Undesirable.

The proposal had been heartily seconded by the Lieutenant-Governor of Natal and conditionally sanctioned by the Home Government. The matter was sub judice when Grey arrived at the Cape. Sir John Pakington, still Secretary for the Colonies, required him to report on the proposal. He examined it thoroughly, as was his custom, viewed it under a variety of lights, and probed it to the bottom. On December 3, 1855, he at length made his report. His imagination, which led him astray in Western Australia and misled him so grievously in New Zealand, again played a prominent part. In a vision he beheld Shepstone's Goshen occupied by a numerous and thriving white population. Forgetting Matabeleland, now Rhodesia, he described it as the last-remaining uncolonised part of South Africa that was suited for European colonisation. Situated on the eastern slope of the great range of the Drakensberg, it page 113was the key of South Africa (surely a gross exaggeration!) and, held by British colonists, it would safeguard States that were now in jeopardy. More than half a century has rolled by since then. Have his prophecies in respect of the disputed territory been more completely fulfilled than they were in North-Western Australia?

But the root of his objections to the scheme did not really lie there. They lay in the position to be granted to Shepstone. That touched him to the quick. That an imperium should be created in imperio of the real ruler of South Africa was intolerable. That it should be assigned to a missionary's son, and that son Shepstone, was monstrous. That such a man should be placed in the position of a sovereign, possessing absolute powers and without giving guarantees for his loyalty, was nothing less than a scandal. Yet it was the position he had himself assumed in South Australia and New Zealand; it was the position he would himself have accepted in New Zealand so recently as 1884. It took on quite a different complexion when it was to be assumed by another. What was Shepstone's record? For ten years he had had complete control over the Zulus of Natal (Grey's later account was only that he had been "confidential adviser to the Lieutenant-Governor"). He had magistrates to aid him, missionaries and a military force. Yet the Zulus were as great savages as they had been a thousand years before (how did he know that?). If Great Britain designed to set up an independent kingdom, let her select as its ruler one whose public service and experience proved his fitness to govern both natives and Europeans (Grey himself, namely).

There were other objections to the scheme, he held. The removal of the Zulus into the new country would breed disorder. The massing of men was always disastrous (how many examples there have been, all over the world and all through history, of voluntary or constrained collective migrations that have not been disastrous!). Fresh hordes would flow into Zululand to fill the places of those who had gone, and these would be a source of peril to Cape Colony.