LETTERS TO THE .EDITOR.
THE SOUTH AFRICAN NATIVES.—A'DOUBT AS TO THE JAMESON RAID. (To Tin gorroa OP TUB "SPECTATOR:1 ' hail with joy Lord Salisbury's words at the dinner of the City Conservative Club on the subject of the Tesponsi•
baffles arising out of the present war : "Perhaps I am not wrong in saying that the first responsibility is that we must protect those native races which have been seriously affected in dealing with the populations of the two Republics, and the engagemeuts made with them in past times," and with no less joy, in the same paper which contained the report of the Premier's speech, that of Sir George White, testifying to the heroic faithfulness displayed by the natives of India at Lady- smith. Our best saieguard against any future trouble with the Boers in the Transvaal lies not with Outlanders intent only on their money-making, but with the coloured races. Give them the right to marry, the right to own land, raise them by education (the teaching of English being made every- where obligatory), enable them to acquire their fair share of power by means of a taxation and education franchise, discipline them as an armed police,* and we need never be afraid of the Boers attempting to recover their supremacy. If these choose to trek into Portuguese or German territory, let them go, so long as there is no armed invasion, which, as a friendly Power, we are bound to prevent, just as we were bound to prevent the Jameson Raid. But the mention of this brings me to a question raised, I consider, by the researches of the Times correspondent in the archives of Bloemfontein. It is now proved—I should think beyond the possibility of any denial by Mr. Harrison, Mr. Bryce, or Mr. Courtney—that since 1887 at least Mr. Kruger has been plotting the subversion of British rule in South Africa, and was for some time only hindered from proceeding further by the good sense of two out of the last three Presidents of the Orange Free State. All he needed for making war upon us was a pretext. With that pretext the stupidity of the Outlanders supplied him in the Raid. Is fee-it cui prodest, says the legal maxim. Is it not probable that his hand may have pulled the strings to which Jameson and his brother-puppets had to dance ? If the archives of Pretoria are not carried away or destroyed, I trust a strict investigation of them may clear up this doubt.
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