and the southern part is sure to grow in every way, but the Amazon, from its climate, and from the difficulty of conquering vegetation, will certainly be one of the last places in the world to fill up with colonists from the Old World, and if, as seems likely, a republic be declared after the death of the present emperor, this will be put off still longer, as from the great antagonism of North and South Brazilians, civil war is sure to follow.

THE SOUTH AFRICAN REPUBLICS.

BY

MISS A. RUSSELL.

The Boers who people the Republics of South Africa which lie north of the British Colonies of the Cape of Good Hope and Natal, between the Orange and Zambesi rivers, are descended from the early Dutch colonists, and French Huguenots, who made the first civilized settlement at the Cape of Good Hope in the middle of the seventeenth century.

The value of the Cape of Good Hope as a key to the East made itself apparent to all the nations who traded with that quarter, and England developed a great desire to possess it. After various indirect ways of trying to attain that end, the British Government added it to their dominion in 1806 by conquest. The early history of the English administration here is one long story of misrule and incapacity, and in relation to the Dutch settlers a purely despotic establishment which at length drove them to desperation, and bred in them a determined and fanatical desire to escape from it. This led them to abandon the Cape Colony in large numbers during the years 1835 and 1836. They trekked northward and formed a republic in what is now known as the British Colony of Natal, and later on the republics which lie northward to the Limpopo River below the 22d degree of South latitude. The British Government raised no opposition to these migrations of

the Boers, but permitted them to lay the foundations of civilized states in these wild regions and establish their own republican form of government, and then rudely fell upon them, dispossessing them and repudiating their claim to independence.

This is the history of the relations which existed between the English and Boers for over half a century in South Africa, until at length the English Government seemed to awake to the fact that this continual aggressiveness levelled at the poverty-stricken and downtrodden Boers was a profitless persecution, inducing neither peace nor prosperity to any condition, and pointing to no ultimate conciliatory relations, and, in 1852, granted a charter of independence, which freed them from the allegiance it could not compel them to acknowledge. As the result of this act, the Boers found themselves in undisputed sway from the Drakenberg Mountains on the south to the illimitable stretches of country which lie north of the Limpopo and on to the Zambesi River. In the years which ensued they realized a “Promised Land,” a genial soil which produced in lavishness for a minimum of effort, and their flocks and herds increased and multiplied past computation. Within recent years these republics have developed mineral wealth which renders them one vast field for enterprise, exploration and capital, and the attitude of the English Government has at different times given rise to complications which, but for the spirit of the Boers, would have made them once more subjects of the great empire, on whose dominions it is boasted the sun never sets.

The sympathies of American people should be drawn towards these South African Republics, whose history is

in some points not unlike their own, and my hope is that through the streams of commerce which must ultimately flow between these kindred countries, a knowledge will be gained in this country of the South African republics which will forever set the Boers at rest on the score of the safety of their independence. As the advance of interknowledge grows between nations so will the spirit of the strong to dominate the weak lessen in power, and a higher ambition replace it; the ambition to compass the interests of mankind in perfect mutual relations, which is the only secure, as it is the highest type of bond between nations.

The history of the Boers and the struggles which they have waged with the English for independence, bring us to contemplate the work which their pioneering enterprise has accomplished in South Africa, opening it to civilization, which is gradually pushing its way to the very central regions of the continent.

A period of twenty years has elapsed since the first discovery of diamonds took place in West Griqualand, a province of the Orange Free State. During all that period the production of diamonds has given yearly a steady average, and recent statistics compute the total value in bulk to amount to £45,000,000. Within later years the production shows an increase, and the mines. average an annual output that rather exceeds than otherwise £4,000,000 sterling.

The good old days have departed when each man had an allotment and mined for his own special behoof, while his wife or sisters took their share in the work by sorting, which was an employment to which they were admirably adapted, from the fact that it required more keenness and

mother wit than mere physical labor implies. Individual mining has been gradually pushed out of the competition, the claims by degrees drifting into the hands of companies, and the immense industry which diamond mining now forms in South Africa is directly controlled by one or two syndicates, and in these the Rothschilds hold magnificent interests. The camp of other years has made way for the pretentious architecture which wealth demands as representative of its power, and Kimberley, the capital of the diamond fields, is now a handsome city with a population of 20,000 souls. It is lighted by electricity, and tram cars intersect its streets, and generally its aspect is not widely different from that of a wealthy section of London.

Railway communication with the Cape of Good Hope, a distance of 647 miles, and a plentiful water supply from the Vaal River have greatly added to the comfort and cheapness of living there. The recent developments have quite changed the aspect of mining, the barriers which formerly divided the individual allotments have disappeared, and these have gradually merged until they form single mines of immense extent, the appearance of which is that of huge pits. The Kimberley mine would cover a space of eleven acres of ground. Looking at these pits from a distance, the intersection of ropes and chains which encompasses them throughout finds an apt illustration in a spider's web. By means of this complicated network the miners descend and buckets are worked backwards and forwards conveying the diamondiferous soil to the surface. The mines are worked to a depth of 500 feet, and from these extensions tunnelling is carried on in the same way as at coal mines, stretching under