as well as towards the natives; and to

remember that the Boers believe they held the Transvaal by the same right by which we hold Canada, India, and many other possessions— the right of conquest.

We must now glance at the different fortunes of the two Dutch Republics founded by the emigrant Boers beyond the Orange River.

The practical independence of the Boers of the Transvaal was from the first assured to them by what is called the Sand River Convention (in 1852), by which their independence was recognised on conditions mainly directed to prevent their enslaving the native tribes in their neighbourhood. But the Orange Free State was at first retained as British territory, and was after some years, in 1854, cast off by the British Government, greatly in opposition to the expressed wish of a large number of its inhabitants, and formed into a separate republic.

Compressed within Natal, Basutoland, and the old Cape Colony on the south, and by the Transvaal Republic on the east and north, the Orange Free State has been restrained within definite limits, and its present development has been thereby greatly promoted. The value of this compression was not at first recognised by the Orange Free State, and its people have not yet forgotten the grievance of the English Government accepting the submission of the Basutos, and declaring Basutoland British territory, just as its ruler was on the eve of surrendering to the Free State.

After this, in one direction only was expansion possible, towards the west, and there the discovery of diamond fields, in a territory to which the right of the Orange Free State was disputed, again brought them in collision with the English Government. The Diamond Fields were annexed to the British territory under circumstances which, however defensible, caused to the Government and people of the Orange Free State intense dissatisfaction, which was not entirely removed by the parliamentary grant of a large sum of money as compensation. There can be no doubt that the neighbourhood of the English colonies has greatly assisted in the development of the Orange Free State, but the steady progress of that republic is more especially due to the statesman who has for many years filled the office of President. Mr. Brand entered public life at Cape Town as son of one of the leading citizens, Sir Christofel Brand, who enjoyed the respect and esteem of all his fellow-colonists as Speaker of the Legislative Assembly. Mr. Brand had been called to the English bar, and had practised with great success in his native colony, when he was elected for the first time President of the Orange Free State. He has since been twice re-elected; and his wisdom and firmness, his statesmanlike foresight and sound patriotism, will never be forgotten as long as the name of the Orange Free State has a place in history.