after a short war, made their submission in 1843, after a warm but ineffectual protest against the principle of equal civil rights for whites and blacks laid down by the British government. The colony of Natal was then constituted, first as a dependency of Cape Colony, afterward, in 1856, as a separate colony. A part of the Boers remained in it, but the majority recrossed the mountains (some forthwith, some five years later), with their goods and their cattle, and joined the mass of their fellow-emigrants who had remained on the plateaus of the interior. Meanwhile an immense influx of Kafirs repopulated the country, and in it the blacks are now ten times as numerous as the whites. Thus ended the Dutch Republic of Natalia, after six years of troubled life. While it was fighting with the Zulus on the east, and other Kafirs on the west, it was torn by intestine quarrels, and unable to compel the obedience of its own citizens. But its victories over Dingaan's armies were feats of arms as remarkable as any South Africa has seen.

Hardly less troubled was the lot of the emigrants who had scattered themselves over the wide uplands that lie between the Orange River and the Limpopo. They too were engaged in incessant wars with the native tribes, who were, however, less formidable than the Zulus, and much cattle-lifting went on upon both sides. Only one native tribe and one native chief stand out from the confused tangle of petty raids and forays which makes up (after the expulsion of the Matabele) the earlier annals of the northern Boer communities. This chief was the famous Moshesh, to speak of whose career I shall digress for a moment from the thread of this narrative. The Kafir races have produced within this century three really remarkable men-men who, like Toussaint l'Ouverture in Hayti, and Kamehameha I. in Hawaii, will go down in history as instances of the gifts that sometimes show themselves even among the most backward races. Tshaka, the Zulu, was a warrior of extraordinary energy and ambition, whose power of organization enabled him to raise the Zulu army within a few years to a perfection of drill and discipline and a swiftness of movement which made them irresistible, except by Europeans. Khama, the chief who still reigns among the Bechuanas, has been a social reformer and administrator of wonderful judgment, tact, and firmness, who has kept his people in domestic peace, and protected them from the dangerous influences which white civilization usually brings with it, and especially from strong drink, while at the same VOL. LII.-32.

time helping them skilfully onward toward such improvements as their character admits. Moshesh, chief of the Basutos, was born in the end of the last century. He belonged to a small clan which had suffered severely in the wars caused by the conquests of Tshaka, whose attacks upon the tribes nearest him had driven them upon other tribes, and brought slaughter and confusion upon the whole of southeastern Africa. Though only a younger son, his enterprise and courage soon made him a leader. Adherents gathered about him. The progress of his power was aided by the skill he showed in selecting a residence and stronghold. In what is now Basutoland, about twelve miles south of the Caledon River, there is a flat-topped hill, called Thaba Bosiyo, nearly two miles long, and from half a mile to a quarter of a mile wide. It rises some 600 feet from the broad valley beneath, and is fenced all about by precipitous cliffs of white sandstone-cliffs not very lofty, but so continuously abrupt that at three points only can an ascent be made, and even in these points only by a steep and narrow track. The level top of the hill is grass-covered, and watered by several springs. Here Moshesh fixed himself, and in this impregnable stronghold he resisted repeated sieges by his native enemies and by the emigrant Boers. On one occasion, in the war which began in 1865, a storming party of the latter had climbed the path by which the easiest access was to be obtained—a path leading up a cleft which the decomposition of a greenstone dike, traversing the sandstone rock, had formed. They were within thirty yards of the open top of the hill when their leader fell, pierced by a bullet from one of the few guns which Moshesh possessed. The storming party halted, and then fell back, and the siege was shortly afterward abandoned. The exploits of Moshesh against his native foes soon brought adherents to him, and he became the head of that powerful tribe, largely formed out of the fragments of other tribes scattered and shattered by war, which is now called the Basuto. Unlike most Kafir warriors, he was singularly free from cruelty, and ruled his own people with a mildness which made him liked as well as respected. In 1832 he had the foresight to invite missionaries to come and settle among his people, and the following year saw the establishment of the mission of the Evangelical Society of Paris, the members of which, some of them French, some Swiss, some Scotch, have been the most potent factors in the subsequent history of the Basuto nation. When the inevitable collision between the Basutos and the white men

arrived, Moshesh was substantially aided by the advice of the missionaries, and partly through their counsels, partly from his own prudence, did his best to avoid any fatal breach with the British government. Nevertheless he was several times engaged in war with the Boers, and once had to withstand the attack of a strong British force, led by the governor of Cape Colony. But his tactful diplomacy made him a match for any European opponent, and carried him through every political danger. When this British army had suffered a reverse in a somewhat imprudent movement made against him, Moshesh, instead of renewing the combat, seized the moment to propose terms of peace and friendship, which, while they extricated his antagonist from an annoying position, raised his own reputation higher than ever, and secured the subsequent good-will of the colonial authorities. Moshesh "died, full of years and honor, about twenty-five years ago, having built up, out of the dispersed remnants of broken tribes, a nation which, under the guiding hand of the missionaries, and latterly of the British government also, has made greater progress in civilization and Christianity than any other Kafir race.

