capable of treachery, without offering any reason. Had any one. treated Mr. Sprigg in this fashion, Sir Bartle would have been the first to vindicate his reputation. It would seem that Letsie was right --the black man must be in the wrong, and his fault of colour him capable of any kind of moral obliquity.

proves

It must of course be admitted that in the recent correspondence Colonel Griffith and others accuse Letsie of weakness, but it seems to me that they hardly make enough allowance for the difficulty and danger of his position, and at any rate there is, so far as I can see, nothing to justify the harsh insinuations in this article to which I have referred.

It ought to be added that, when the critical moment arrived, Letsie was not supported by the Government as he should have been. As early as the 29th of April 1880, Mr. C. H. Bell, one of the resident magistrates, warned the Government that the people preferred waiting for orders from their chiefs, to obeying orders from the Government, so long as that Government had no force in the country, because they feared the risk of having their families murdered, and their cattle captured, if they abandoned their arms (Cape Blue Book, A. 12: 1880). In fact, the Government rushed unprepared into the war, and so aggravated their difficulties, by giving no visible sign of an intention to protect loyal natives. As Sir H. Clifford puts it (C. 2755, p. 169), 'When the order was given to the Basutos to surrender their arms, arrangements at the same time should have been made to protect those who immediately complied with the order from those who would not.'

(3.) I think Sir Bartle is guilty of an omission as to Mr. Sprigg, but it is in the other direction. He praises him for his temper, prudence, and humanity, but he seems to have forgotten all about the Vagrancy Acts and the Pass Acts, which seem to the ordinary Englishman to be neither prudent nor humane. But probably Sir Bartle thinks such proceedings necessary in dealing with black men, and therefore justifiable, and certainly if the conduct of Government as to this war be humane, there is not much to be said as to former acts; but I object to our judgment as to recent proceedings being clouded by reference to the character of any one, unless we have it set before us more fully and clearly than in general phrases which may mean much or little according to the bias of the writer. The evidence would seem to show that Mr. Sprigg has always been an advocate of stern repression of the coloured race, and as such he is consistent in his present course; but it is too much to ask us to credit him with great humanity, when we see such misery and desolation resulting from his measures.

There can be no question that the Vagrancy Law has caused terrible suffering to perfectly innocent people with black skins. It is certainly not a 'humane' law, whatever else may be said about it.

A minister of the Presbyterian Free Church at Umgwali was, less than a year ago, arrested for travelling without a pass, and had to spend the night in the common prison, when he was merely on his way to attend a meeting of the Presbytery. The arrest was, I suppose, legal, but it was as harsh as it was absurd.

About two years ago occurred the Koegas massacre and that of the Korannas, both of which made no small stir at the time, and would seem to show that the Government of the Cape is far from humane. It cannot be a cause of surprise if many natives should shrink from coming under the absolute control of white men, so regardless of justice to the black race as in these cases officials of the Govern.. ment were proved to be. The less said about humanity the better. Some would, I suppose, say that inhumanity to black men is unavoidable. At any rate it is best to call things by their right names.

(4.) Another most serious omission occurs with reference to Colonel Griffith. Sir Bartle asserts that the Colonel acquiesced in each step of the Cape Government and advised an appeal to force before the Government did anything. The reader is left under the impression that the Colonel is a thorough supporter of the policy of the Cape Government as to Basutoland. But the fact is that the Colonel has expressed himself most favourably towards the tribe, and when it was proposed by Sir Bartle Frere to confiscate the land of Morosi, and treat it as no longer part of their territory, he wrote a most firm

