"is entirely opposed to those measures, tending to the resumption of sovereignty over that State, of which you have publicly expressed your approval in your speech to the Cape Parliament, and in your answers to the address from the State in question." Nor was that all. In his endeavours to establish a simple but effective system of European magistrates over the Kafirs beyond the eastern border of the Colony, he was hampered by the short-sighted economy of the Home Government. It seems incredible that a Colonial Governor, even at that epoch, should have been looked upon by Downing Street as a sort of importunate mendicant. But Grey's language shows that this was the attitude against which he had to defend himself. [Sidenote: The burden of the empire.] "I would now only urge upon Her Majesty's Government," he writes on September 8th, 1858, "that they should not distress me more than is absolutely necessary for the government and control of the people of the country which lies beyond the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope. Stripping the country as I am of troops [to serve in putting down the Indian Mutiny], some great disaster will take place if necessary funds are at the same time cut off from me. I am sure, if the enormous reductions I have effected in military expenditure are considered, the most rigid economists will feel that the money paid by Great Britain for the control of this country has been advantageously laid out." These extracts are not pleasant reading. They were written at the time when the Imperial spirit was at its nadir. In the plain language of the Secretary of State for the Colonies[6] in 1858, it was a time when ministers were "compelled to recognise as fact the increased and increasing dislike of Parliament to the maintenance of large military establishments in our colonies at Imperial cost." Yet one more passage must be cited, not so much because it is tinged by a certain grim humour--although this is a valuable quality in such a context--as because it affords an eminently pertinent illustration in support of the contention that the refusal of the Home Government to follow the advice of the "man on the spot" has been the operative cause of the failure of British administration in South Africa. The reply to the charge of "direct disobedience," which Grey formulates in one leisurely sentence, runs as follows: [Footnote 6: Sir E. B. Lytton.]