Such were the opinions given by men supposed to be intimately acquainted with Zulu character and feeling, one of them being _the_ great authority on all native matters; and on such statements did Sir Bartle Frere rely when he laid his scheme for the Zulu War. How absolutely ignorant, how foolishly mistaken, were these “blind leaders of the blind” has been amply proved by the events of 1879. We need not enter very fully into the accusations brought by the missionaries against the Zulu king of indiscriminate slaughter of native converts for their religion’s sake. They were thoroughly believed in Natal at the time; but, upon investigation, they dwindled down to three separate cases of the execution of men (one in each case) who happened to be converts, but of whom two were put to death for causes which had nothing whatsoever to do with their faith (one of them being indeed a relapsed convert); and the third, an old man, Maqamsela, whose name certainly deserves to be handed down to fame in the list of martyrs for religion’s sake, was killed without the sanction or even knowledge of the king, by the order of his prime minister Gaozi.[105] That the latter received no punishment, although the king disapproved of this action, is not a fact of any importance. It is not always convenient to punish prime ministers and high commissioners, or powerful indunas. Sir Bartle Frere of course takes the strongest possible view of the matter against the king, and speaks of his having killed Zulu converts (2220, p. 270), “at first rarely, as if with reluctance, and a desire to conceal what he had ordered, and to shift the responsibility to other shoulders, latterly more frequently, openly, and as an avowed part of a general policy for re-establishing the system of Chaka and Dingane.” This little phrase is of a slightly imaginative nature, resting on no (produced) evidence. It is, in fact, a “statement.”[106] Sir Henry Bulwer’s reply—November 18th, 1878 (2222, p. 171)—which forms an able refutation of various statements of Sir B. Frere, contains the following sentence: “I took some pains to find out how the case really stood, and ascertained that the number of natives, either converts or living on mission stations, who had been killed, was _three_. I have never heard since that time of any other mission natives being killed.... I was, therefore, surprised, on reading your Excellency’s despatch, to see what Messrs. Oftebro and Staven had said. I have since made particular inquiries on that point, but have failed to obtain any information showing that more than _three_ mission natives have been killed. Among others to whom I have spoken is the Rev. Mr. Robertson, of Zululand, who was in ’Maritzburg a few weeks ago. He told me that he had not heard of any other than the _three_ cases.”