SEVERITY SOMETIMES NECESSARY. 241 



control, his children become a plague to himself and a 

 scourge to the community. The Kaffirs are children of a 

 larger growth, and must be treated accordingly; children 

 in knowledge, ignorant of the relationships of civilized 

 society, and strangers to many of the motives which 

 influence the conduct of the white man. But they are 

 men in physical and mental powers ; men in the arts and 

 usages of their nation, and the laws of their country ; and 

 the great difficulty in governing them is, to treat them as 

 men-children, teaching them that to submit and to obey 

 are essential to their own welfare as well as to that of 

 others. 



" Some kind-hearted Christians will say, ' This is much 

 too severe;' but my firm conviction, after many years' 

 experience, is, that it is not merely the best, but also the 

 only way to save the native races from ruin and annihila- 

 tion ; and that, had the Kaffirs on the frontier of the old 

 colony been treated with more apparent severity after the 

 first war, a second outbreak would not have taken place. 

 Who, I would ask, is their best friend, the man who 

 would save them by apparent severity, or the man who 

 would destroy them by mistaken kindness ? I presume 

 the former. Besides, it should not be forgotten that what 

 appears to be severe to us is not so to them, since many 

 of them have lived under the iron rule of cruel capricious 

 despots, with no security for life or property, and are 

 consequently unable to appreciate or understand our 

 excess of civilized kindness; being strangers to those 

 refined feelings which operate in the breast of the 

 Christian. The result of too mild a policy is, that in 



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