and admirer. The two men were both businessmen from poor immigrant backgrounds who had outlooks that were relatively liberal for the times and saw eye-to-eye on a number of issues. According to Saul Solomon's official biography, Molteno only accepted the office of Prime Minister after insisting that it first be offered to Solomon, who turned it down however due to his delicate health. Solomon supported the Molteno Ministry, though he refused offers of cabinet positions so as to be able to oppose the government if and when his conscience required it. One supporter told Parliament that "Molteno would not hold a Ministry together for one week if Mr Solomon was in it; and no cabinet could do without him." Eastern Cape Separatist League (1854–1874) The eastern part of the Cape Colony had a long-running separatist movement, consisting of a portion of white settlers (the "Easterners"), led by parliamentarian John Paterson of Port Elizabeth, who resented the rule of the Cape Town parliament and wanted stricter labour laws to encourage the Xhosa to leave their lands and work on the settlers' plantations. In accordance with his stated policy that "natives should be allowed to sell their labour as they desired, and that no semblance of coercion should be employed to provide labour for the farmer" and because he detested the Easterners' white supremacist views, Solomon took a strong stance against the separatist movement and for a united, multi-racial Cape. When he was addressing parliament about the need to enforce the principles of racial equality that the Cape's constitution called for, the Separatist representatives all stood up and walked out on him. He reportedly declared: "I would rather address empty benches than empty minds!" In parliament he went on to lead the "Westerners", who backed the Molteno–Merriman government in successfully crushing the separatist league. Separatist parliamentarians branded him a "negrophile" – an intended insult that he in fact accepted with considerable pride, and he went on to push even further for social reform (for example repealing the discriminatory Contagious Diseases Act). The imposition of Confederation (1874–1878) Starting in 1874, the British Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Carnarvon, having federated Canada, began an ill-fated plan to impose the same system of confederation on the very different states of southern Africa. Although earlier in his career Solomon had been in favour of a form of federated "United States of Southern Africa", he