In other respects the Dutch are politically conservative, and will give us little trouble." If, on the other hand, native policy was to be directed from home, or, in other words, if adequate precautions were to be taken against slavery, a federal system would be useless, and South Africa must be governed like an Indian province.
Pretoria Froude found full of English, loudly demanding annexation.
He told them, speaking of course only for himself, that it was impossible, because the Cape was a self-governing Colony, and the Dutch majority "would take any violence offered to their kinsmen in the Republics as an injury to themselves." To annexation without violence, by consent of the Boers, the great obstacle, so Froude found, was the seizure, the fraudulent seizure, as they thought it, of the Diamond Fields.

He visited Kimberley, called after the Colonial Secretary who acquired it, "like a squalid Wimbledon Camp set down in an arid desert." The method of digging for diamonds was then primitive.
"Each owner works by himself or with his own servants.

He has his own wire rope, and his own basket, by which he sends his stuff to the surface to be washed.

The rim of the pit is fringed with windlasses.

The descending wire ropes stretch from them thick as gossamers on an autumn meadow.