Chapter 13

But the difference between a dead and a living religion is vital; the first weighs down the man who carries it; the living religion up-bears him. There is perhaps no life quite worth living without a living religion, under whatever name or form it may be concealed, vivifying and strengthening it. The Boer's religion is alive, it is in harmony with his knowledge, his ideals, and his aims. Therefore it is his strength.Theoretically, so far as its dogmatic clothing is concerned, his religion is a form of Christian Protestant Calvinism, and differs in no way from that still professed by the majority of Scotchmen, from the Aberdeen grocer to the Edinburgh professor. Actually, it differs very materially from that held by the large bulk of any truly modern population.It is often said of the lives of men congregated in vast cities, under more or less completely artificial conditions, that they suffer from these or those disadvantages—that the de-oxygenated air of cities retards muscular development, that it renders persons continually exposed to it anæmic; that the continual noise, vibration, and lack of direct sunlight have an injurious effect upon the nervous system and that a debilitated physical condition is bound to arise. But the most serious loss entailed by life in vast cities under artificial conditions, whether in the modern or the ancient world, is seldom directly referred to.The story of the small modern child, born and brought up in a modern town, where her father, an electrical engineer, had installed all the lights in the street and houses, and who, when at four years old was taken to the country for the first time and allowed to see the stars, said: "Did my father set them up too?" may or may not be true; but it illustrates with force the terrible vacuum in knowledge and experience of the most profound aspects of existence which a life walled in amid artificial conditions tends to produce. That which the Buddha left his kingly palace and sat beneath his Boh-tree to seek; that which Zoroaster found in his solitary sojourn on the mountain top, and Mohamed in his secret cave, which the Hebrew leader discovered in the deserts ofSinai, and the teacher of Galilee in the wilderness and on the mountain tops; that which, having perceived, they strove to give voice to in the world's bibles, and which has become symbolized in the world's temples, from the rock-hewn cave temples of India to the Holy of Holies of the Jew; from the Greeks' Parthenon on the hill-top bathed in light and air, to the Gothic cathedral with its forest of shafts—that of which all the religions and all the dogmas are but the tentative attempts of the struggling human spirit to give voice to—this reality is not easily perceived as present and always over-arching when the individual is swathed in by conditions of life, the result of man's small labours, and seemingly having no root beyond his own will; and when the tumultuous sounds and minute details forced on it at every moment almost blind and deafen the individual to the consciousness of anything beyond the fragmentary and present.This is the serious danger and almost certain loss to which the spirit of man exposes itself, when he severs himself from all contact with the living and self-expanding forms of nature beyond himself, and surrounds himself purely by those which have a relation to himself, and have been modified by his action. It is an inverted view of the universe, with accompanying narrowness and blindness, which, far more than any danger of physical asphyxiation and nervous muscular deterioration, constitutes the evil attendant on the ordinary life of men in great cities, or wherever immersed in purely artificial conditions.Undoubtedly there are lofty and powerful spirits who have reached a deep and calm clear-sightedness which no aspect in the world immediately about them can obscure, to whom the city and the petty sights and sounds of our little human creation are seen abidingly to be as much the outcome and mere passing development of the powers beyond and behind them as the silent plain and the mountain top—"And what if trade sow cities,Like shells along the shore;And thatch with towns the prairies wideWith railways ironed o'er?They are but sailing foam-bellsAlong thought's causal stream,And take their shape and sun-colourFrom that which sends the dream."No doubt the Jew of Amsterdam in his small room grinding his lenses, living on milk-soup and a few raisins, found his piercing mental vision no more shut in by the city-roof above him than had he slept with Jacob's desert-stone for a pillow; and no doubt there are as rare souls, immersed externally in the very noisiest civilization about us, who yet see serenely over and above it. But, with the mass, this is not so; we cannot see past the little material conditions that press on us.When one bends over an ant-heap on a vast plain, that ant-heap with its little millions of existences toiling there are to the one bending over it but an infinitesimal part of the vast landscape, where a hundred other ant-heaps, broken and new, lie around, and over which the sun shines and about which the mighty mountains rise; but to the ant, down in the ant-heap, it is the universe; he does not even know that his ant-heap was heaped out of the red sand and will return to it to-morrow; he knows nothing of the fallen ant-heaps or of the great human eyes looking down at him; were it possible for him to climb to the top of his ant-heap and raise himself up on his tiny legs, and once to look round, he might know something of what the ant-heap was.Most of us in our human ant-heaps are unable to lift ourselves out of them; we mistake the handful of dust we have accumulated round us, and which we call our cities and civilization, for the universe; and the noise we make in gathering it we think is the sound of eternity. Were it not for two things which we cannot obliterate in our civilization—the wail of the newborn child, and the long straight, quiet figure, knowing nothing and seeing nothing, which the hearse carries away—it might well be that we should sink into a state of ignorance and superstition so profound that we should believe, not merely every day but in our sanest moments, that the will of man was the ruling power of life, his work theend, and we ourselves the universe, and beyond us, nothing!From this form of ignorance and superstition our primitive Boer is saved, assuredly not because of any superior wisdom and insight inherent in him, but by the conditions of his life. For the average human creature reads life as it is continually presented to him. The Boer has not willed to go into the wilderness and the desert to seek for wisdom with the teacher of Galilee or the sage of India; but for the two hundred years of his South African wandering that which prophet, seer, and poet have in all ages turned to for wisdom has been laid open as a book before him, whether he willed it or not; so that he too, however slow or dull his individual intelligence, has been compelled by the daily conditions of his life, with more or less clearness, to decipher it. Dark and blinded beyond the average of human souls must have been the old fore-trekker, who, as at sundown his wagon crept for the first time into some vast plain where no white man's foot had ever trod, and as the blue shades of evening fell across the countless herds of antelope, and the far-off flat-topped mountains stood sharp against the sky, could cry "I,Iam the centre of this life! The earth is mine, and the fulness thereof!" And the solitary African youth who has been out in the veld looking for his father's sheep all day, over kopjes and through dried-up watercourses, and who walks home in the starlight, and hears the jackals call, and pauses, listening silently to hear if it be not the young lions crying for their food, has been exposed to educative influences totally distinct from those which he would have been subjected to had he spent the day in a factory amid pulleys and wheels and a crowd of labourers, and had walked home at night through a gas-lit crowded street, past bars, music-halls, and policemen, to his garret. The last music-hall air, the picture of light streaming through the public-house doors, the whirr of the machinery, and a thousand minute complex sense-impressions springing immediately from the action of man, the one, of necessity, carries home with him. The other has none of these complex man-related sense-impressions; he loses muchwhich the other wins, but he also has something of his own. Whether he will or no, however dull his ear and dim his eye and torpid his intellect, he carries home with him pictures of the colossal things which he has seen, things which the son of Jesse beheld when in his youth he tended his father's flocks at night, to guard them from the wolf and the bear, and which, when King of Israel, he reproduced in that chant which has gone down the ages: "When I behold the heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained—what is man that Thou art mindful of him!"The African woman on her solitary farm may have no inherent power for grasping large wholes, or seeing behind small externals to the moving cause beyond; yet when she sits all the morning sewing in her still front-room, while the children play out in the sunshine by the kraal wall and the flies buzz round, and she sees wherever she raises her head, through the open door, twenty miles of unbroken silent veld with the line of the blue mountains meeting the sky, she is exposed to eight hours of an educative influence entirely distinct from that she would have undergone had she sat in a tenement-room in a city court, and heard her neighbours tramp to and fro on the stairs, and the omnibuses crash in the street, and seen only from her window, when she looked out, the red-brick wall opposite. No man, be he hunter, traveller, or trader, or who or what he may, who has ever been exposed to both orders of influences, will say that their educative effect is the same, or that a man can remain long exposed to either set of influences, the artificial life of cities or the solitude of the desert, without being profoundly modified by it, above all, as to his view of existence as a whole, which is religion.The Boer, however blind by nature he may individually be, has always open before him the book from which the bibles were transcribed—and it has been impossible for him to fail wholly to decipher something from it. Therefore, even his dogmatic theology (and it is wonderful how very little real dogmatic theology the true primitiveup-country Boer has!) lives, animated by a great, direct perception of certain facts in life.That which the Essenes sought in their rocky caves, which the Buddhist thinker to-day immures himself on his solitary mountain peak to find, which the Christian monks built their monasteries and cloisters to acquire; to supply men artificially with the means of partially attaining to which dim-aisled churches and pillared temples have been reared in the midst of dense populations; which the old Dissenting divine was feeling after when he said: "Spend two hours a day alone in your room with the window open if possible, in quiet and thought; your day will be the stronger and the fuller for it"; and which the Protestant hymn aims at when in its quaint doggerel it says—"Night is the time to pray;The Saviour oft withdrewTo desert mountains far away;So will his followers do.Steal from the world to haunts untrod,To hold communion there with God."