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Zulus. We were treated the same at every kraal. I had been a long time in Zululand; I knew the people and their habits, and, although I believed they would be true to their king' [in other words, knew that the charges of Sir Bartle Frere were false], I never expected such devotion. Nothing would move them. Neither the loss of their cattle, the fear of death, nor the offering of large bribes, would make them false to their king.' Such information as they obtained from small boys,' or from solitary Zulus, was extorted by proper persuasive measures;' and it is easy to guess what these would be.

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Nothing more is needed to prove that the epithets by which Sir Bartle Frere justified his designs against Cetshwayo were slanderously untrue. If the conduct of a nation under the most trying conditions goes for anything, the inference follows that his charges had absolutely no foundation in fact. But a series of incidents, openly avowed and even boasted of, in this narrative and in others, go far towards shifting upon British shoulders the infamy with which Sir Bartle Frere did his best to overwhelm the Zulu chieftain. The party in search of him, having failed to make any impression on the men whom they caught, lighted on a solitary woman in the bush. In her terror she told them where the king had slept two nights before; but three men seized at the kraal to which she directed them

denied in the most solemn way that they knew anything about the king. We threatened to shoot them, but they said, 'If you kill us we shall die innocently.' This was about 9 P.M., a beautiful moonlight night, and the picture was rather an effective one. There were all our men sitting round at their fireplaces, our select tribunal facing the three men, who were calin and collected, whilst we, as a sort of Inquisition, were trying to force them to divulge their secret. As a last resource we took one man and led him away blindfolded behind a bush, and then a rifle was fired off to make believe that he was shot. We then separated and blindfolded the remaining two, and said to one of them, You saw your brother blindfolded and led away; we have shot him, now we shall shoot you. You had better tell the truth.' After a good deal of coaxing, one told us where the king had slept the night before. It was now eleven o'clock. Lord Gifford gave orders for our party to saddle up, which was smartly done, and we started off with the two brothers as guides. We left the one brother behind, so as to keep on the screw, and make the two believe he had been shot. Deeds of a like kind were done after the proclamation of peace. Two chiefs, who by their fidelity to their king had drawn on themselves the wrath of Sir Garnet Wolseley, were slow in giving up their arms; and it was resolved to remind them of their previous misdeeds, although now,' as the narrator admits with delightful simplicity, all the memory of that (sic) was nominally buried under the amnesty proclaimed by Sir Garnet.' One of these chiefs, we are told, at first attempted resistance.' If he had no guns, he must pay the fine of cattle; and he began to pick out the very worst and mangiest starvelings in his herd.' It was time to interfere, and

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In his kraal were found articles seized on the field of Isandhwlana. 'It was hard to keep our hearts quiet and our hands still. Oh! had but that stupid, sulky dog of a Kafir had but the pluck to have fired a shot or two at us, it would have loosed us like bloodhounds from the leash-revenge or death the watchword and reply.' The writer does credit to his Christianity; but it is something to know that the attempted resistance of the Kafir chief did not go beyond words, which, as no arms were found, may have been after all true.

Mr. Vijn's journal, as well as all the evidence thus far brought together, tends to prove the studied adherence of Cetshwayo to his policy of strict self-defence. Some of his men were about to cross into Natal (and Natal, it must be remembered, lay absolutely at his mercy), when an Induna, or officer on horseback, shouted to them with a loud voice: Has he said you were to cross? He is not invading. He is only defending the land of the Zulus. Come back!' With one demand of the English, and with one only, he refused compliance. He would not break up his forces and surrender his arms. It remains to be seen whether the British nation will solemnly sanction the war which followed on such a pretext as this; but if, to its lasting disgrace, it should do so, the plea of wanton assault on the part of Cetshwayo remains absolutely false. Mr. Gladstone might well say, as he said at Chester,

That is a statement which beats all description. When it is really asserted by the responsible Minister of the Crown, that the Zulus invaded us, we ought to be on our guard. The error is to be found in this, that not only did we invade the land of the Zulus, but unfortunately, by that terrible calamity which befel our troops, they practically drove us out of the land; they made a broad road towards the dominions of the Queen; but, having broken our bands with a heavy hand, they did not cross the little bright stream which separated their land from ours, but simply were contented to wait within their own territories for the renewal of our wanton, unprovoked, mischievous, terrible attack.

