COMMERCIAL PROSPECTS 299 



White Man's Colony should (with forest and game reservations excepted) be 

 surveyed, divided into estates of moderate size, and thrown open to settle- 

 ment at the hands of natives of the United Kingdom, or— failing a sufficient 

 number of applicants from England, Scotland, and Ireland — to the natives of 

 the British Empire, perhaps on slightly less liberal terms, since they have 

 not contributed to the original expenditure. No law or regulation need be 

 issued in this sense to horrify doctrinaire adherents of Free Trade or of that 

 present lack of Imperial organisation by which the 40,000,000 inhabitants of 

 the United Kingdom meet tlie entire cost and responsibility of creating, 

 extending, and defending the Empire ; but spoken instructions might be 

 conveyed to the local authorities in the consideration of claims for free 

 estates to favour, in the first instance, applicants who have been taxpayers 

 in the United Kingdom. The map on which the density of population and 

 the existing European settlements are given shows the approximate area of 

 this territory which I call the White Man's Colony. Over the greater part 

 of this extent there is not a single settled native inhabitant, no one in the 

 shape of a black man but a few wandering hunters. Consequently we are 

 comtnitting no act of injustice towards an indigenous population in offering 

 this land to the British settler. We are offering him in this direction a 

 country with a climate as healthy as that of the temperate parts of South 

 Africa, of Southern Australia, of New Zealand ; a land abundantly watered 

 by running streams, with grassy downs, splendid forests of conifers, a fertile 

 soil, and a country which, though exactly under the equator, is singularly 

 like the landscapes of southern England — ^landscapes that are decked with 

 wild-flow^ers closely resembling those that grow in the English meadows and 

 hedgerows ; a land wherein it is never too hot in the daytime, though some- 

 times there is a frost at night ; where there is heavy rain and (where the 

 forest is too thick) too much humidity; where the wind is sometimes 

 keen ; where the lion, the leojiard, the wild-cat, and the hyaena may for a 

 time exact a toll from the settler's flocks; where there will be unlooked-for 

 disappointments in the third year's crops, or where an unexpected disease 

 may diminisli the tenth year's out[)ut of potatoes; yet on the whole one 

 of the fairest countries for beauty on the habitable earth, and a tract of 

 land which, if it lay within the limits of Australia or a South African colony,, 

 would maintain a prosperous European population of 500,000 souls. 