—that which religious minds in all centuries and of all races have sought after, has been strangely forced on the African Boer by his silent solitary life amid vast man-unmodified aspects of nature. And with all that he may lack in other directions of knowledge and wisdom, of keenness and versatility, that which the conditions of his life had to teach him, he has learnt. Therefore, though his dogmatic theology is in no sense higher or different from that of others, his religion oftentimes lives when theirs is dead.We are aware, it may be said, that all this is purely a misconception; that the man of unusual intellect seeks nature and solitude merely that his own large mental powers may unfold themselves unhindered; that what the saint, the philosopher, the poet, and the prophet find, they take with them; that to the mere bucolic mind the midnight sky studded with stars is but the covering of the plain where sheep feed; and that the most infinite sky over him when he off-saddles alone at midday in a vastplainis but that to which he looks up in order to find the time.But this is not so. The great analytical reasoner may find, labouring in his laboratory, the great thinker in his study, watching the processes of his own mind, may discover, that which the vast man-untouched processes of nature testify of; it is exactly on the simple purely receptive mind that the silence and solitude of vast unmodified natural surroundings have the most educative effect.Driving on a hot summer's day in a cart across a great African plain, with the light pouring down on the brak bushes and karroo, till it seemed to shimmer out of them, the Boer who drove us was, as usual, silent. He was a man six feet in height, large-boned and powerful, with a still blue eye, an iron will, and indomitable persistency. Living in a remote part of the country, he seldom went to church more than once in the year, and could with great difficulty read a chapter in the Bible. During the years we had known him we had never heard him refer to anything more profound than his sheep and cattle, and the habits of tiger-leopards, upon which he was an authority. After driving about two hours, the horses' feet sinking into the sand and coming out again with a sucking sound, but no movement breaking the hot stillness, he looked round at us, with that peculiar shy glance which marks men who live much alone, and do not often try mentally to approach their fellow-men, and said slowly in the Taal: "There is something I have long wanted to ask you. You are learned. When you are alone in the veld like this, and the sun shines so on the bushes, does it ever seem to you that something speaks? It is not anything you hear with the ear, but it is as though you grew so small, sosmall, and the other so great. Then the little things at the house seem all nothing. Do you hear it, too—you who are so learned?"We are aware of the guffaw of laughter which would greet such a statement from souls on the stock exchange, in drinking-bars and fashionable clubs, and perhaps the national assemblies where the representatives of civilized nations meet. This man, it would be said, had lived so much alone with nature that he had become a fool. If he had been fifteen years in the share marketor the diplomatic service, and had lunched at his club and spent his evening at the theatre or the café chantant, he would never have felt himself or his affairs small, nor would he have perceived anything greater than himself. It will be said it was all ignorance and superstition.We reply: "This may be so; but if it is, then burn your world's bibles, and destroy your world's temples, for that which the world's bibles were written to express and its temples built to symbolize is an 'ignorance and superstition.' Yet, before we accept your verdict finally, answer us these two things: Where were you and I eighty years ago? Where shall we be eighty years hence, when this throbbing hand that writes to-night is a handful of dust, and your mouth that smiles is quiet beneath six feet of earth? Answer these questions without 'ignorance and superstition,' and we, too, will allow that the man—who, in the presence of the vast life of nature which existed for ages before he was and will continue for millions after he has ceased to see, which waxes and wanes without regard of him or his ends—is a fool, when he feels himself less than a fine grain of sand in the mighty circle of that life in which we live and move and have our being and are continually sustained."The day may come when, with changing conditions of life, the Boer will no more live in the presence of these large realities, and then his religion will be dead; whatever external form it may take.It may be, that then he will have much of the learning of the schools, and his own material life will have become infinitely complex, and his knowledge how to govern the powers of nature for the gratification of his own instincts almost unlimited; he may have luxuries, comforts, amusements he knows not now—but it may not be so well with him.It may be, the day will come when he shall rear for himself vast cities, and walk, with the kings that have been, upon their walls, crying, "Behold this is Babylon, my great city, whichIhave built"—and know not that the sands of the desert shall cover it, and the little shrew-mouse build her nest there.And, if that day come, when the desert shall hold no more for him any burning bush, and no spot on earth be longer sacred to him; when, with increased external knowledge and material wealth, the littleIgrows always greater and greater for him, and the universe beyond less and less, then he will no longer fight so bravely on his kopjes or live so peacefully on his plains or fall asleep so quietly when the time comes to lie beneath the sand and bushes—and it will not be so well with him.When the day comes, when he exchanges the voice of the desert for the ignorance and superstition of the city, then, however vast his expansion in certain directions, the secret fountain of strength of this strange little people will have dried up, and they will be even as others.Finally, it has been said of the African Boer that he does not regard the African native as his brother, nor treat him with that consideration with which man should treat his brother man.The consciousness of human solidarity, with its resulting sense of social obligation, has in all ages developed itself in proportion to the nearness of man to man. Initiated in the relation of mother to child, where the union is visible, physical and as complete as is compatible with distinct existence, it has spread itself out successively, as the sentient creature developed, through the relations of family and the tribe to that of nation, and has extended, even though in a partial and undeveloped condition, to the limits of race; but here, almost always, in the average human creature as up to the present time evolved, the growth has stopped. Even the most ordinary man or woman, in the bulk of the societies existing on the earth to-day, is conscious of a certain union with, and more or less strong social obligation towards, the members of his own family; most men are conscious of some sense of solidarity with, and of some social obligation towards, the members of their own national organization; and probably few are wholly unconscious of a certain dim sense of identity with, and a vague (though it may be very vague) sense of obligation towards, men of their owncolour and racial development. But only the few, and they the very few, most fully evolved and exceptionally endowed humans have been in the past or are even at the present day capable of carrying the sense of solidarity and social obligation across the limit of race. Nor, when we consider how intermittent and often feebly active is the social instinct even within the domain of the family, the nation, and the race, is it to be wondered at that its action should cease almost entirely when the vast chasm of racial distinction is reached. While humanity as a whole is still in so primitive a condition that even the bonds of family kinship, the close interactions of a common nationality with common language, common tradition, and common institutions, the similitude which binds nations of a common race, are yet continually inoperative in insuring any approach to truly socialized action; when nations as closely knit by ties of physical resemblance, common racial habits of thought and ideals, as are all the European nations, are yet continually animated by the bitterest antagonism; while Frenchman hates Englishman and Englishman German and German Italian, it is assuredly in no way to be wondered at, that, when humans are brought into contact with those as widely dissevered from themselves, not merely in colour and external configuration, but in the much more important matters of anatomical structure and the racial ideals and habits of life, the results of countless ages of growth, as are Mongolian and Aryan, European and African, that social instinct should become in the main entirely inoperative.Ignorant persons may suppose, when they hear to-day of Americans who belong to what is probably, on the whole, the most enlightened and humane state on the globe, first mutilating and partially dismembering the Negro, and then applying the fire gradually to parts of his body that he may roast the more slowly, that the men performing such deed must of necessity be cut off from the rest of their race by a fiendish ferocity peculiar to themselves and an anti-social structure of mind. Such ignorant persons also undoubtedly picture to themselves the owners of the English slave-ships (who have perhapsinflicted a larger amount of suffering on the human race than any other body of men of equal number in the history of the race) as persons wholly devoid of human sympathies, who could not be trusted to deal justly or generously with their own wives or children, and possessed of no sense of social obligation. But we, who have obtained a sorrowful knowledge through personal experience of racial problems, we know that this is not so. We know well that a man may bristle with all the ordinary domestic and private virtues, may be a loyal husband, a devoted son, a thoughtful father, a citizen who abides within the law and would give his life for his nation, and may even be a man who would not easily inflict an uncalled-for wrong or wanton cruelty on any man of his own race and colour, though divided from him by national and lingual differences; and yet, when the limit of racial continuity is reached in this same man, there may be a sudden, complete and abysmal hiatus in the action of the moral sense and the socialized instincts. (Strangely enough, in our own personal experience, several cases of the most painful cruelty and injustice, on the part of white men towards black, have been cases in which the white men concerned were exceptionally good-hearted, generous and open-handed men. In one instance of particular cruelty, where two white men were concerned, upon seeing our manifest discomfort at their action, they were sincerely distressed. "If I had any idea you would take on like that about a miserable nigger, I would never have touched the wretched beggar!" remarked one. Persons ignorant of the racial problem may regard it as improbable, if not impossible, that men who could perform acts of ruffianly brutality towards an African should yet be so sensitive as to be deeply concerned that they had momentarily distressed a looker-on, whom they hardly knew and had no personal friendship for, but who was of their own race. Yet, persons who have practically no knowledge of inter-racial relations know that not merely is this psychologic attitude possible, but that it is a matter of universal occurrence.)Social instinct has never in the past, and does notto-day, except in a few and exceptional instances, spontaneously tend to cross the limits of race.The sooner this truth is recognized as axiomatic by all who attempt to deal with problems of race, the greater will be the possibility of dealing with them in a spirit of wisdom.To blind our eyes to this fact, and then attempt to comprehend or deal rationally with race-problems, is to act as would a schoolboy who sets himself to solve an arithmetical puzzle in which he had failed to set down the leading term. The sooner it is recognized as axiomatic that the distinctions of race are not imaginary and artificial, but real and operative; that they form a barrier so potent that the social instincts and the consciousness of moral obligation continually fail to surmount them; that the men or the nations which may safely be trusted to act with justice and humanity within the limits of their own race are yet, in the majority of cases, wholly incapable of so acting beyond those limits; that only in the case of exceptional individuals gifted with those rare powers of sympathetic insight which enable them, beneath the multitudinous and real differences, mental and physical, which divide wholly distinct races, to see clearly those far more important elements of a common humanity which underlie and unite them, is the instinctive and unconscious extension of social feeling beyond the limits of race possible; that, for all others, wholly just and humane action beyond the limits of their own race, can be only attained as the result of a stern, conscious, unending, mental discipline; and that perhaps no individual man or woman is at the present day so highly developed as regards social instinct as to be certain that they can at all times depend