This attack was marked by the employment of all the destructive agencies placed at our command by modern science; but we have yet to learn that the employment of some of these would be held justifiable in such a struggle as that of the Franco-German War. Cetshwayo undoubtedly had his rifles. With these he met us in the open field, and with, these, if it be granted that our cause of quarrel was adequate and righteous, we were justified in meeting him. But he refused on his side to use means against which his conscience revolted. When a Tonga doctor offered his services for killing the whites by poisoning the springs of water, Cetshwayo, Mr. Vijn tells us in his journal, said that he would not fight with the whites in any such inhuman manner, but he would fight in honourable fashion, for he had men enough for this. Also he gave orders always to his people that, whenever they were able to get white men into their hands alive,

On this, the Bishop of Natal remarks (and his words demand the serious consideration of Englishmen),—

No doubt, Cetshwayo was right in his decision, according to ordinary principles of humanity. But it is not easy to see where the line is to be drawn in planning means of death for an enemy in war, when dynamite' has been employed in Zululand (and elsewhere in South Africa) to destroy the ignorant savage, and smoking out of caves has been practised in Natal, and terrible engines, horribly destructive of human life, though requiring only skill in their use, and not any special display of valour.. have swept away the legs, and arms, and heads, or cruelly smashed the bodies of thousands of brave but helpless Zulus. . . If civilised men by their secret arts may poison the earth, why may not savages poison the water?

us.

If it be urged that the application of all scientific results is fair in war, the reply must be that there was a time when the man who knew how to poison water was the possessor of a scientific secret which gave him over his opponents a vantage ground similar to that which the knowledge of dynamite and other like substances gives But it is incredible that Englishmen can urge or sanction such a plea as this, and it is still more monstrous to suppose that they would, if they knew the facts, justify their employment for the purpose of smothering to death in caves multitudes of women and children who, with the men, had taken refuge in them. Of such deeds the Bishop of Natal has cited, in his notes to M. Vijn's journal, a series of sickening and revolting narratives written by the perpetrators. In another instance, where the inmates offered a stout resistance, the mouth of the cave was walled up, and bricks of gun-cotton' (?' dynamite') 'were thrown inside, and blew up the cave, destroying 400 or 500 men, women, and children who were in the inner recesses of the cave. My informant, a white man, said that there is no doubt about this, as the prisoners taken assured them that all their women and children were inside.'

Of the mode in which Cetshwayo was dealt with in the negotiations for peace, it is unnecessary to speak at any length. Messengers from the king were, in some instances, treated as spies, and manacled. Sufficient time was not allowed for the return of answers to English letters; and these letters all contained impossible demands, with the exception of the last, which never reached him. at all. It was not in the chief's power to compel his regiments to lay down their weapons in the sight of the Queen's forces; and unhappily the assurances of an English General could scarcely convey to Zulus the satisfaction which they would reasonably give to a European enemy. Even after the declaration of peace at Ulundi, Colonel Villiers had a brush with Manyonyoba's people, who had sought refuge in a number of caves near Lüneburg. From one cave nine headringed men were induced to come out on solemn promise of their lives and fair treatment, given them by the word of Doyle, who was staff interpreter with General Wood. They came out, and a few minutes afterwards they were killed by Tetéteku's people, who formed

