"They are separated from Natal by a river easily fordable for the greater part of the year, and not too wide to talk across at any time. "The boundary between them and the Transvaal is even more easily passed. "All these, I submit, are incontrovertible facts, proved by the well-known events of the past few months. "I know that there are educated men to be found, of great ability, who claim to be lovers of liberty and of right, and of their own species, who have lived long near the Zulus, and who say there is no danger to be apprehended from them if we let them alone; that Cetywayo is a well-meaning prince, quite within his own right in massacring his own subjects, and our soldiers, too, if they enter his territory; that all that is necessary to our own safety is to let the Zulu king alone, or if the English do not like that, to leave his neighbourhood. "Having lived now for many weeks within a couple of Zulu marches of the Zulu border, among sensible Englishmen, many of them men of great sagacity, coolness, and determination, and reasonably just and upright in all their dealings, who never went to sleep without having their arms within reach, and being prepared to take refuge with wives and families at a minute's warning within a fortified post; having learnt from 'voortrekkers' and their children, who had witnessed the massacres of Weenen and Blauwkrantz, and who could thus testify that the present peculiarities of Zulu warfare are no recent innovation; I may be allowed to doubt the possibility of making life within reach of a Zulu 'impi' permanently tolerable to ordinary Englishmen and Dutchmen. "Nor does it seem to me that we can justly say to colonists, either in Natal or the Transvaal, that if they do not like the situation they may go elsewhere. "The Zulu right to be where the Zulus now are is, with the exception of a small and remote tract towards Delagoa Bay, simply one of recent conquest by devastation and massacre. "I have never heard the historical fact questioned that the earlier Zulu 'impis' into what is now Natal and Transvaal territory preceded by a very few years, if they preceded at all, the first appearance of Dutch and English adventurers in the same lands; and the Zulus certainly cannot claim, as the Dutch and English may, any right of occupation from having civilized or improved the land. "Hence it seems to me no more than natural justice that if either party is to make way for the other, the Zulus should yield, and not the English or Dutch. "But I submit that in the interests of the Zulus themselves we have no right to leave them to their fate.