on themselves to act with perfect equity where inter-racial relations are concerned; that no individual is so highly developed morally as to be able wholly to dispense with a most careful intellectual self-examination when dealings with persons of alien race and colour are entered on; and, finally, that the great moral and intellectual expansion which humanity has during the ensuing centuries to undergo, if harmonized human life on the globe is everto be, is in the direction of extending the social instincts beyond those limits of the family, the nation, and the race, to the humanity beyond those limits:—the sooner we recognize as axiomatic these truths, the quicker will be our progress towards the comprehension and satisfactory solution of racial problems; and, failing to recognize these truths, it is perhaps wholly useless for anyone to attempt to deal with the moral and social aspects of inter-racial questions.With perfect uniformity throughout the whole history of the human race in the past, we find strong anti-sociality appearing at the point where the light Aryan race comes into contact with darker races; and it appears to make little difference which nations are concerned.We Anglo-Saxons have the unhappy priority of having caused to the natives of Africa, in our functions as slave-traders, slave-owners, and explorers, probably more than fifty times as much suffering as any other European nation. It appears, indeed, to have been our unhappy prerogative to have been born to be the perpetual scourge and torture of this vast, wonderful, attractive continent and its interesting children. Probably at least fifty Africans have perished under the lash, have borne the manacles, or been shot by the guns of Anglo-Saxons, for every one that has been lashed, manacled, or shot by a Frenchman, German, Spaniard, or European of any other variety; but this has arisen, not at all because other nations were more socially inclined towards the African, but because the love of material wealth being dominant in us and trade our speciality, the African, whom all white nations have regarded as mainly a means of producing or procuring wealth, has naturally fallen most into our hands. Where Spaniard has dealt with Indian, German, Frenchman or Dutchman with African or Asiatic, exactly the same lack of lofty social feeling, and the same mental attitude regarding them merely as means for production of increased benefits for themselves, and not as individuals who are ends within themselves, has prevailed.Irrespective of nationality or time, the line at which light race meets dark is the line at which human socialityis found at the lowest ebb; and, wherever that line comes into existence, there are found the darkest shadows which we humans have cast by our injustice and egoism across life on earth.If then, when the statement is made that the South African Boer has not treated the South African native as it is desirable man should treat man, it be meant to imply that in his treatment of the dark races his conduct has been at one with that of all other European races, and that he has not entered on that loftier and more socialized course of action toward subject and dark races, to which it is our hope that the humanity of the future will attain, then the statement is wholly and unmitigatedly true. But if, on the other hand, it be intended by the assertion to imply that the South African Boer, in his treatment of the dark races with whom he has been thrown into contact, has been less governed by just and humane instincts than men of other races under like conditions, that the English slave-trader or speculator, the Portuguese adventurer, the Spanish conqueror, the Jamaica planter have treated the African native better, then the statement is wholly and unmitigatedly false.As the student of racial problems has continually occasion to repeat, there has been no wide difference between the attitude of different white races when brought into contact with dark, whether in Asia, Africa, or America; but on the whole the relation of the African Boer with the African native, sorrowful as are all inter-racial relations, has yet probably tended to be rather slightly more and not less pacific than those of other races. This results in no way from the higher humanitarian standpoint of the Boer, but from his circumstances.Firstly, from the fact that his numbers have always been small and insignificant as compared with those of the Bantus, the African people with which he has mainly had to deal, and that the Bantus, being one of the most virile and powerful of all dark races, it has not been possible for him to dominate them as he might have done a feebler people. (Were the natives of India of the sameindependent and resolute spirit as the Bantus of South Africa, England could never have subjected and held them down, as she has done at the point of the bayonet, for sixty years.)Secondly, the African Boers are a peculiarly pacific and even-tempered people, not quickly roused to anger or any other emotion, though when roused yet difficult to appease; and, as acts of violence towards subject people are most often the results of sudden outburst of passion, the native has probably fared somewhat better at their hands than in those of a more quick-blooded race.The strange, gentle, slow and somewhat dreamy element, which forms so important a charm in the character of the Boer, is by no means peculiar to the Dutch South African. It is a quality which is found almost quite as markedly in the grandsons of the British settlers of 1820 and other South African born men of English descent, and is especially marked in many of the young English farmers in the Eastern and Frontier districts, who form the flower of our English population, and who are often South Africans of the third generation. It is by this peculiar mental attitude more even than by their muscular build and prominent bony structure, that one tells almost invariably and without fail the South African born man of whatever descent from the foreigners and newcomers who fill our seaports and mining centres. It has in it something slightly reminiscent of the Italiandolce far niente, and partly finds expression in the Dutch motto of the Free State: "Wacht een bietje: alles zal recht kom" (Wait a little: all will come right); but it differs wholly from the Italian quality, in that this gentleness and slowness covers almost invariably a power of stern, persistent, concentrated emotion which we have not found equally common in the Italian. It takes on the average five times as long to rouse the African-born man into action and powerful emotion as the average foreigner of English or any other nationality; and it takes ten times as much to pacify him again!Speaking once to a noted American traveller and military man, who had journeyed all over the world andnoted keenly, we asked him, after spending two years in South Africa, what had most struck him in the country. He replied: "The strange gentleness of the African men. I hardly knew whether to be most surprised or touched by it when I first came. I have seen nothing like it in the world."When we ourselves returned to South Africa after ten years' absence in Europe, and were therefore able to view our birth-fellows almost impartially, the true born South African man, whether Dutch or English, reminded us of nothing so much as those huge shaggy watch-dogs, which lie before their masters' houses placid and kindly, whom you may stumble over and kick, almost with impunity; but when once you have gone too far and he rises and shakes himself, you had best flee. There is little doubt that, in the great blended South African nation that is coming to its birth, this mental attitude will be a leading characteristic; exactly as quickness and alertness is a distinguishing mark of the Americans of the Northern and Western States. It appears probable that exactly as we shall be marked by our large, powerful bony structure and heavy muscular strength, we shall be marked by a certain gentle passivity, covering immense emotional intensity and dogged persistency; that the great men we shall produce will not be so often keen financiers and speculators as artists and thinkers; that our national existence will culminate, not in producing versatility and skill, but persistency and depth, in our most typical individuals. We shall probably always be a people more easily guided through our affections and sympathies than almost any other, and more impossible to subdue by force.Whether the cause lie mainly in the nature of the Boer or the Bantu, this is certain, that the African native has not tended to melt away with anything of the rapidity with which the Indian was exterminated by the English American in the north, and by the Spaniard in the south of the American continent; nor in the two hundred years the Dutch have been in South Africa is any incident so painful recorded as that which is universally accepted, and has not, we believe, been authentically denied, withregard to the treatment of the natives of India, when men who, however brutally, had been fighting in defence of their native land, were, before being blown from the gun's mouth, compelled to lick up the blood of the persons they had killed, in order that the fear of eternal damnation might be added to the other horrors of death. No analogous incident, sinking civilized man so far below the level of the wild beast and the primitive savage, has we believe ever been recorded of the African Boer, even when his women and children have been killed and mutilated by scores.The same equality in the treatment of the dark races, whichever may be the white race concerned, is illustrated when we consider the condition of the African native in the different States into which South Africa is divided.In the Cape Colony, where the majority of the white inhabitants are Dutch, though at present a British Colony, the position of the native is more favourable than in most other states. Theoretically the aboriginal native has in the Cape Colony almost the same rights as a white man; he is allowed to vote at elections, and theoretically he is allowed to sit on juries; though practically were he to attempt to substantiate his right to try cases in which white and black men were concerned by sitting on a jury he would probably be lynched; and in no case has a native ever been returned for Parliament. Yet his position, in spite of past laws and recently introduced laws—that he may not walk on the pavement, etc.—is far more satisfactory than in any other state.In Natal, another British Colony, where the majority of the white inhabitants are English, the position of the aboriginal native is far less satisfactory, and that of the Asiatic as intolerable as it well can be. Large numbers of Indians from India have been deliberately imported on the plantations; but they are both hated and feared, and vigorous endeavours are made to prevent their trading or acquiring property in a land into which they have been deliberately introduced.In the two Republics of the Free State and the Transvaal, the native has not the same theoretic rights as inthe Cape Colony. He has neither the theoretic right to sit on juries or become a member of Parliament, which in theory, though not in fact, he has in the Cape Colony, nor is he recognized by the law as the equal of the white man. Practically, in the Transvaal he increases and multiplies as fast as elsewhere, if not faster, but his condition is in many ways far less desirable than in the Cape Colony.On the other hand, it is in the purely British possessions of Matabele and Mashonaland that his condition is worst. Probably a larger number of natives have been exterminated in these territories during the last eight years than throughout the whole of the rest of South Africa by Dutch and English together in any like period. And it is here that, during the last few years, a determined and practical attempt has been made to introduce a modified form of slavery under the name of compulsory labour. The unhappy condition of the natives in these territories rises, however, not at all from the fact that the men dominating them are English, nor at all from the fact that the few genuine white settlers in the country are of a lower stamp than those elsewhere in South Africa, for this is emphatically not the case; but to the form of government.A body of speculators, mainly non-resident in the land, chartered for commercial purposes and given despotic rule over a vast country and its people, must always be the form of rule