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war were, to say the least, strained to the uttermost. when Lord Chelmsford was insisting on his 'utterly impracticable demand' that a thousand of the Zulu warriors should in person lay down their arms before him, he had accepted from Cetshwayo, and sent to England, an elephant's tusk of huge size; and by this act, the Bishop of Natal remarks, according to native usage, as well as by Lord Chelmsford's accepting the Prince Imperial's sword, we were pledged in honour and good faith, on the word of an English general,' to amicable relations with the king himself. It was perhaps owing only to the time of day when his capture was effected that Cetshwayo lives to await the judgment of the English nation at Cape Town. Of his party of twenty-three, eleven tried to escape in the evening dusk, and five were shot. It is easy to see,' the Bishop adds, what would have been, almost to a certainty, the fate of Cetshwayo, if Lord Gifford had carried out his plan of making the capture at night (the time fixed, it is said, being 8 P.M.), and if the king had made an effort to escape in the evening shade and uncertain moonlight. A rifle-shot would in all probability have. . . . relieved Sir Garnet Wolseley and the Government of the difficulty of deciding how to deal with him in the face of the English people and of all civilised and Christian men. In this case the unfortunate and nobleminded king would have perished without the chance of justice being done to him by word or act, his name blackened and his whole character misrepresented through the ceaseless vituperations of Sir Bartle Frere.'

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The war, in short, from first to last, has redounded to our disgrace. In the light of mere self-interest it has gained us nothing, it has settled nothing, and it has made the name of Englishmen a reproach amongst tribes whom, if we care, as we profess to care, for British interests, it was our business to make our friends. By it, if we may take the judgment of one of the most venerable of South African missionaries, the cause of Christian missions has been throughout the land thrown back for half a century; and unless we retrace our steps, we may have entered on a path which leads to internecine conflict between natives and European incomers. This is the result, a result in no way surprising or wonderful, when a nation allows wars to be undertaken and carried on in its name without ascertaining distinctly, in the assembly of its representatives, the alleged causes of injury, and then deciding for itself whether the war shall be undertaken or not. This is the plain duty of the people with regard to all wars; but if the conflict be against a nation equal in skill, science, and power with our own, some defence may be made for the practice of entrusting to the executive a power which the nation ought to retain in its own hands. In the case of a South African war even this poor plea is lacking; and the consequence is gross and wholesale injustice, for which it is the duty of the British people to make ample and generous amends.

THE CROOKIT MEG:

A STORY OF THE YEAR ONE.

[THE favourable reception accorded by the critics to the studies of Scotch life in a certain volume of Essays in Romance has tempted me to try my hand on a somewhat larger canvas. I was unwilling moreover that my recollections of some of the racy characters of a remote district of Scotland who were my friends when a boy should be allowed to pass away unrecorded. The generation to which they belonged retained many of the characteristics of their fathers, and, in particular, most of them-both men and women-used that Scots tongue which is now hardly to be met with in its purity out of a few Ayrshire villages. The middle class, indeed, and many of the upper, were able to speak either dialect,-the broad Scots of the labouring population, and the Scots-English, which was, and continues to be, spoken in those polite circles of the northern metropolis which are so obnoxious to the stout and pugnacious patriotism of Professor Blackie. I hope that I have been able to retain, while eschewing merely local patois, so much of the Scots tongue (as current till quite lately in the North of Scotland) as is distinctly characteristic ;-to attempt a piece of verbal photography would serve no good end, but would, on the contrary, render the dialogue obscure, and possibly unintelligible, to the vast majority of readers, even in Scotland. SHIRLEY.]

July 1879.

IT

I.

was the year One-the first year of a century which has passed the Psalmist's threescore-and-ten. Seventy and odd years have played sad havoc with most of us; the new-born babes who were then sleeping quietly in their cradles are now mainly under the turf, sleeping a sounder sleep-if it be a sleep that rounds our little life. Oblivion scattereth her poppies. These monotonously returning springs and summers and autumns are frozen into a winter from which there is no recovery. Their harvests are all gathered in, and death has reaped the reapers. Was the game worth the candle?

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Throughout that district of Scotland which (according to the Gaelic derivation of the name) lies in the bend of the ocean, and more particularly in the sea-port of Peelboro'-the Broch' being then, as now, the capital of a remote and secluded community--there was manifested on the first day of October, in the year One, a certain measure of restrained excitement,—an excitement as keen, indeed, as these reticent people ever permit themselves to manifest. There were wars and rumours of war. The Deluge was rising over Europe. It had come to be felt on all sides that the antagonism between the rival forces was too vital to admit of any compromise. That wild flood of hate and fury and revenge needed to spend itself before any thought of peace could be entertained. The triflers and critics were

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