Willis and Lieutenant Collingridge,[1] the force which had been gradually got together on the Matabele frontier numbered, at the date of this letter, 672 Europeans and 155 Colonial natives. Although the latter were entitled under this agreement to certain benefits, I will deal only with the Europeans. It will be seen, therefore, that the collective stake amounted to £6,720,000. The land of the Matabele thus confiscated in advance amounted to over 6,000 square miles, being six-sevenths the area of Wales. For a parallel to so comprehensive and cynically calculated a plan of anticipatory spoliation, we must hark back three hundred and sixty-seven years to the famous contract between Pizarro, Amalgro, de Luque and their followers, for the sack of Peru.
While Dr. Jameson was thus perfecting his arrangements for the filibustering enterprise which he was to repeat, with less success, later on against the Boers. Lobengula on the one hand, and the High Commissioner and the Colonial Office on the other, were doing their best to avert war. It cannot be said that the High Commissioner's efforts in this respect were characterised by much vigour. It is fair to bear in mind that he was doubtless hampered by his distance from the scene, and by the ingenious misrepresentation of facts at which the manager of the Chartered Company was an adept. The desires of the Colonial Office were unmistakably expressed by Lord Ripon, who had succeeded Lord Knutsford as Secretary of State:
It is important—he declared in a dispatch dated August 26—that the British South African Company should not, by menacing Lobengula, commit themselves to any course of action which I might afterwards have to, reverse. Their duty under existing circumstances must be limited to defending their occupied territory and Her Majesty's Government cannot support them in any aggressive action."
But vague threats of this kind were not likely to deter those responsible for the action on the spot of a corporation with the Court and social influence possessed by the British South Africa Company.
Lobengula's attitude seems to have been distinguished throughout by a courage, a dignity and a pathetic trust in the British Government's sense of justice which are remarkable, but by no means unparalleled in the authenticated record of "Barbarism's" clash with "Civilisation."
- ↑ "The Downfall of Lobengula."
