resident magistrate of Graham's Town, was appointed the first Lieutenant-Governor of Natal. CHAPTER II. NATIVE POLICY IN NATAL. LAWS, CUSTOMS, AND RELIGION OF THE ZULUS. The protection of the natives was the professed object of the British Government in taking possession of Natal. The conquests of Chaka had driven no fewer than 100,000 fugitives to the westward of the Tugela river, and how to rule this vast and fast increasing number of natives soon became a problem fraught both with difficulty and danger. Mr. Theophilus Shepstone, son of a Wesleyan missionary, thoroughly conversant with the Kafir language, customs, manners, and habits, was appointed to take charge of the numerous natives of Natal. His policy can be very briefly described. It was to keep all the coloured races entirely distinct from the white population. They were collected in locations, and governed by their own laws, through their own chiefs, under Mr. Shepstone as the great chief. Large tracts of country, rugged and mountainous, were set apart for the various tribes, and there, in an Italian climate, and in the lap of a most productive and generous soil, they increased and multiplied. Christianity and real civilization were ignored, and a most dangerous _imperium in imperio_ created. The wretched refugees who fled from the Zulu tyrant found their lot in Natal incomparably more happy than in the precarious existence of former days. Their easy, savage, sensuous life made them useless citizens, and when labour was required for the sugar plantations on the coast, it had to be obtained from India. However smoothly and well the native policy seemed to work, it soon became very evident that the 20,000 white people of Natal were really seated on a political volcano. Three hundred thousand heathen savages of an alien race had the power to rise and destroy them at any moment, and it was impossible to be sure that they might not at any time have the inclination. All the checks which religion and civilization place on men had been deliberately cast aside. No doubt the Zulu monarch was feared; but there can be no doubt also that if the dread paramount ruler of the Zulu race had at any time crossed the Tugela as a conqueror, tens of thousands of his own race in the colony would have joined him out of fear, and hastened to prove their loyalty by the massacre of every white inhabitant of Natal. This is no fanciful idea, but sober earnest fact.[8] [Sidenote: _The Shepstone native policy._]