most productive of evil to the subject people, whether the speculators so incorporated be French, Jewish, English, Belgian, or German. The rule of such a speculative and commercial body must necessarily be devoid of those personal sympathies with the ruled which may soften even the government of an individual tyrant; the conscience of such a body, if in its collective capacity it may be said to have one, must of necessity exercise itself merely in a conscientious striving to extract the largest possible percentage of interest for the corporate shareholders from the land and labour of the subject people. Under no possible circumstances can it exhibit those virtues of consideration and self-abnegation for the subjectpeoples which even a purely military conqueror might exhibit; and the rule of such a body must always remain the most oppressive for the ruled and the most demoralizing for the ruling people. To blame, primarily, the men who are the mere instruments in carrying out such a form of government would be unjust in the highest degree; and even these speculators and adventurers who form the ruling chartered body can only be blamed in a secondary degree, having but obeyed the instincts of their kind, which compels individuals of a certain class to employ their lives on earth in seeking to attain the largest amount of profit with the smallest amount of outlay to themselves. The primary blame must rest with that people which at the end of the nineteenth century can allow so hoary an anachronism as a commercial chartered company to usurp its place in the government of primitive peoples, and, from under the ægis of its flag, to stretch forth in safety the long, grasping fingers and the grotesque, greedy face of a Financial Chartered Company, which should long since have been relegated to the past among the extinct evils of the human race.The native is best off and happiest in South Africa where, as amid the mountains of Basutoland, he still maintains a semi-independence. Both Dutchmen and Englishmen have carried on bloody wars against this people, but neither the Boers nor the English have been able wholly as yet to break up their tribal organization; and, guarded by their mountains and their courage, they are slowly absorbing modern civilization, in a manner more healthful than would be possible under a sudden dislocation of their social and moral system. How long this interesting phenomenon in national African development will be allowed by circumstances to continue, it is difficult to say. Should gold or precious stones be found in their territory, it would then be worth while expending many millions in destroying the people and taking complete possession of the land.Thus, viewing the South African states as a whole, we find that the question of the condition of the native does not depend on the nationality of the governingpower, or of the majority of the white inhabitants, but on other and more intricate causes.The question is frequently asked one when visiting in Europe: "Which treats the African native the best, the Dutchman or the Englishman?" It is a question which awakens a certain silent amusement. It is as though, after spending ten years in Europe in the study of labour problems, one had been asked on one's return to South Africa: "Who treats his employees best, a Scotchman or an Englishman?" The true answer is, that the relation of white man to black, as of employer to employed, depends on far deeper and more complex conditions than any racial variety of the white man or the employer will explain.The individual equation always tells for much; but, roughly speaking (one can but deal roughly with the delicate, complex, organic intricacies of social life), there are in South Africa, as a whole, four attitudes among white men as regards the native, which attitudes have no causative relation with the matter of race.Firstly:—There is the attitude of the farming population who, more especially in frontier districts and to the north and east, are, and have been for generations, thrown into close contact with the aboriginal native in his most crude and primitive form, and who are compelled by the conditions of their life to live in close relations with him, and to act upon and to be re-acted on by him. These men and women, whether Boer fore-trekkers and their descendants, or British settlers of 1820 and their children and grand-children, have borne, and to a certain extent still bear, the crude brunt of the first impact between light and dark races, with their widely opposing ideals, manners of life, and physical differences. These people and their ancestors, whether Dutch-Huguenots who landed in Africa two hundred years ago, or British settlers who came eighty years ago, have in almost all cases passed through a life-and-death struggle with the natives for the possession of the land, a struggle which, even in the case of the British settlers who were backed by the soldiers and the power of the British nation, was bitter enough; and this struggle has left behind it in many cases thatintense, curious bitterness which is engendered by a race feud. Further, it is these folk who to-day are brought directly face to face with the difficulties which must arise at the point where the divergent ideals, social, ethical and racial of the Aryan and the African, are first brought into contact.Generally speaking (and allowing for the many exceptions which will always occur where men are spoken of in large masses), there is, in this class of the population, a strong tendency, not so much towards scorn and indifference towards the native, as of keen, bitter resentment, which can sometimes not be described otherwise than as hatred: a feeling which is not generally found in any other large class of the community. Nor is this in any way to be wondered at, when we recall the century-long bitterness between folk so closely allied as are Highland Scots and Lowland English, and the deathless feuds of the border, and, above all, when we recall the fact that in modern times a whole civilized nation has howled frantically for the blood of a brother nation, to avenge defeat sustained by superior numbers of its own men, fighting against inferior numbers, inferiorly placed, of the fellow nation.With the wild-beast cry of "Avenge Amajuba" still ringing in our ears, it appears rather wonderful than otherwise that so much of pacific human feeling should prevail between frontier farmer and fore-trekker and the aboriginal races as still does exist.There are few old frontier families in Dutch or English in the Cape Colony, Transvaal, Free State, or Natal, who, if their past family history were written, would not have to record hair-breadth escapes of women and children who have fled for miles at night to avoid sudden attacks, of farm-houses destroyed, of men coming home to find the women and children killed and mutilated; this in addition to the record of countless open battles in which their ancestors or they themselves took part. And, on the native side, are even bitterer memories, and the consciousness, in many cases, that the land on which the white man now lives, and where he dominates, was once his father's. Alike among Dutch and English, these memories have left their bitter mark. We havenever heard the natives so bitterly and fiercely denounced as by descendants of English settlers whose ancestors had suffered racially from them. "I almost hate you," has cried a friend belonging to one of the most cultured and intelligent of our English Cape families, "when you talk of raising and educating the natives. Hewers of wood and drawers of water they shall be to us to the end, in spite of you." "I feel a shudder of hatred go up my spine when I look at a Kaffir," said another refined and, in many respects, noble frontier English woman to us once; "I feel as if I could just put out my foot and crush them."On the other hand, it would be very easy to exaggerate the universality and intensity of this antipathy. We have known, not isolated instances, but scores of cases, where both English and Dutch farmers have entertained the kindliest feelings towards natives generally, and their own servants in particular. We have known intimately an unlettered Boer, so innately gifted with the power of ruling wisely that for fifteen years, during which time he had always from fifteen to thirty natives on his farm, he had never found it necessary to punish, or even to threaten, one, and who was so beloved by his servants that, during a long illness, when he was obliged to leave his farm for months in the care of his Kaffir servants, he found on his return not one head of stock missing, and the farm managed as though he had been there himself. We have known both English and Dutch farmers who have kept their servants twenty years, cared for them in old age, and aided them in illness. We have known a Boer woman, herself an invalid, who would go evening by evening to the hut of her sick servant to comfort and help her; we have seen a whole Boer family gathered weeping round the grave of a black Bantu; we have known both English and Dutch farmers who have treated their native servants with far more consideration and kindness than the average English landowner shows towards the labourers on his estates; and, on the other hand, we have known both English and Dutch farmers with whom no native would willingly remain in service; who were as cordially hated as they hated;and whose whole relation with the native was a series of petty oppressions, with occasional acts of gross injustice or cruelty. But we believe that every one who has attentively and impartially studied this matter on the spot will allow that it is a question into which the Dutch or English extraction of the farmer does not materially enter.In the notorious Hart case of a few years back when, in the Cape Colony, an English farmer of that name flogged a Bantu to death in cold blood, they were English and not Dutch farmers who offered to subscribe to pay the small fine inflicted on him, and who resented his being punished at all. The most hopeful sign with regard to this feeling of "race feud" is that, on the whole, it is a decaying feeling. To find it in its full intensity among Dutch or English one must always go to the older men and women of forty, fifty, seventy, or older, who in their youth went through bitter experiences of conflict with the native, or remember the experiences of their parents. It is far less intense among the younger men and women of from twenty-five and under, now growing up, and in another generation it will probably be all but extinct in the form of a true race feud.We would not, however, for a moment have it understood that an anti-social attitude towards the native is peculiar to the African-born farmer. So far is this from being the case, that, where men newly arrived from Europe are thrown into the same close contact and come into conflict with aboriginal natives, their attitude is generally far less human,and has in it an element of complete callousness and cold contempt, seldom or never found among men born in South Africa, who have grown up among the native races. This may appear strange, but an analogous phenomenon has often been noted in America, where it has been observed that the slave-owners in the Southern States, in spite of their dominance over the slaves and occasional acts of brutality and oppression, really regarded them more as fellow humans and were emotionally nearer to them, than were, in many cases, the Northerners who came to live in the South, and who, on first meeting them, were often filled with shrinking and disgust.The African-born farmer, Dutch or English, who has grown up among the natives, has been nursed by them in childhood, often speaks their language, and knows something of their manners and ideas, may hate them; but always, in his heart of hearts, he recognizes them as men; and his very hatred and bitterness is a kind of tribute to the common humanity that he feels binds them. Man only hates man.To the newcomer from Europe, on the other hand, who becomes a farmer, or is otherwise thrown into contact with the aboriginal native, he is often an object, not merely of hatred, but of contempt and sport; there is no mere assumption of cynicism when he speaks of the native merely as an object of the chase; he has often no other view with regard to him. We have heard a brilliant young English officer, who had only been a few years in the country, but had been employed in what is called a "Native War," dwell with manifest and almost boyish