COMPROMISE WITH THE BOERS.
[To THE EDITOR OP THE "SPE(TATOR.") SEn,—In answer to "An Old Liberal" (Spectator, March 30th), I beg leave to say that having sat on the "Jamaica Com- mittee " with John Bright, and having had a valued friend in W. E. Forster, I am certain that both those statesmen would have,approved of duly qualified men of colour sitting in any Parliamentary assembly, and I am convinced—though my personal acquaintance with him was but slight—that Richard Cobden would have done the same. With Mr. Gladstone the case was different. In his curiously constructed mind, the workings of which are often so difficult to trace, the influence of family feeling was intensely strong. The son of a Liver- pool merchant who received compensation for slaves owned by him at the abolition of West Indian slavery—having spoken against emancipation in the Oxford Union—I believe that filial respect always gave him an instinctive bias in favour of the slave-owner, lest he should seem to condemn his father, and it is thus that I should explain his preposterous mis- judging of the American Civil War, when he spoke of Jeff Davis as having "created a nation" in the South ; as also the deplorable surrender of the Transvaal after Majuba Hill. For myself, I believe that if we suffer the consideration of mere colour to limit the franchise in South Africa, God's curse will be upon us, as it has been upon the Boers, but that a combined taxation and education franchise, somewhat restricted at first, but the' same for all colours and creeds, and gradually ex- panded, may build up there a glorieus commonwealth under theBritish- Crown.—I am. Sir, &c„ J. M. LUDLOW.
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