"With regard to any necessity which might exist for my removal on the ground of not holding the same views upon essential points of policy as Her Majesty's Government hold, I can only make the general remark that, during the five years which have elapsed since I was appointed to my present office, there have been at least seven Secretaries of State for the Colonial Department, each of whom held different views upon some important points of policy connected with this country." [Sidenote: The discovery of diamonds.] Grey was not by any means the only Governor of the Cape to show the home authorities how impossible it was to govern South Africa from Downing Street, and to urge upon them the necessity of allowing their representative, the one man who was familiar with local conditions, to decide by what methods the objects of British policy could be most effectively advanced. But it was not until some considerable time after the Colonial Department had been placed under a separate Secretary of State, and the Colonial Office had been constituted on its present basis, with a staff of permanent officials, that these protests produced any appreciable effect. What really aroused an interest in South Africa--that is to say a practical interest, as distinct from the interest created by the stories of missionary enterprise and travel, and by the records of Kafir warfare--was the discovery of diamonds in Griqualand West in 1870, and the subsequent establishment of the diamond industry at Kimberley. It was the first time that anything certain had occurred to show that the vast "hinterland" of the Cape might prove to be a territory of industrial possibilities. The earnings of the diamond mines provided the Cape Colony with a revenue sufficient to enable it to link together its main towns by a tolerable railway system. The industry, once established, attracted British capital and British population, and by so doing it did what Blue-books and missionary reports had failed to do: it brought the every-day life of the British Colonist in South Africa within the purview of the nation. Thanks to the Kimberley mines the Cape ceased to be thought of as a country whose resources were exclusively pastoral and agricultural. The epoch of the next great divergence of opinion was a more hopeful time from an Imperialist point of view. Lord Beaconsfield, who was the first statesman to give practical expression to the belief that the maintenance of empire was not inconsistent with the welfare of the masses of the home population, was in power. British statesmen, and the class from which British statesmen are drawn, had begun to study Colonial questions in a more hopeful and intelligent spirit. Something had been learnt, too, of the actual conditions of South Africa. And yet it was at this epoch that what was, perhaps, the most ruinous of all the divergences of opinion between Capetown and Downing Street occurred.