delight on the pleasures of Bantu-hunting. He described the curious delight you feel in finding the mark of a naked foot and tracing it down. "It is," he said, "like the pleasure of the hunting field—with something added!" We have also known a skilful English doctor, a man of singular tenderness and generosity towards persons of his own nationality, who had been only eight years in the country, but had served in two native campaigns, remark that the only two purposes for which natives were of any use were to serve as targets for rifle-shooting and as good subjects for vivisection; while his inhumanity towards wounded and other natives was a matter of common remark among the South African burghers. And a fine young English trooper who had been two years in the country, after hearing our view on the native question, remarked thoughtfully: "Well, you know, all this is quite new to me; I have never regarded the nigger as anything but something to shoot." To the South African-born man this light-hearted, callous, sporting attitude is quite foreign. He may take the life of a native, but he takes it sternly, bitterly; it is something much more than hunting down the indigenous black game of the country; he knows in his heart of hearts that thething he hunts is aman, and a strong man; and in his hatred of him there is even an element of fear as well as revenge. This attitude forms a far more promising field for the growth of possible socialized feeling, than any attitude of callous contempt can even do. Hate is nearer to love than scorn can ever be; and, paradoxical as it may seem, we hold strongly that if, in South Africa to-day, sincere personal affections and sympathies are to be found crossing the line of race, they will be found most often between the African-born farming population, Dutch and English, and their domestic servants. The warmest expressions of affection towards individual natives which we have ever heard have been expressed by English and Dutch farmers towards their old servants.Secondly:—There is the attitude of the townsman, Dutch, South-African-English, or Newcomer, who most often never comes into any contact with the aboriginal natives at all, and whose employees or domestics are all more or less civilized natives or half-castes. Here, as a rule, the element of intense racial bitterness is wholly lacking. The townsman treats his civilized servant very much, in the main, as men of all European nationalities treat their domestics and dependants. As far as wages, food, and the amount of labour expected is concerned, the civilized domestic servant and town labourer is rather better off than in most European countries. On the other hand, there is always a hard-and-fast line, dividing the white man from the dark, which is never overstepped. The only real drawback to the condition of the civilized native in towns lies in the fact that, the moment he attempts to transcend the limits of domestic servitude, he is met by a stern barrier, socially obstructing him;a barrier raised quite as much by the instinct of the descendant of the Anglo-Saxon as the Dutch-Huguenot. At present this matters little, as the attempt is seldom made; but in fifty years' time this harmonizing of black and white men in the higher walks of life will probably form a great part of the South African problem. It is not, however, a problem which the question of the descent of the white South African from Dutch or English ancestors will in any way affect. Every one who has any knowledge of SouthAfrican life will allow that at the present day it makes not the slightest difference in the condition of the civilized servant in towns whether the doctor, lawyer, or merchant who employs him be of Dutch or English descent. We have, indeed, sometimes been inclined to fancy that there was a tendency, as between women, for a slightly more friendly and harmonious condition to be common between the mistress of Dutch descent in towns and her domestic, than between the English woman and hers. The Dutch descended woman is often more easy going and has less of that curious reserve which marks the attitude of the Anglo-Saxon towards his dependants, and even his equals, but there is probably no material difference along racial lines in the treatment of civilized domestics and employees in town and their employers.Thirdly:—There is what, for want of a better name, we may define as the financial and speculative attitude towards the native. This is the attitude of the great labour employers. These in South Africa are practically never individuals but great syndicates, companies, and chartered bodies, the individual members of which are seldom or never brought into any personal contact with the natives whose lives they control. In the majority of cases they are non-resident in South Africa, wholly or for the larger part of their lives. For them the native is not a person hated or beloved, but a commercial asset. To these persons the native question sums itself in two words "cheap labour." Their view of the native question is as clear-cut and simple as the outline of a gallows. There is no intricacy or sentiment about it. The native is the machine through the action of which companies and speculators have to extract the wealth of the South African continent; and the more the machinery costs to keep at work, the smaller the percentage of South African wealth which reaches the hands of the speculator.For them the native problem is in a nutshell: "In how far, and by what means, can the rate of native wages be diminished, so raising profits?"It must be remembered that the natives form almost the entire body of the true wage-earning labouring class of South Africa. The European, working in mines orelsewhere, becomes almost at once in the majority of cases simply the overseer or guider of the native labourer; and in mining and other fields of labour natives are rapidly fitting themselves for even the more skilled forms of manual labour.The question of the relation between the great foreign syndicates and companies and the native races of this country is thus the great labour-question of Europe and America, but complicated enormously by two facts.Firstly, by the fact that the mass of speculators, company-controllers, and their shareholders are Jews, Englishmen, Americans, or Continentals, wholly non-resident in South Africa, or residing here merely while they make sufficient wealth to ensure their retirement to a life of ease and luxury in Europe, or, in the case of ambitious Englishmen, till they are enabled, by means of their wealth, to enter the English Parliament or obtain titles. From this fact it follows that a decrease in the wages of our native labouring-class and an increase in dividends, while it makes larger the number of yachts on the Mediterranean, the palaces of Jewish and other parvenus in London and on the Continent, and while it increases the gains of the tables at Monte Carlo and of the racing grounds of England, and replenishes the purse of debilitated and degenerate English aristocrats, yet not only addsnothingto the material wealth of South Africa, but positively diminishes those very small returns which, under existing legislation, is all she receives from her mines. European skilled miners and overseers, as a rule, take their extensive earnings back to Europe with them; and, with the exception of what the Government railways may earn, it is mainly through the wages of the native labourer, expended in buying the necessaries of life, and to no inconsiderable extent in supporting his schools and churches, that the legitimate commerce of the country and its general population are benefited by its mineral wealth. Thus, on this all-important point, our native problem, which is also our labour problem, differs materially and most essentially from the labour problem of Europe, in that it is not merely a question of dividing the wealth of the country between one class or another (as is generally thecase in Europe and America), but of retaining the products of the land in the land of all.It has been said by a leading speculator and millionaire in South Africa that, if the States of South Africa could be broken down and crushed into one, a united and uniform labour system might then be adopted, and the wages of natives brought down; and he has held up as an ideal for imitation the condition in India where natives are supposed to labour for twopence a day, living therefore so closely upon the border of starvation that the slightest rise in the price of foodstuffs renders them liable to widespread famine and destruction, and therefore also eager to accept the smallest amount of remuneration which will maintain life.To this end the Speculator and Capitalist, among others, have sought to enter political life in South Africa, and in order that, by the passing of laws dispossessing the native by indirect means of his hold on the land, and breaking up his tribal tenure, and by the making of direct wars upon him, the native, at last being absolutely landless, may be unable to resist any attempt to lower wages, and may then sink into the purely proletariat condition of a working class always on the border of starvation, and therefore always glad to sell his toil for the lowest sum that will maintain life.Were this plan entirely successful, South Africa as a whole would lose all the native now gains, the increased profit going to enlarge the wealth of the foreign Speculator and often aristocratic shareholder; and South Africa would then be saddled with a proletariat class of the very lowest type. For, the only hope of the African native's rising, and becoming a valuable and intelligent labouring class, lies in his receiving such remuneration for his labour as shall enable him to grasp at least some of the subordinate advantages of civilization, along with those of its evils which are necessarily forced on him. If the South African native is not in the position to obtain primary education and in some measure to grasp such advantages and privileges as there are in our modern civilization, then, as his old tribal ideals and institutions are destroyed, he must inevitably sink into a condition lower and more terriblethan that of the lowest proletariat in Europe; and, as he forms (and must do for generations, in a land where white men refuse to perform the bulk of physical labours) the major part of the population, South Africa will permanently be weighted and degraded by the degradation and degeneracy of the great bulk of the inhabitants.To the Company Director, Capitalist, or Speculator who never visits South Africa, or remains here only while financial reasons make it desirable, it can matter nothing what becomes in the present or in future generations, morally or intellectually, of the native. But to those of us, to whom South Africa is a home, to whom not only the present but the future of this land is our most intense human concern, and who with our descendants have got to sail with the African native permanently in the same ship across the sea of time, it matters everything.The second, and even more important point, which differentiates our labour problem from that common in Europe, is that our labouring class is divided sharply from the employing class by the line of colour. Even in European countries, where employers and employed are of one race and physically identical, divided merely as being for the moment the haves and have-nots, the adjustment of the labour problem presents sufficient difficulty. But in South Africa, where racial and physical differences divide employer from employed, the difficulties are immeasurably and almost inconceivably increased. Any attempt on the part of our labouring class to better its position or resist oppressive exactions, being undertaken mainly by men of one colour against men of another, will always immediately awaken, over and above financial opposition, racial prejudice; so that even those white men, whose economic interests are identical with those of the black labourer, may be driven by race antagonism to act with the exactors.The complete failure to grasp this aspect of our South African problem leads to much of the inability in other lands to comprehend the South African situation as a whole.Thus, it is often said, "Why should the speculator, monopolist, and millionaire loom so large in South African life? Why should he be so much more of abugbear and threaten all free political and social institutions in South Africa in so much greater a degree than in other lands where he also exists?"Our answer