I return from this digression to trace the fortunes of the emigrant Boers who had remained on the north side of the Quathlamba range, or had returned thither from Natal. In 1843 they numbered not more than 15,000 persons all told, possibly less; for, though fresh emigrants from the colony had joined them, many had perished in the native wars. They were scattered over an area 700 miles long and 300 miles wide-an area bounded on the southeast by the Quathlamba mountain chain, but on the north and west divided by no natural limit from the great plain which stretches west to the Atlantic and north to the Zambesi. To have established any kind of government over so wide a territory would have been in any case difficult. But the very qualities which had enabled them with so much success to carry out their exodus from Cape Colony, and their campaigns of conquest against the natives, made the task of government still more difficult. They were selfreliant and individualistic» to excess; they loved not only independence, but isolation; they were resolved to make their government absolutely popular, and were little disposed to brook the control even of those authorities they had themselves created. It was only for warlike expeditions, for which they had contracted a great taste, that they could be brought together, and only to their leaders in

war that they would yield obedience. Very few had taken to agriculture, and the halfnomadic life of stock-farmers, each pasturing his cattle over great tracts of country, confirmed their dissociative instincts. However, the necessities of defense against the natives, and a common spirit of hostility to the claims of sovereignty which the British government had never renounced, kept them together. Thus several small republican communities grew up, each with its Volksraad, or popular assembly, held together by a sort of loosely federative tie, which rested rather in a common understanding than upon any legal instruments. In the northeast, beyond the Vaal River, these communities, while distracted by internal feuds chiefly arising from personal or family enmities, were left undisturbed by the colonial authorities. Those authorities, as I have already observed, were in those days, under orders received from home, anxious rather to contract than to extend the sphere of British influence, and would have cared little for what happened far out in the wilderness but for the native troubles which the presence of the Boers induced. At last, in 1852, the then governor of Cape Colony concluded at Sand River a convention with the commandant and delegates of the Boers living beyond the Vaal, by which the British government «guaranteed to the emigrant farmers beyond the Vaal River the right to manage their own affairs, and to govern themselves according to their own laws, without any interference on the part of the British government,» subject to a condition that slavery should not be permitted or practised by the farmers in the country north of the Vaal River. From this convention the South African Republic, afterward slowly formed out of the small communities which then divided the country, dates its independence. Two years later a similar convention, signed at Bloemfontein in February, 1854, declared the independence from the British crown of the inhabitants of the country nearer the colony between the Orange and Vaal rivers. In this country, then called the Orange River Sovereignty, the colonial government had exercised practical control, and six years before (in 1848) it had defeated in battle an army of the farmers who endeavored to resist that authority. Moreover, whereas the farmers beyond the Vaal were nearly all of pure Boer stock, those in the Orange River Sovereignty were mixed with English settlers, and from their proximity to the colony were much less averse to the British connection. In fact, a large part of them-though it is

not now easy to discover the exact proportion-warmly resisted the proposal of the British government to withdraw, and independence had to be forced on them against their will. The authorities of the colony and the colonial office at home were, however, inexorable. They saw no use in keeping territories which involved great cost of defense against native raids, and from which little benefit was then expected. Hardly any notice was taken in Great Britain of the Sand River Convention, and when, at the instance of delegates sent home by those who in the Orange River territory desired to remain subject to the British crown, a motion was made in the House of Commons asking the Queen to reconsider the renunciation of her sovereignty over that territory, the motion found no support, and had to be withdrawn. So little did Englishmen then care for that South African dominion which they have subsequently become so eager to develop and extend.

