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curse of a colony the low out of deference to the interests,

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established institution.

But we have no wish to discuss in detail a question upon which such copious floods of illogical declamation, sectarian rancour, and political trickery have been poured. The frothy fury which has been spent upon it is only subsiding now, when the hope is rapidly disappearing of the possibility of bringing the unthinking mass of the nation to the arbitrament of a general election while prejudice was still at its height. For a calm discussion of possible alternatives, leading to the inevitable conclusion that the proposal to introduce Chinese labour was the only possible scheme, we must refer our readers to Mr Buchan's pages. But the course of the controversy since Mr Buchan's book was published serves in itself to show how absolutely dishonest was the opposition which this proposal aroused. The preliminary discussion in the Legislative Assembly at Pretoria upon Sir George Farrar's motion took place last December. It would have been quite legal to have introduced Chinese labour by a free issue of permits. The leading members of the Chamber of Mines had from the first pledged themselves against this,

in large measure, of the small tradesmen, who feared that such an influx might have established a wholesome competition, such as has, in Natal, greatly lowered their profits and cheapened the cost of living. During the whole of the debate the arguments-if it is necessary to call them by so flattering a name-by which Chinese labour were opposed were very simple and very plainly stated. Only four of the members of the legislative council of thirty spoke against the measure. Their arguments were only two. First, that no ordinances, however carefully drawn, would prove any real impediment to the establishment of the Chinese in lucrative trade in the Colony; and, second, that if more labour were necessary, it could easily be obtained by forcing the Kaffir to labour. One working-man representative caused much amusement by naïvely proposing that Kaffir labour might be obtained in abundance by the simple process of "enlisting the influence of the chiefs "11 Four Dutch members spoke strongly in favour of the measure; and Louis Botha was so indignant at being quoted as opposed to it that he compelled the member who so used his authority to recant his statement, by the threat that if he did not do so

1 One of the most amusing episodes of the Parliamentary discussion at Westminster occurred in a question put by a Scottish Radical member. He asked if it was true that a rule was being enforced which prevented the Kaffir from using the side-paths. The answer was received with the usual shouts of "Slavery again!" But it was not known-or was conveniently ignored-that this Boer regulation, which still stands on the Statute-Book, was enforced at the instance of Mr Loveday, a member of the Transvaal Legislative Assembly, who opposes Chinese labour because, in his opinion, the Kaffir "should be forced to work.”

Botha would supply a contradiction to one of the members of the Government. By 24 votes against 4 the proposal was affirmed. The decision was received with acclamation by Johannesburg, and no one who then mixed with any grade of society in that town could doubt that had there been free representative government in the Colony last January, scarcely one member who ventured to oppose it would have had a chance of election.

Such were the arguments of the men in whom the facile consciences of our Radical leaders, and of those renegades to party allegiance who were in search of any means of injuring the Government which they were elected to support, found allies ready to their hands. The arguments of their new allies were scarcely suited for consumption at home; but nothing was easier than to adopt the conclusions on entirely different arguments, and to make a dishonest appeal to the possible reversion of the proposal by representative representative government at a moment when representative government was out of the question! The fatuity of factious blindness has rarely proceeded to greater absurdities, nor has political rancour often resorted to tricks so base. To interfere with a great industry, the check upon which was injuring all the markets of the world; to impede the prosperous settlement of a great colony, the destinies of which had only recently come into our keeping; to mock representative government by a

specious appeal to its supposed result, and at the same time to flout the openly expressed opinion of the vast majority of every class of the colonists; to form an alliance with a handful of men who opposed the mass of their fellow-colonists, and at the same time to use arguments which were the very converse of those which their new allies employed,-such were the devices to which a political party have not hesitated to resort. We rejoice to think that such devices have only resulted in a short-lived semblance of success.

We have not space to follow Mr Buchan in his discussion of other administrative questions of the first moment. We have entered more fully into this particular question because his judicial exposition of it stands in so marked a contrast with the fanatical outburst of prejudice which it has provoked since his book appeared. His words are the more weighty because they were written before that outburst began. If other topics of pregnant importance for South Africa should provoke a similar appeal to factious malignity, we are confident that on these also he will be found a sound and trustworthy guide. His survey of South African administration is a wide and comprehensive one, and we rejoice to find that while he has learned the difficulty and complexity of the problems before us, he has the confident hopefulness of the final issue which is characteristic of the distinguished Chief under whom he served in South Africa.

A CYCLE OF CATHAY.

"Hathi par howdah, ghore par zeen, Pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat, Warren Hasteen."

As the evening gun flashed and reverberated over the huge durbar camp at Moghul Delhi, studded with twinkling lights and merry camp-fires, I, James Foresight, a simple captain of artillery in general and of a heavy battery in particular, stepped out of the gunner mess-tent into the cool moonlight, loosened my jacket, and, weary of dessert and mess chatter, leant against a howitzer in the battery gun-park. The spirit of reverie that haunts an Indian evening descended on me, and there in the durbar camp, within a rifle-shot of "the Ridge,' а thousand thoughts crowded on each other, of ancient India, of Prince Gautama and Alexander of Macedon, of Timurlang and the mighty Babar, and then of the India of "John Company," down to my own poor wanderings, while the band from the Viceroy's pavilion sounded clear across the camps, even as the strains of mutineer bands, playing British airs to the imperial puppet, must have reached "the masters" as they clung to that ridge close on half a century ago.

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The moonlight glinted from the four long khaki barrels of the heavy guns, and their howitzer satellites, no longer drawn by giant elephants, but confided to the lumbering

-Old Indian Lullaby.

"twenty yoke of the 40pounder train."

