ABSTRACT
South Africa.' The Government were willing to take risks rather than deny the colony representative government. I In July 1848 the Governor forwarded his report upon the question, based upon separate reports from the members of the Executive Council and the Judges of the Supreme Court. They all agreed that the existing Legislative Council carried little weight, and that the time had come for a representative assembly. 'It is', said Porter, the Attorney-General, 'an experiment, and one which none but a very silly or a very sanguine man can contemplate without anxiety ... But ... it appears to me that in the natural course of things it cannot be very long postponed.' They minimized Lord Stanley's specific objections. The fear of Capetown domination certainly existed in the east, where the 1820 settlers and their descendants had their own traditions and their special frontier preoccupations: separation· had been more than once talked of, and the Kaffir war revived the demand for it: Sir H. E. F. Young, who had succeeded Hare as Lieutenant-Governor but was like Pottinger a bird of passage, was in favour of a change, but seemed to prefer the shifting of the seat of government to Uitenhage.2 But Sir Harry Smith was a convinced opponent of separation, and his officials considered Capetown domination a mere bogy. Journeys that were possible for ministers and elders of the Dutch Reformed Church, said Montagu, were possible for members of Parliament. The danger of racial discord between Dutch and English was small. To quote Montagu: 'With the exception of the law of inheritance and succession . . . to which the Dutch are exceedingly attached and the English equally averse, there is not a single subject within the legitimate province of legislative interference, on which national prejudices or the conflicting interests of race are likely to be engendered.'