is, that, wherever in Europe or America the great millionaire and monopolist, Jewish or Christian, is found, with the pluto-aristocratic speculators and shareholders who draw their wealth through him, there also is found a great equipoise to their powers of exaction or aggression in the great more or less organized masses of the working classes. The limits are very sharply set, beyond which the greatest Jew or Christian speculators backed by the most powerful princes or plutocracy cannot go. We have no such counterpoise in South Africa. Owing to the difference of colour and race, our great labouring class dare not organize itself and use its strength; and we dare not organize and use it, for fear of awakening the baneful flames of racial antagonism. South Africa is the heaven of the Speculator, the Capitalist and Monopolist. Here, alone, the opposing forces which meet him in every European and civilized country do not exist.The labour of resisting his endeavours to gain possession of the whole mineral and landed wealth of the country and its public works, and with them the exclusive control of the political machinery, lies with the necessarily small middle class section of the community, mainly farmers and small landed proprietors with a handful of skilled workmen. These have not only to act for themselves, but for the entire labouring class, which, on account of its difference in race and colour from the rest of the community, cannot act for itself.Any one who has given thought to the study of modern social phenomena will understand at once how enormously our labour and racial problem, being interlaced in this way, complicates our whole social condition, and how almost helpless it throws South Africa into the hands of the Jew or Christian foreign speculator. Let us give a concrete example. In a town called Kimberley there is the richest diamond mine in the earth, once the property of South Africans and belonging to multitudes of them, but now fallen into the hands of a powerful syndicate of Jews, Englishmen, and others, who, withthe exception of a couple of South Africans, all reside wholly or mainly out of South Africa, and whose power is so enormous that they are able, by a mere expression of their will, to return eight or ten men to the Cape Parliament, irrespective of the wishes of the community. The action of this powerful syndicate has long formed a source of disease and corruption in South African public and social life, and the question is often asked, why the working men and other inhabitants of Kimberley and such places as the company dominates submit to this dictation? It is not so, as is sometimes supposed, because the skilled workmen and overseers in the great company are inferior to their compatriots in Europe in their love of freedom or independence; for they are, on the whole, picked men, and many of them are strongly democratic and freedom-loving; it is certainly not because the inhabitants of Kimberley are more indifferent to their manhood, or more willing to deliver up their right to exercise the franchise into the hands of a small knot of Jews and Speculators than other men; but because the forces opposed to them are so overpowering compared to their own that they feel crushed.Were the thousands of working men labouring in the mines white and not black, and could they freely combine with the skilled European overseers and the townsmen, the monopoly of the power would be snapped in twenty-four hours. They would refuse to go into compounds, they would demand higher wages and the right to spend them where they pleased, and to vote for their own representatives, and the power for evil of the great company would be broken.But the bulk of the workmen being black, and any attempt to organize or combine them being at once met with the cry "Black-men combining," the handful of skilled English workmen and townsmen are powerless.Our situation is very grave, and differs radically for the worse from that of all other lands where kindred problems have to be faced. We have nothing to fall back upon but the fierce and indomitable love of freedom in a certain section of our farming population.If it should be possible for the international Speculatorand Capitalist to carry out his dream, to break down the autonomy of the different African States, each one of which is a kind of redoubt behind which our African freedom is ensconsed, and, crushing us into one structureless whole, to introduce "a uniform native policy," dispossessing the natives wholly everywhere of their lands by means of labour, taxes and other devices, and bringing them down to the lowest wages on which life can be sustained; then, when we shall have inured the Bantu to the evils of our civilization, its drinking bars and its brothels, but have left him no means of attaining to the higher forms of knowledge or the fields of skilled labour, then we shall be left with a great, blind, stupefied Sampson in our midst who will assuredly some day stretch out his mighty much-wronged arms, and bring down upon our descendants the social structure which we are to-day with so much labour attempting to rear. Our gold and diamond mines may by that time be exhausted, and Jew and Speculator, and foreign Shareholder will long have carried off their gains and be here no more to feel the shock. Upon us whose portion of earth to inhabit this land is, and upon our descendants, will fall the blow.This question of the relation between the foreign Speculator, Capitalist, and Shareholding class, and the black labouring class, is the very core within the core, and the kernel within the kernel, of the South African problem.The old race-feud attitude of the farming population, whether Dutch or English, toward the native, embittered by the memory and tradition of old wars and early struggles, will tend to die out, and even now is softened by personal relations; the attitude of the employer towards his civilized native domestic has in it little that is detrimental to either, and suggests in itself no great coming evil. But the financial attitude is one which will increase in its importance and in the virulence of its evil effects with every year that passes. The small cloud upon the horizon, to-day no bigger than a man's hand, will in forty years have overspread the whole of our African sky, unless some great and at present unforeseen revolution should occur. It is upon the skill with which white man and black man combine to avert the threatened evil,that the fate of Africa in the middle of next century will depend. It may be easy to break down and demoralize our great, and at present noble, Bantu races; but it may be very hard ever to build them up again.For the moment the men holding the purely financial attitude towards the native happen mainly to be English or Jewish foreigners; but there is really nothing racial in this attitude. Were the Hollander or the Italian head of a great gold-mining, railway-building, or diamond syndicate, there is not the very slightest reason to suppose that he would regard the native South African less purely as a "commercial asset" than his brother, the English financier, does.The more profoundly one studies the question of the relations of the white man to the black in South Africa, the more clear it becomes that the determining factor in that relation is something far other and deeper than the mere fact that the white man belongs to this or that European variety.Fourthly, and finally:—There is the attitude of a body of persons, small in number, of no invariable occupation, sex, nationality or creed, but gathered from every part of the white community. So small in number is this body of persons holding this attitude, that again and again have men and women belonging to it felt inclined to draw aside, and in bitterness of spirit to cry with the ancient Hebrew at the door of his cave: "I, only I, am left." Yet this body has never been wholly extinct in South Africa, and, we believe, never will be. As we hope later to deal exhaustively with the aims and attitude of this section, it is not now necessary to do more than passingly to glance at them.This attitude cannot be better summed up than by saying that it is the extreme antithesis to the financial attitude. The man compelled by his mental organization to take this view is of necessity obliged to regard the native not merely as a means to an end, but as an end in himself. Consistently with his whole view of life, he cannot regard the native merely as a "commercial asset"; he is compelled to apply to him the categorical imperative: "Deal with thy fellow man as, wert thou in his place,thou wouldst have him deal with thee." He does not write up as the motto which is to govern all the relations of black men with white: "Cheap labour," but rather: "Noblesse oblige." He is compelled always to see before him the moral fact that, if the native be his equal in mental power and moral vigour, his place is beside him; but, if the African native benothis equal in mental power and moral vigour, then there rests upon him the mighty obligation of all strength towards weakness, of all wisdom towards ignorance, of the God towards the man: "Rank confers obligation."To the man holding this view the African native always presents himself as the little dark brother of the great family-human, who stands looking wistfully through the open door into the great hall of the nineteenth-century civilization in which we fair-skinned Aryans disport ourselves; and we are compelled to go to the door and say: "Come in, little brother, come in; there are many better things out there in the open where you have been than we have here; yet, if you must enter, give us your hand, and we will try to show you what in this great carnival of ours is best, and what most to fear. Walk in, little brother, this hall was built for the sons of the children of man."It is manifest that men holding such a view must ever be in deadly conflict with men holding the financial view. The future of South Africa depends largely on the result of this struggle. If the financial attitude predominate absolutely, and the native be dispossessed of his land by wars and the skilfully devised legislation, which, breaking up his tribal tenure everywhere, throws him and his lands entirely into the hands of the financial speculator, and if low wages at the same time deprive him of the means of education, he must become a helot, having no stake in the general welfare of the land of his birth—always its menace, and at length its downfall.If the other attitude prevail to any large extent, and the men holding it are strong enough to set their mark on legislation and institutions, the native may morally and intellectually survive the shock (as he certainly will physically) of sudden transplantation from his moral andsocial atmosphere into ours. He may grasp what is great in our civilization along with its evils and may yet become the most valuable element and the ablest defender of a social organization in which he has much at stake. But even were this not so, the stern demands of human obligation towards human would yet compel an uncompromising justice towards him.It will be obvious, to any person skilled in the study of human nature, that persons, compelled by their mental organization to assume this attitude towards the African native races, are not of necessity of any particular European race, sex, or social condition. In the past some of the men who have the most courageously and persistently upheld this attitude have been Englishmen. More notable than all was Sir George Grey, most gifted and most farseeing of all the Colonial Governors whom England has ever sent out, a man of whose type it would appear a country can only produce once in a century. There has also been Sir William Porter, a great Irishman, whose name still recalls noble ideals and generous performance to South African hearts, and who during his stay exemplified the fact that the greatest gift which the old European lands can send the new is one of their great sons, a man with a heart large enough to be able to wrap itself about the people and institutions and things in a new world, and, through loving, to comprehend them. Another man who in the past has been noted for this attitude was Saul Solomon, a man of brilliant gifts, said to be of Jewish extraction, who through a long life amid endless difficulties fought an heroic battle and never fell from the side of justice and generosity towards the African native, and who has left a permanent mark on the legislation of South Africa.