From time immemorial the heavy guns, called in some shrewd jest the "true politicals" of India, had been drawn by elephants, and only their ammunition-waggons by bullocks; and now, by a recent edict, elephants had been discarded-discarded at any rate till a 40-pounder next jams in the Khyber. So, down by the gun-park I dreamed of the past pomp of my battery, now dimmed by the loss of our famous elephants, and mused on, on the varying phases of a soldier's life in India; of my subaltern service with the mountain artillery, lightest of the dogs of war yet hardly least; of my first sojourn with elephants in Burma, when we hoisted our 7-pounders on their backs to thread the Pinmana jungles.

Then on to years spent with the jingling gunmule all the frontier round, wandering on to stories of Clive and Cornwallis, of Lake and Wellesley, and of the romance of Indian soldiering, that, descending through Donald Stewart and Roberts, still lingers on the Afghan marches, with

That whistles shrill, ‘All flesh is grass,' "The flying bullet down the pass,

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where my best friend lies, shot through the heart as he

breasted a kotal at the head and has been with Scindiah

of his battery.

"Salaam, sahib," broke on my dreams, the salute of a muffled figure that had approached from the bullocklines. It was none other than my old friend Sheikh Bhulloo, for some time jemadar of mahouts in my battery, now chief of the hathi-khana (elephant-stable) of Scindiah, in whose retinue he had come with the State elephants to the durbar, and had hastened to greet us the first spare moment he had had. He had been with our artillery elephants at Pinmana, and I had met him again in charge of the beasts carrying commissariat grain - bags to our posts on the Yunan frontier. In those days a bottle of chlorodyne and a tin of Swiss milk had enabled me to cure the old man of what he firmly believed to be cholera, so he was proportionately grateful, and delighted beyond measure at meeting me at Delhi, and finding me the captain of his former heavy battery. He had returned the chlorodyne favour by curing me of ague in those same frontiers by giving me some of his pet opium pills, and as ague had been threatening me for the last two nights, I felt inclined to ask for a pill now.

"Well, Sheikh Bhulloo, how goes the hathi-kana ?"

"By the favour of the Presence, all is well. To-night is old Seevaji's festival; he is the oldest elephant in Hindostan,

since the Great Fear; men say he carried Carnwallis sahib, and even the Horrible Istink1 sahib. Gopi Nath has just repainted his head, and three chirags [oillamps] burn on his skull-top; will not the Presence come and see him. Shisha Nag, who used to be head elephant in No. 4 gun in the Huzoor's battery, is with him, and as the prince-born knows, Shisha Nag drew Lord Lake's guns when the Huzoors first came to Delhi ; but Seevaji is older than he."

"Of course I'll come and see Seevaji, and old Shisha Nag too; but wait till I get my cloak, for I've had ague these two nights." When I returned with my cape I found the old man examining the new breechloading howitzers with intense interest: cannon have always fascinated the Asiatic.

"The Presence has ague ! he must have aƒeem" (opium), said Sheikh Bhulloo, and I was at once presented with an opium pill of considerable size.

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1 The Honourable Mr Hastings.

battalions, British and native; past camp-fires and cheery sing-songs

"

"Jolly good song, jolly well sung, Jolly good comrades every one till we came to the medlied establishments of the native chiefs. Slipping past the spreading tents and shamianas of the potentates, we came to their cavalry camps and gunpark, differing scarcely at all from a gathering of Moghul feudatories of perhaps a couple of centuries ago, since in the immutable East a century is but a span.

In the rajwara gun - park there was little of the sombre order obtaining in the Sirkar's camp a mile or so away. Big guns and little guns, silver and even gilt, dragon-mouthed and ostentatious, lay in delightful medley. Field-guns that Scotch Sangster had cast at Agra for De Boigne's French - trained contingent a century ago, silver coehorns on rosewood carriages from Indore, rakish swivelguns, bell-mouthed zumbooraks, long-barrelled sher butchas from mountain fortresses, every fantastic piece of ordnance that oriental ingenuity could devise, stood cheek by jowl on the nitre flats by the Jumna, while beyond them loomed two huge elephants, and some fifty yards farther on a dozen more. By this time my afeem pill had allayed the incipient chattering of the ague, and was producing a feeling altogether novel,-so much so, that when finally settled on the trail of a huge lumbering bombard, within a dozen yards or so of Seevaji

and Shisha Nag, I felt hardly surprised at the weird effect of the lighted chirags flickering on the former's crown, or the elaborate painting on his forehead that showed up fitfully as the wicks flared and sank again.

"That's Seevaji, the worldcompeller, the mover of mountains," whispered my guide. "See his tusks, mounted with gold; Scindiah had that done when Seevaji charged through his own mutinous troops at the time of the Terror, and enabled him to escape to the British, so that he preserved his honour and his fidelity. Forty-five years ago to-day, and his Highness always gives bukhsheesh to the hathi-khana and decorates Seevaji, the Amir-i-filam [Prince of elephants], lest he turn on us and kill his mahout: seven mahouts has he killed in my memory, Huzoor, and what he has seen and what he knows no man can tell. See the garlands of roses the Maharajah sent him this morning; he will only wear them if his temper is good."

Weird indeed, wise and unearthly certainly, loomed that mountain of flesh and bone, the wrinkles in brow and trunk forming a forming a rugged silhouette in the full fragrant moonlight that the white nitre efflorescence on the ground reflected with the brilliance of an arc-lamp. couple of yards behind stood my old friend Shisha Nag, the erstwhile leader of four gun, a contemporary of Gerald Lake, of Delhi and Laswaree,— "Lucky Lake" men called him, for all the hazards he

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