Jump to content

Page:South Africa (1878 Volume 1).djvu/49

From Wikisource
This page needs to be proofread.

slave owners. The slaves of the Cape Colony were numbered at 35,745, and were valued at £3,000,000. The amount of money which was allowed for them was £1,200,000. But even this was paid in such a manner that much of it fell into the hands of fraudulent agents before it reached the Boer. There was delay and the orders for the money were negotiated at a great discount. The sum expected dwindled down to so paltry a sum that some of the farmers refused to accept what was due to them. Then there was further trekking away from a land which in the minds of the emigrants was so abominably mismanaged. But the slaves fell into the body of the coloured population without any distinction, and were added of course to the free labour of the country. The ordinary labourer in all countries earns so little more than board lodging and clothes for himself and his children, and it is so indispensable a necessity on the slave owner to provide board lodgings and clothes for his slaves, that the loss of slaves, when all owners lose them together, ought not to impoverish any one. There may be local circumstances, as there were in Jamaica, which upset the working of this rule. In the Cape Colony there were no such circumstances; and it seems that those who remained and accepted the law were not impoverished. There can be no doubt, however, that the inhabitants of the Colony generally were disgusted. The measure was brought into effect in 1838, an apprenticeship of four years having been allowed.

But we must go back for a moment to the Kafir war of 1835,—the third Kafir war, for there was a second, of which