But the difference between a dead and a living religion is vital; the first weighs down the man who carries it; the living religion up-bears him. There is perhaps no life quite worth living without a living religion, under whatever name or form it may be concealed, vivifying and strengthening it. The Boer's religion is alive, it is in harmony with his knowledge, his ideals, and his aims. Therefore it is his strength.

Theoretically, so far as its dogmatic clothing is concerned, his religion is a form of Christian Protestant Calvinism, and differs in no way from that still professed by the majority of Scotchmen, from the Aberdeen grocer to the Edinburgh professor. Actually, it differs very materially from that held by the large bulk of any truly modern population.

It is often said of the lives of men congregated in vast cities, under more or less completely artificial conditions, that they suffer from these or those disadvantages—that the de-oxygenated air of cities retards muscular development, that it renders persons continually exposed to it anæmic; that the continual noise, vibration, and lack of direct sunlight have an injurious effect upon the nervous system and that a debilitated physical condition is bound to arise. But the most serious loss entailed by life in vast cities under artificial conditions, whether in the modern or the ancient world, is seldom directly referred to.

The story of the small modern child, born and brought up in a modern town, where her father, an electrical engineer, had installed all the lights in the street and houses, and who, when at four years old was taken to the country for the first time and allowed to see the stars, said: "Did my father set them up too?" may or may not be true; but it illustrates with force the terrible vacuum in knowledge and experience of the most profound aspects of existence which a life walled in amid artificial conditions tends to produce. That which the Buddha left his kingly palace and sat beneath his Boh-tree to seek; that which Zoroaster found in his solitary sojourn on the mountain top, and Mohamed in his secret cave, which the Hebrew leader discovered in the deserts ofSinai, and the teacher of Galilee in the wilderness and on the mountain tops; that which, having perceived, they strove to give voice to in the world's bibles, and which has become symbolized in the world's temples, from the rock-hewn cave temples of India to the Holy of Holies of the Jew; from the Greeks' Parthenon on the hill-top bathed in light and air, to the Gothic cathedral with its forest of shafts—that of which all the religions and all the dogmas are but the tentative attempts of the struggling human spirit to give voice to—this reality is not easily perceived as present and always over-arching when the individual is swathed in by conditions of life, the result of man's small labours, and seemingly having no root beyond his own will; and when the tumultuous sounds and minute details forced on it at every moment almost blind and deafen the individual to the consciousness of anything beyond the fragmentary and present.