From the convention of 1854 dates the beginning of the Orange Free State, which, increased by the acquisition of new territories in the south, has ever since remained perfectly independent and at peace with the British colonies. Its only serious troubles have arisen from native wars, and these have long ago come to an end. In 1854 an assembly of delegates enacted for it the republican constitution under which it has ever since been quietly and peaceably governed. It had the good fortune to elect as its president, in 1865, a lawyer of Cape Colony, of Dutch extraction, Mr. (afterward Sir John) Brand, who guided its course with great tact and wisdom for twenty-four years, and whose favorite expression, «All will come right,» now inscribed on his tombstone at Bloemfontein, has become throughout South Africa a proverbial phrase of encouragement in moments of difficulty.

Beyond the Vaal River things have gone very differently. The farmers of that region were more scattered, more rude and uneducated, and more prone to factious dissentions than those of the Free State. In 1858 an instrument called the «Grondwet,» or Fundamental Law, was drawn up by a body of delegates, which, though subsequently altered in some material points, is still the constitution of the country. It was, however, at first repudiated by two out of the three self-governing communities of which the state then consisted. Not till after the civil war of 1862 can the present South African Republic be 1 This was modified in 1884, but the interpretation of the modifying instrument has given rise to a controversy with which I have not space to deal. Great Brit

deemed to have been really established. The Volksraad, or representative assembly, proved an inefficient governing body, while the successive presidents, to whom, in the constant financial embarrassments and frequently recurring native wars, a great deal of control inevitably fell, were hampered by the resistance of hostile factions. At last, in 1877, the republic found itself in hopeless difficulties. The treasury was empty, the government was no longer obeyed, a formidable native chief was in arms in the northeast of the territory, and the power of the Zulus constituted a grave menace on the southeast. A British commissioner, who had been sent into the country on the ground that its condition had become a danger to its neighbors, proclaimed its annexation to the British crown, believing, it would appear, that the citizens were disposed by the troubles from which they could not extricate themselves to welcome the protection thus secured to them. The British government at home shared his opinion and approved his action. Probably the great majority of the Boers would have acquiesced had the British administration, which was thereupon set up, been prudently conducted. But the military governor who was soon afterward sent into the Transvaal irritated them, not only by a strict levy of taxes, a thing which the Boers resent even from their own Volksraad,-but also by delaying to give them such representative self-government as had been promised to them, and by his arrogant and distant treatment of men among whom a strong sense of republican equality had grown up. Discontent soon grew to disaffection, and at last broke out into revolt. In the end of 1880 the people rose in arms, and captured or drove out the small occupying force; and after some engagements on the Natal frontier, in which the British troops suffered heavily, the home government, perceiving that independence was desired by the large majority of the Transvaal people, and unwilling to accentuate race hatreds all over South Africa, recognized, in 1881, the independence, as regards internal government, of the South African Republic, while retaining a suzerainty as regards foreign relations.1 This canceling of the annexation was a magnanimous act, for the British troops in Natal had received reinforcements which would have made resistance by the Transvaal men hopeless. But it has not produced those results of good feeling between the Boers and ain retains an undoubted right of veto on any treaty concluded by the Republic, except one with the Orange Free State.

their neighbors of English race which were expected from it; and the rankling memories of the war of 1881 have had something to do with those very recent Transvaal troubles, which are too well known to need recounting here. The first result of the war and the recovery of self-government by the Boers was to intensify their sentiments of nationality, and dispose them to fresh enterprises. Their president, Mr. Stephen John Paul Krueger, who had been one of the three triumvirs by whom the insurrection was successfully guided, began to plan acquisitions of territory. The native chief who had threatened the republic on the northeast was gone; a British force had overcome him in 1879. The Zulu power was gone on the southeast, Cetewayo having been overthrown and carried off prisoner in the same year, 1879. Thus the republic, though penniless, had been freed by British arms from its chief dangers. Its ambitions have been successful in the south, where it has acquired a large slice of Zululand, and on the east, where the British government (by a treaty signed in 1894) has given it virtual control over the rich district of Swaziland. But on the west its attempts to raid and conquer some of the tribes of Bechuanaland were checked in 1884, while its hopes of annexing the vast territories which, on the north, lie between it and the Zambesi were dissipated by the declaration, in 1888, that those territories were to be deemed to lie within the sphere of British influence, and by their occupation, in 1890, by the pioneers of the British South Africa Company.

