Those who were concerned with the story are still alive and many of them are still sore with the feeling of unmerited defeat. And to no one in the whole matter has there been anything of the triumph of success. The friends of Langalibalele, and his enemies, seem equally to think that wrong has been done,--or no better than imperfect justice. And the case is one the origin and end of which can hardly now be discovered, so densely are they enveloped in Zulu customs and past Zulu events. Whether a gentleman twenty years ago when firing a pistol intended to wound or only frighten? Such, and such like, are the points which the teller of the story would have to settle if he intended to decide upon the rights and wrongs of the question. Is it not probable that a man having been called on for sudden action, in a great emergency, may himself be in the dark as to his own intention at so distant a period,--knowing only that he was anxious to carry out the purpose for which he was sent, that purpose having been the establishment of British authority? And then this matter was one in which the slightest possible error of judgment, the smallest deviation from legal conduct where no law was written, might be efficacious to set everything in a blaze. The natives of South Africa, but especially the natives of Natal, have to be ruled by a mixture of English law and Zulu customs, which mixture, I have been frequently told, exists in its entirety only in the bosom of one living man. It is at any rate unwritten,--as yet unwritten though there now exists a parliamentary order that this mixture shall be codified by a certain fixed day. It is necessarily irrational,--as for instance when a Zulu is told that he is a British subject but yet is allowed to break the British law in various ways, as in the matter of polygamy. It must be altogether unintelligible to the subject race to whom the rules made by their white masters, opposed as they are to their own customs, must seem to be arbitrary and tyrannical,--as when told that they must not carry about with them the peculiar stick or knobkirrie which has been familiar to their hands from infancy. It is opposed to the ideas of justice which prevail in the intercourse between one white man and another, as when the Zulu, whom the white man will not call a slave, is compelled through the influence of his Chief to do the work which the white man requires from him;--as an instance of which I may refer to those who are employed on the roads, who are paid wages, indeed, but who work not by their own will, but under restraint from their Chiefs. It must I think be admitted that when a people have to be governed by such laws mistakes are to be expected,--and that the best possible intentions, I may almost say the best possible practice, may be made matter of most indignant reproach from outraged philanthropists.