British Kafraria.

He set to work in the province nearest his hand, where he possessed consular powers. There he repeated the policy he had striven to carry out in New Zealand. Disregarding the warnings of Earl Grey, who urged, publicly in 1848 and privately in 1853, that the power of the chiefs should be maintained with a view to the preservation of order, he strove to break the power of the Kafir chiefs by undermining their influence and secretly sapping their authority. From 1856 onwards he appointed them magistrates, and, in lieu of the fines they had arbitrarily levied on defaulting or offending kraals, he assigned them a salary or pension, paid monthly and calculated on the fines. By the side of the chief, sitting in his own court, he proposed to place a European assessor, who was a virtual magistrate, and who thus supplanted the chief in his judicial capacity. It was intended that the fines thus levied should meet the cost of the arrangement, but it soon proved that the institution would cost as much as £3,000 a year in excess of them. The scheme was reported against by the British Resident in Kafraria, whom Grey must soon after have got rid of, on the Turkish principle, but Grey induced the Secretary of State to assent to it, on the understanding that the expenditure in connection with it should be drawn from colonial funds. This was far from being Grey's intention. He designed that the Imperial Government and the British tax-payer should bear the chief burden, and as a matter of fact it was this that happened.

The new system had a measure of success. Two of the chiefs promptly accepted the magistrates nominated by Grey, and four others had agreed to do the same. It was characteristic of his optimism that he believed, after a tour through Kafraria, that the natives had generally page 98found the system acceptable. We shall soon see how far they were from accepting it.