In confirmation of what I have said as to the administration of the law, I quote a few words from the address of Mr. J. A. Froude to Lord Kimberley in introducing a deputation on the 27th of May, last year. Referring to these two measures, he says:- An inquiry was ordered, and at last, after various delays-not, however, till nearly a year had passed the Cape Government undertook a prosecution, and a judge came down to Victoria West to try the farmers for murder. It was known that at Victoria West, among their own relations, there was not the slightest prospect of a verdict against them. The prosecuting barrister himself telegraphed, before the trial, to the Attorney-General to tell him so, and to beg that the case might be removed to the Supreme Court in Cape Town. The Attorney-General ordered him to go on where he was. The Koegas case was tried first. The prisoners were indicted for the murder of the six women and children on the march. They were distinctly proved to have shot them; but the Attorney-General had neglected to produce the formal proof that they had been killed, and the result, as had been expected, was an acquittal. The escort who had shot the five men were to be tried the next day. The prosecuting barrister again telegraphed to the Attorney-General, telling him what had happened, and again begging that the second trial might be held elsewhere. Again the Attorney-General instructed him to go on, and again with the same result. The murderers were acquitted. When the verdict was given in, the whole court rose and cheered, and one of the jury openly said that all Korannas ought to be shot. Such is justice at this moment in the Cape Colony, and it is to be remembered that these field-cornets held commissions under the Colonial Government, and were acting in the Queen's name and under the British flag. But the story is not yet over. The editor of the Argus newspaper, which has always bravely defended the native interests, published an indignant article, reflecting justly and sternly on the Attorney-General's conduct. The Attorney-General prosecuted him for a libel, demanding ten thousand pounds damages. The damages given were small, scarcely more than nominal, but they carried costs, and the editor or proprietor of the paper had to pay several hundred pounds.'

remonstrance which had great weight with Lord Kimberley, and he has always been most anxious to maintain friendly relations with the Basuto chiefs. A few words from this letter, dated the 27th of November, 1879, are worth quoting (C. 2569, p. 34):-'I fail to see why the Basutos who have staunchly supported us should be punished for the acts of the rebel chief Morosi and his followers who have paid the penalty of their crime with their lives. . . . The Basutos will at once conclude that this is only the thin end of the wedge, and that upon one pretence or another they will eventually be deprived of all their country.' More than this, in a letter dated the 26th of January, 1880, addressed to the Secretary for Native Affairs, he mentions four measures, and amongst them disarmament, as likely to cause disaffection; and he says, 'I cannot but feel that I have been placed in an equivocal position;' and again, I am loth to run the risk of losing this hard-won reputation without raising one warning note.' It is certainly most strange that the actual opinions of Colonel Griffith should have been thus concealed from his readers by Sir Bartle.

It is proper to add, though Sir Bartle does not mention it, that Colonel Griffith's view was entirely approved by Lord Kimberley, who in his despatch of the 20th of May, 1880 (Blue Book, p. 49), expresses very strongly his wish that the land of Morosi should be kept for the Basutos, and not handed over for sale to natives and whites without discrimination-so breaking the compact made, as he insists, that Basutoland should be for the Basutos.

I have thus endeavoured to state the case of the Basutos as it strikes Englishmen who try to look at it without prejudice and who merely desire the welfare of all parts of our dominions. I never met Sir Bartle Frere. I have judged his public conduct as set forth in public documents open to all the world. If he had allowed the case to rest on those documents, I dare say others would have done the same. But he has not done so. He has sought to vindicate his conduct in an elaborate article. It is, I think, natural that those who differ from him should endeavour to frame a reply. I have desired in these pages to make allowance for the difficulties of his position. But in reviewing his conduct it is of no use to conceal one's sentiments and to use mild phrases when one feels a strong disapproval. The case is now before the world, and before ParliaSir Bartle has evidently satisfied his own conscience as a He has done his best. It is for others to judge whether he has done well.

ment.

man.

VOL. IX.-No. 49.

PP

WILLIAM FOWLER.

LONG AND SHORT SERVICE.

