The Times of Thursday publishes a letter from the Cape
-diamond fields, which is in its way a curiosity. Englishmen and Americans have, except in India, not too much respect for the rights of " natives," but a plebiscite forbidding any native to own property in his own country is an unusual stretch of injustice. It appears, however, to be diggers' law at the diamond fields that no native shall own a diamond or sell one, and the writer actually complains that the officials will not enforce these " good regula- tions," and that the white diggers have been obliged to resort to lynch law to prevent dealers buying stones from the proscribed people. The assumption is that the natives must be thieves, but as all the diamonds are in some sense theirs, as many of them are -digging " claims " of their own, and as the stones can be protected against them as well as against anybody else, their proscription is nothing better than high-handed oppression. The writer com- plains also of a new labour-tax imposed upon diggers who employ more than six natives, and at the same time wants more magis- trates and police, his general notion appearing to be that the white should have a right to rob the copper-coloured, and get a .Government grant in aid for the operation.
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