This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1880 edition. Excerpt: ... the zulus. i hphe vast disjointed dominion which upon the maps of the world bears the colour and the cognomen of British colonial territory has ever had strange methods of making its existence known to the mother country. For many successive years various portions of it will lie in a kind of moral and political torpor, giving forth to the far-away home land only the feeblest evidences of existence. Life, indeed, will at such times be very far from being extinct in these quiet dependencies. Ships will sail to and fro between the great maritime centres of commerce and distant ports in the southern hemisphere, all the work of life--the buying and selling, the birthing and the burying--will be carried on there; but beyond some chance allusion in the column of a newspaper to a change of ministry, to the appointment of a new governor, or to the state of trade, that world, which calls itself "the world," passes along its road utterly ignoring the existence of entire colonies, and serenely unconscious of political or territorial divisions whose superficial area would measure ten times that of Great Britain. All at once, however, "the world" rouses up to a wonderful greed for knowledge upon some particular spot which has been British territory for half a century, but which Britons have never bothered their heads about. Some colony has suddenly spoken. A black king, whose name nobody ever heard of, has suddenly crossed a river, whose name nobody could ever remember, at the head of thirty thousand of his soldiers, whom nobody knew anything about. The excitement instantly becomes intense. Everybody has something to say about this black king, his thirty thousand soldiers, and the river which he has crossed. The illustrated papers immediately produce...