GREAT misconception exists in the minds of the public as to the real meaning of short service,' and as to its effect upon the present condition of our army. This ignorance is even very largely shared by the army, many of whose older members, with that unquestioning courage for which the British veteran has always been distinguished, condemn it without understanding either the reasons that begot it or the objects it was intended to secure. I think it may be safely asserted that a large proportion of those who are loudest in condemning it have never read the parliamentary papers in which its provisions are explained, or the speeches in which Mr. Cardwell and hist colleagues explained the Enlistment Act of 1870. It is the same. with the localisation scheme: how few comprehend its provisions, or have taken the trouble to study the Reports of the Committee on the Organisation of the Military Forces of the country, dated 1872-73. Were it possible to collect information on the subject, how interesting and instructive it would be to furnish Parliament with a return showing what proportion of those, who in the military clubs are loudest in denouncing the present army system, have ever read the Report of the Militia Committee of 1876, of which Colonel Stanley-the late able Secretary of State for War-was president. How few of our older officers are aware that our new army organisation is based upon the proposals contained in a very remarkable memorandum by his Royal Highness the Field-marshal Commanding-in-chief, written in 1871, which was presented to Parliament in 1872. Every ailment from which our army, in common with all armies, periodically suffers, is attributed to the recent reforms effected in our military organisation, it being entirely forgotten that those reforms have been based upon the valuable suggestions contained in the above-mentioned memorandum of his Royal Highness the Duke of Cambridge.

Those unacquainted with our army and the habits and mode of thought of our officers, especially of those of the old school, may very naturally inquire how this comes about: why is it that men who are honest, truthful, straightforward, and loyal in the very highest acceptation of those terms, many of them of considerable experience in public affairs, all of whom have seen a great deal of the world, and have received the average education of the ordinary English gentleman-why should they be prejudiced in an unreasoning manner, and

combine to condemn a system of which a large proportion of them know so little ? To the civilian mind this may be difficult to understand; but to the man who has himself spent a quarter of a century in camp and quarters surrounded by all those subtle influences which imperceptibly discipline the officer's mind without his being conscious of the process going on in it, this fact requires no proof. When I joined as an ensign in 1852, I heard the same complaints then that are to be heard daily in our clubs now, as to the deterioration of the army; that neither officers nor men were as good as they had been in previous epochs of our military history, and that all the reforms that had then been recently effected in the law of enlistment, abolishing enlistment for life and for twenty-one years, and establishing ten and twelve years as the terms for which our infantry and cavalry were thenceforward to be respectively engaged, were in themselves essentially bad, and must eventually ruin the army. The symptoms that mark this military disease of chronic grumbling, of whining pessimism, are the same, yesterday, to-day, and will be so for ever, in the same way that the arguments used in Parliament in 1847 by the old generals, who then opposed with all their power and influence the Short Service Act of that year, are almost identical word for word with those in which the recently effected reforms have been and are still denounced. There is a certain class of officer who seems to believe that the world, as far as armies and military science are concerned, stands still; they see around them the most marvellous changes effected by steam, electricity, and mechanical inventions, and they accept them as a matter of course, ignoring or unconscious of the fact that all such discoveries and inventions react upon armies and military science, and that, as education and the intelligence which is its grandchild spread through the social strata from which we obtain our recruits, we are obliged to treat them in a different manner from that in which we dealt with their illiterate and stupid forefathers. The private soldier of the last century, and even during our great struggle with Napoleon, was treated by us in an almost brutal manner; we dealt with him as if he were an unreasoning mechanism which, for very contrariness sake, went frequently out of order. We caught him as a sort of wild man, and, instead of endeavouring to raise him in the scale of humanity, we brutalised him by treating him as an unreasoning being. Those who would still wish to flog the soldier as the keeper does his wilful spaniel, who are never tired of reminding us of the glories achieved by our troops under Wellington, and of referring to that army that could do anything and march anywhere,' forget the atrocious and fiendish horrors of Badajos and of Ciudad Rodrigo; there is much ado because an occasional henroost may be robbed nowadays on the line of march during operations in the field, whilst all remembrance of the scenes of indiscipline during Moore's retreat to Corunna, or the great Duke's retreat to Lisbon, are entirely for

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