“Few Events of the Century Surpass it in Interest and Importance.”

Several hundreds of men, eminent in divers professions, have come from England, America, the Cape, Orange Free State, Natal, Basuto and Zulu Lands, the Transvaal, Bechuanaland, and Northern Rhodesia, to celebrate the railway achievement by which this young Colony has become connected with the oldest Colony in South Africa. In any other continent the opening of five hundred miles of new railway would be fittingly celebrated by the usual banquet and the after-dinner felicitations of those directly concerned with it; but in this instance there are six members of the Imperial Parliament, the High Commissioner of the Cape, the Governor of Natal, scores of members of the Colonial Legislatures, and scores of notabilities, leaders of thought and action, bankers, merchants, and clergy from every colony and state in the southern part of this continent. They all felt it to be a great event. Few events of the century surpass it in interest and importance. It marks the conclusion of an audacious enterprise, which less than ten years ago would have been deemed impossible, and only two years ago as most unlikely. It furnishes a lesson to all colonising nations. It teaches methods of operation never practised before. It suggests large and grand possibilities, completely reforms and alters our judgment with regard to Africa, effaces difficulties that impeded right views, and infuses a belief that, once the political and capitalist public realises what the occasion really signifies, this railway is but the precursor of many more in this continent. In fact, we have been publicly told that we are to expect others, and that the railway to the Victoria Falls of the Zambesi is the next on the programme.