Colonel Plumer, we hear, is laying down "immense" stocks of food-supplies at Kanya, so that the natives here, who are already so reduced that they are dying from sheer inanition, having successfully accomplished the journey, which is one of ninety miles, may feed to their hearts' content--provided that they are able to pay for the rations which are so generously distributed to them. Whatever motives of philanthropy direct the policy of the executive in this question of distributing food allowances to natives, it cannot be said that the Government or its administrators, err in their administration upon the side of liberality. Even here in Mafeking we have set a price upon the bowl of soup--horseflesh and mealie-meal mixed--which is served out to the natives from the soup-kitchen, finding excuses for such parsimony in the contention that, by charging the starving natives threepence per bowl of soup, when it is exceedingly doubtful if they have that amount of money in their possession, we can successfully induce them to remove to Kanya, and there live in a state of happy flatulency off the stocks which Colonel Plumer has been ordered to prepare against their reception. Of course, at a moment like this, it is injudicious to cavil at the procedure of the Imperial Government, but there can be no doubt that the drastic principles of economy which Colonel Baden-Powell has been practising in these later days are opposed to and altogether at variance with the dignity of the liberalism which we profess and are at such little pains to execute, and which enter so much into the pacific settlement of native questions in South Africa. The presence of a large alien native population gathered in Mafeking at the present juncture has been our own fault, since the authorities, in whom the management and control of the natives of this district is invested, advised the military authorities here to allow some two thousand native refugees from the Transvaal to take up their abode upon the eve of war in the Mafeking stadt, and it is through the tax which this surplus population put upon the commissariat that this particular question has required such delicate adjustment. With supplies which are rapidly diminishing, we are compelled to force nightly a moderate number to attempt the journey to Kanya, and if they have been signally unsuccessful in their essay to pass through the Boer lines, it is in part because the enemy, having promised them a free passage, maliciously fires upon them as they reach the advanced trenches. For the most part, therefore, we are no better off than we were, since those natives who escaped invariably return to Mafeking.