These events complete the story of the relations of the Dutch and English races in South Africa so far as the determination of the territorial limits of the colonies and republics is concerned. Of their present political attitude toward each other, and the tendencies that are at work to shape the political future of both, it will be necessary to speak later. The problems which that

future opens are complicated by the facts that the Dutch element is still very powerful within Cape Colony itself; that a large British population has recently migrated into the mining districts of the Transvaal Republic; and that the British power, which surrounds the Transvaal on the north, west, and south, does not surround it on the east, where it is divided from the sea by a comparatively narrow strip of Portuguese territory, through which a railway runs from Pretoria, the capital, and the mining districts to the port of Lourenço Marques, on Delagoa Bay.

The fourth and last European race that has entered South Africa is the German. Besides her East African dominions, which, since they lie north of the Zambesi, do not here concern us, Germany took possession, in 1884, of a stretch of country on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean between the Orange River and the West African possessions of Portugal. The limits of her claims there have been defined by agreements made with Portugal in 1886, and with Britain in 1890. Under these she is mistress of some 340,000 square miles; but the native population does not exceed 200,000, and the country is so bare and waterless as to be wholly unfit for agriculture, and in most places unfit even for ranching. Moreover, the only tolerable harbor, Walfish Bay, belongs to Cape Colony. There is, therefore, little prospect that any German population will spring up on these unattractive coasts, and if Germany plays any part in South African politics, she will not do so, at least for a long time to come, in respect of her Southwest African possessions. It is rather to the east side of the continent, and in particular to the Transvaal, that her eyes seem to have been recently directed. But the question of her plans and desires, as well as the other problems which the economical prospects of South Africa, and the relations of the white and colored races, suggest for discussion, must be reserved for a concluding article.

S

T. LOUIS, in more than one sense, must be accorded a central place in the series of great American towns. It is not only central by virtue of its geographical situation, but it is also more typically American than any other of our large communities, by reason of the blending of the several American types of population. The process of assimilation has been more complete than in the Northwestern towns, and distinctions of race and class are less sharp than in most Eastern cities. St. Louis is comparatively an old community. It has succeeded fairly well in reducing New Englanders, Virginians, New Yorkers, men from the Gulf States, Kentuckians, Northwesterners, Missourians, the Illinois contingent, the Texans, and the Irish and Germans as well, into a body of progressive yet conservative Americans, to which each element has contributed something, while losing the sharp edges of its own eccentricities. There results a community that is typically American, and more completely representative of our whole country, such as it is, than any other one of the dozen largest American cities. It also happens that St. Louis is the most satisfactory exponent of what may be called the distinctively American system of city government that the country affords on any similar scale of magnitude. If the analogy of our National and State organizations is to be followed at all in municipal government, it ought to be followed so intelligently and logically as to retain the merits along with the complications and inconveniences. This is what the St. Louis system, more than any other in the country, has succeeded in doing. The one great achievement for which St. Louis is to be praised is the completeness with which it has won its liberty, and stands for the principle of municipal home rule. It is entitled to be called a free city. Even its charter was not made for it and conferred upon it by the legislature, or by any State agency, but was made by a local body of citizens elected for that purpose, and was then adopted by the voters of St. Louis at a special election.

HOW ST. LOUIS ACHIEVED HOME RULE.

THIS was in 1876. The State of Missouri had been holding a constitutional convention, and the convention had found itself face to face with the problem how to deal with the government of Missouri's chief municipality. Much confusion had arisen from the illogical and overlapping dual government of the county of St. Louis and the city of St. Louis. The county debt was a large and growing one, while the city debt was in the same process of extravagant increase. A rough-and-ready method for the limitation of local indebtedness was fixed upon by the convention. It was ordained in the State constitution that such local debts should not become greater in the aggregate than five per cent. of the assessed valuation of local property. As regards St. Louis, it was provided that the city and county governments might, if they chose, agree to hold a special election in order to choose thirteen men, who should be empowered (1) to draw up a scheme for the entire separation of the city from the county, and (2) to draft a charter for the reconstituted city. This program was carried out. The scheme of separation greatly increased the municipal area, and fixed the bounds now existing. County buildings, with other county property inside the limits of the city, were all transferred to the municipality, and in return the city assumed the entire county debt.

The popular house of the Municipal Assembly, known as the House of Delegates, was made to consist of twenty-eight members, one from each ward, elected for two years, all retiring together. The upper chamber of the Assembly, known as the Council, was to consist of thirteen members, elected for four-year terms on a general city ticket. The president of the Council was to be specifically elected to that position. Of the remaining twelve members six were to retire every two years. The municipal elections were ordered to be held in April, and were thus kept distinct from State and National elections, which occur in November. The mayor was to be elected for a term of four years, and other general officers, to be elected at large for four-year