The accounts from South Africa are rather more favourable. We
hope we may avoid a Basuto war, after all,—especially if Sir Bartle Frere is promptly recalled. With the evidences accumulating upon us of the long array of evil consequences which his jingoism has produced, we must say that the Government will, in our opinion, risk what it has no right to risk, if it does not recall him at once. Confederation has failed. There is nothing left for Sir Bartle Frere to do which a man of more prudence and soberer judgment could not do as well or better. and Sir Bartle's undoubted popularity with the Cape Colony itself arises, partly at least, from causes which make his in- fluence there all the mare dangerous. Lord Lytton, on landing at Malta, will find fresh testimony to the disastrous character of his Indian policy ; and if the Government delay too long Sir Bartle Frere's recall, we fear that when at last he is recalled, he, too, may be tracked home by the slow-footed Nemesis who pursues unrelentingly these speculators in conquest. Indeed, loyalty to hundreds of thousands of anxious Liberal electors would alone demand this decisive pledge that the policy of aggression is to be sternly discountenanced in our dependencies, and all "prancing pro-Consuls" to be replaced.
