Generally speaking, the representatives of the British Government, both Governors and High Commissioners, soon learnt that neither the natives nor the Dutch population could be dealt with on the same footing as a Western European. But the British Government cannot be said to have thoroughly learnt the same lesson until, in almost the last week of the nineteenth century, the three successive defeats of Stormberg, Magersfontein, and Colenso aroused it to a knowledge of the fact that we had been within an ace of losing South Africa. Many, indeed, would question whether even now the lesson had been thoroughly learnt. But, however this may be, it is certain that throughout the nineteenth century the Home Government wished to treat both the natives and the Dutch in South Africa on a basis of British ideas; and that by so doing it constantly found itself in conflict with its own local representatives, who knew that the only hope of success lay in dealing with both alike on a basis of South African ideas. As the result of this chronic inability of British statesmen to understand South Africa, it follows that the most instructive manner of regarding our administration of that country during the nineteenth century is to get a clear conception of the successive divergences of opinion between the home and the local authorities. At the very outset of British administration--during the temporary occupation of the Cape from 1795 to 1808--we find a theoretically perfect policy laid down for the guidance of the early English Governors in their treatment of the Boers, or Dutch frontier farmers. It is just as admirable, in its way, as were the instructions for the treatment of the Hottentots furnished by the Directors of the Dutch East India Company to Van Riebeck. In a despatch of July, 1800, the third Duke of Portland, who was then acting as Secretary for the Colonies, writes: [Sidenote: Non-interference.]