But blood shed on a scaffold is always fresh. The scaffold may be taken down, the bodies buried, but in the memory of the people it glows redder and redder, and with each generation it is new-shed; it sanctifies, sacrificially, the cause it marked. It may be questioned whether anywhere in the history of nations, blood, judicially shed for political purposes, whether the actual means were rifle-bullet, axe, rope, or the slow anguish of long imprisonment, has ever really aided the cause in which it was shed. It appears even quite possible that if Charles the First had been killed on the battlefield instead of being beheaded, there might have been no Restoration in England. The African people dispersed quietly and went back to their farms; but the picture of Slachter's Nek was engraved in the national heart. After this blunder, Lord Charles Somerset remained in Africa for some years. He was at last recalled, not on the ground of his treatment of the old inhabitants, but in answer to the complaints of a few newly arrived English colonists, by whom he was charged with corruption and oppression. Burke had promised to move for his impeachment, but his wealth and rank protected him (he was an elder brother of the Lord Raglan afterwards so notorious for his conduct of the Crimean War), and he died at Brighton in the year 1831. But his work lived on, and, in addition to other causes, helped to produce that bitterness in the hearts of South Africans which led to that important movement known in South African history as the Great Trek. In 1828 it was finally enacted that not only was the African Taal, though the only language of almost the entire people, not to be used in law courts and public documents, but even petitions written in that language were no longer to be received by the English Government; and a little later, men speaking their native language, in the land of their birth, were not allowed to sit on juries unless they could speak English, a language they had no facilities for acquiring. Other causes worked in the same direction towards the embitterment of the minds of the people against English rule. Even the most generous act recorded of our English race was a cause of fresh suffering and wrongs. In 1830 the English people, guided by its best element, voted a sum of twenty million pounds for the liberation of the slaves throughout the English colonies and possessions; and a portion of this sum it was determined to expend in buying and setting free the slaves in South Africa. It is a curious exemplification of the absolute impossibility of guiding wisely, justly, or successfully the affairs of a nation six thousand miles distant, which has again and again been exemplified in the history of South Africa, that this plan miscarried. An intention, which leaves Europe a white-garbed bird of peace and justice, too often turns up, after its six thousand miles' passage across the ocean, a black-winged harbinger of war and death.