Page:Colonization and Christianity.djvu/477

 do you not perceive that in spite of all these means to make your people honest, that your prisons continue full, and that you have constant employment for your magistrates, policemen, and hangmen, without being able to keep down your colonial thieves and cheats? A thief is a wolf; he belongs to no society, and yet is the pest and bane of all societies. You have your thieves, and we have thieves among us; but we cannot as chiefs, extirpate the thieves of Caffreland, more than we can extirpate the wolves, or you can extirpate the thieves of the colony. There is however this difference between us: we discountenance thieves in Caffreland, and prevent, as far as possible, our people stealing from the colony; but you countenance the robbery of your people upon the Caffres, by the sanction you give to the injustice of the patrol system. Our people have stolen your cattle, but you have, by the manner by which you have refunded your loss, punished the innocent; and after having taken our country from us, without even a shadow of justice, and shut us up to starvation, you threaten us with destruction for the thefts of those to whom you left no choice but to steal or die by famine."

What force and justice of reasoning in these abused Caffres! what force and injustice of action in the English! Who could have believed that from the moment of our becoming masters of the Cape colony such dreadful and wicked scenes as these could be going on, up to 1834, by Englishmen. But the end was not yet come; other, and still more abominable deeds were to be perpetrated. Another war broke out, and the people of England asked, why? Dr. Philip, before the Parliamentary Committee,