140 SOUTH AFRICA. 



the line. In justice to Waterboer, it must be said 

 that he resisted for a time and ridiculed the position 

 imposed on him, but Arnott found means, by con- 

 verting him from a decent, respectable man into 

 a sodden idiotic inebriate, to obtain his assent to 

 the fraud in the end, and he consented to become 

 a Government pensioner to the tune of 1,000 per 

 annum. Most of the British settlers were ruined 

 and the Orange Free State ignored by the action 

 taken by Government ; but what of that ? It 

 obtained the diamond fields, and Arnott the 

 hundred square miles of land (supposed to be 

 diamondiferous) which was to be his reward for 

 successful bravado. Within the above mentioned 

 hundred square miles were many farms belonging 

 to British subjects; most of them were persuaded 

 by armed parties of natives under Arnott to quit, 

 a small minority only holding out, and retained 

 possession in spite of sanguinary threats. Not 

 daring to resort to actual violence, Arnott deter- 

 mined merely to ruin these people by forcibly com- 

 pelling some small Kaffir tribes in the neighbour- 

 hood to quit their own kraals and standing crops 

 and encamp on the farms of the recalcitrant 

 settlers with their flocks and herds, and then, by 



