I have put this question of the taxation of the Transvaal in the forefront of this paper, because it is of pressing importance and immediate interest. Scarcely less important, though the subject will probably be dealt with more fully by another pen, is the question of land settlement. We are approaching this matter too parochially and timidly. If the land companies and burghers will not part with suitable land to settlers on reasonable terms, they must be made to do so. The example of New Zealand must be followed. It is absolutely essential that we should plant out settlers on a large scale; especially is it essential in view of the fact that the loyalty of the dwellers in Johannesburg and other mining centres is not to be counted on confidently. With these men commercial considerations are certain to be dominant. Even if they are not given the solid reasons for discontent already foreshadowed, reasons, real and imaginary, in plenty are certain to crop up. Hence their loyalty will not be a matter of sentiment, but one of calculation. Further, every help and encouragement must be given to the right kind of settlers; the country which spent over two hundred millions sterling in making South Africa a possible place for Englishmen to live in, should not grudge another ten, twenty, or if necessary thirty millions to make the conditions of life sufficiently attractive to the emigrating English agriculturist. The conditions underlying land settlement have been carefully studied by Mr. Arnold Forster's Land Commission, and they were lucidly set forth in the report of that Commission. It remains for the Imperial Government to make them operative, by coming to the country for generous support. I can do no more here than record my absolute conviction, for what it may be worth, that if land settlement in the new colonies is to find its own level, so to speak; if we are trusting to men with the necessary capital, some £300 or more, to come forward in anything like sufficient numbers to affect appreciably the question of British _versus_ Boer in favour of the British, or the problem of self-seeking Cosmopolitanism (purely commercial interests) _versus_ sentimental and patriotic Imperialism, we are building our hopes on sand. The drawbacks to farming in Africa are many: absence of transport (and obviously without well-devised and speedily carried out railway schemes the internal development of South Africa is impossible); absence of navigable rivers; recurrent droughts (here again I may say that nothing less can avail than grand schemes of organised irrigation such as those favoured by Mr. Hedger Wallace and by Mr. Willcocks in his luminous report); cattle disease and locusts. The _ignis fatuus_ of the Rand, it must always be remembered, is ever present to lure away the settler when he has once been induced to settle. To the Englishman the love of isolation is not generally the strongly developed vice or virtue it is with the Boer. Consequently, we