Page:George McCall Theal, History of South Africa from 1873 to 1884, Volume 1 (1919).djvu/49

1877] sorrow for the unfortunate old man, passing his last days on a bare islet far from the pleasant woods and streams of Kaffraria, and with no one near him that cared whether he lived or died. And if one of another race sympathises with him, what must the Gaikas have felt when the tidings reached them that he had died as a dog dies? What must Tini, his son, have felt?

The fate of Makoma is an illustration of what must happen when civilisation and barbarism come in contact, and barbarism refuses to give way. It was not in his nature to refrain from causing disturbances when he was at liberty on the frontier, and so the government was obliged to place him in confinement at a distance, where he could not communicate with the people who were ready to obey his orders at any hazard to themselves. He can be pitied, but can hardly be blamed, for being what he was, and the government cannot be blamed for acting as it did, though it is to be regretted that the benevolent intention to provide him with some companions was not carried into effect more quickly.

In 1876 a frontier defence commission was appointed, with Mr. (later Sir) John Gordon Sprigg as its chairman, to take evidence as to the condition of affairs and to endeavour to devise a plan of restoring tranquillity. Mr. Sprigg was a farmer in the district of East London, and the other members were equally well acquainted with the state of the border, but they took a good deal of evidence on the subject. In January 1877 the commission sent in a report which was somewhat startling, for the farmers were living, it stated, as if on the brink of a volcano. It proposed an additional expenditure of £150,000 a year for defensive purposes, and recommended the increase of the frontier armed and mounted police from nine hundred, its strength at the time, to twelve hundred men, with three hundred footmen additional attached to it for the purpose of garrisoning fixed posts. A strong burgher force was