This is the serious danger and almost certain loss to which the spirit of man exposes itself, when he severs himself from all contact with the living and self-expanding forms of nature beyond himself, and surrounds himself purely by those which have a relation to himself, and have been modified by his action. It is an inverted view of the universe, with accompanying narrowness and blindness, which, far more than any danger of physical asphyxiation and nervous muscular deterioration, constitutes the evil attendant on the ordinary life of men in great cities, or wherever immersed in purely artificial conditions.

Undoubtedly there are lofty and powerful spirits who have reached a deep and calm clear-sightedness which no aspect in the world immediately about them can obscure, to whom the city and the petty sights and sounds of our little human creation are seen abidingly to be as much the outcome and mere passing development of the powers beyond and behind them as the silent plain and the mountain top—

"And what if trade sow cities,Like shells along the shore;And thatch with towns the prairies wideWith railways ironed o'er?They are but sailing foam-bellsAlong thought's causal stream,And take their shape and sun-colourFrom that which sends the dream."

"And what if trade sow cities,Like shells along the shore;And thatch with towns the prairies wideWith railways ironed o'er?They are but sailing foam-bellsAlong thought's causal stream,And take their shape and sun-colourFrom that which sends the dream."

"And what if trade sow cities,Like shells along the shore;And thatch with towns the prairies wideWith railways ironed o'er?

"And what if trade sow cities,

Like shells along the shore;

And thatch with towns the prairies wide

With railways ironed o'er?

They are but sailing foam-bellsAlong thought's causal stream,And take their shape and sun-colourFrom that which sends the dream."

They are but sailing foam-bells

Along thought's causal stream,

And take their shape and sun-colour

From that which sends the dream."

No doubt the Jew of Amsterdam in his small room grinding his lenses, living on milk-soup and a few raisins, found his piercing mental vision no more shut in by the city-roof above him than had he slept with Jacob's desert-stone for a pillow; and no doubt there are as rare souls, immersed externally in the very noisiest civilization about us, who yet see serenely over and above it. But, with the mass, this is not so; we cannot see past the little material conditions that press on us.

When one bends over an ant-heap on a vast plain, that ant-heap with its little millions of existences toiling there are to the one bending over it but an infinitesimal part of the vast landscape, where a hundred other ant-heaps, broken and new, lie around, and over which the sun shines and about which the mighty mountains rise; but to the ant, down in the ant-heap, it is the universe; he does not even know that his ant-heap was heaped out of the red sand and will return to it to-morrow; he knows nothing of the fallen ant-heaps or of the great human eyes looking down at him; were it possible for him to climb to the top of his ant-heap and raise himself up on his tiny legs, and once to look round, he might know something of what the ant-heap was.

Most of us in our human ant-heaps are unable to lift ourselves out of them; we mistake the handful of dust we have accumulated round us, and which we call our cities and civilization, for the universe; and the noise we make in gathering it we think is the sound of eternity. Were it not for two things which we cannot obliterate in our civilization—the wail of the newborn child, and the long straight, quiet figure, knowing nothing and seeing nothing, which the hearse carries away—it might well be that we should sink into a state of ignorance and superstition so profound that we should believe, not merely every day but in our sanest moments, that the will of man was the ruling power of life, his work theend, and we ourselves the universe, and beyond us, nothing!

From this form of ignorance and superstition our primitive Boer is saved, assuredly not because of any superior wisdom and insight inherent in him, but by the conditions of his life. For the average human creature reads life as it is continually presented to him. The Boer has not willed to go into the wilderness and the desert to seek for wisdom with the teacher of Galilee or the sage of India; but for the two hundred years of his South African wandering that which prophet, seer, and poet have in all ages turned to for wisdom has been laid open as a book before him, whether he willed it or not; so that he too, however slow or dull his individual intelligence, has been compelled by the daily conditions of his life, with more or less clearness, to decipher it. Dark and blinded beyond the average of human souls must have been the old fore-trekker, who, as at sundown his wagon crept for the first time into some vast plain where no white man's foot had ever trod, and as the blue shades of evening fell across the countless herds of antelope, and the far-off flat-topped mountains stood sharp against the sky, could cry "I,Iam the centre of this life! The earth is mine, and the fulness thereof!" And the solitary African youth who has been out in the veld looking for his father's sheep all day, over kopjes and through dried-up watercourses, and who walks home in the starlight, and hears the jackals call, and pauses, listening silently to hear if it be not the young lions crying for their food, has been exposed to educative influences totally distinct from those which he would have been subjected to had he spent the day in a factory amid pulleys and wheels and a crowd of labourers, and had walked home at night through a gas-lit crowded street, past bars, music-halls, and policemen, to his garret. The last music-hall air, the picture of light streaming through the public-house doors, the whirr of the machinery, and a thousand minute complex sense-impressions springing immediately from the action of man, the one, of necessity, carries home with him. The other has none of these complex man-related sense-impressions; he loses muchwhich the other wins, but he also has something of his own. Whether he will or no, however dull his ear and dim his eye and torpid his intellect, he carries home with him pictures of the colossal things which he has seen, things which the son of Jesse beheld when in his youth he tended his father's flocks at night, to guard them from the wolf and the bear, and which, when King of Israel, he reproduced in that chant which has gone down the ages: "When I behold the heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained—what is man that Thou art mindful of him!"

The African woman on her solitary farm may have no inherent power for grasping large wholes, or seeing behind small externals to the moving cause beyond; yet when she sits all the morning sewing in her still front-room, while the children play out in the sunshine by the kraal wall and the flies buzz round, and she sees wherever she raises her head, through the open door, twenty miles of unbroken silent veld with the line of the blue mountains meeting the sky, she is exposed to eight hours of an educative influence entirely distinct from that she would have undergone had she sat in a tenement-room in a city court, and heard her neighbours tramp to and fro on the stairs, and the omnibuses crash in the street, and seen only from her window, when she looked out, the red-brick wall opposite. No man, be he hunter, traveller, or trader, or who or what he may, who has ever been exposed to both orders of influences, will say that their educative effect is the same, or that a man can remain long exposed to either set of influences, the artificial life of cities or the solitude of the desert, without being profoundly modified by it, above all, as to his view of existence as a whole, which is religion.

The Boer, however blind by nature he may individually be, has always open before him the book from which the bibles were transcribed—and it has been impossible for him to fail wholly to decipher something from it. Therefore, even his dogmatic theology (and it is wonderful how very little real dogmatic theology the true primitiveup-country Boer has!) lives, animated by a great, direct perception of certain facts in life.

That which the Essenes sought in their rocky caves, which the Buddhist thinker to-day immures himself on his solitary mountain peak to find, which the Christian monks built their monasteries and cloisters to acquire; to supply men artificially with the means of partially attaining to which dim-aisled churches and pillared temples have been reared in the midst of dense populations; which the old Dissenting divine was feeling after when he said: "Spend two hours a day alone in your room with the window open if possible, in quiet and thought; your day will be the stronger and the fuller for it"; and which the Protestant hymn aims at when in its quaint doggerel it says—

"Night is the time to pray;The Saviour oft withdrewTo desert mountains far away;So will his followers do.Steal from the world to haunts untrod,To hold communion there with God."

"Night is the time to pray;The Saviour oft withdrewTo desert mountains far away;So will his followers do.Steal from the world to haunts untrod,To hold communion there with God."

"Night is the time to pray;The Saviour oft withdrewTo desert mountains far away;So will his followers do.Steal from the world to haunts untrod,To hold communion there with God."

"Night is the time to pray;

The Saviour oft withdrew

To desert mountains far away;

So will his followers do.

Steal from the world to haunts untrod,

To hold communion there with God."

—that which religious minds in all centuries and of all races have sought after, has been strangely forced on the African Boer by his silent solitary life amid vast man-unmodified aspects of nature. And with all that he may lack in other directions of knowledge and wisdom, of keenness and versatility, that which the conditions of his life had to teach him, he has learnt. Therefore, though his dogmatic theology is in no sense higher or different from that of others, his religion oftentimes lives when theirs is dead.

We are aware, it may be said, that all this is purely a misconception; that the man of unusual intellect seeks nature and solitude merely that his own large mental powers may unfold themselves unhindered; that what the saint, the philosopher, the poet, and the prophet find, they take with them; that to the mere bucolic mind the midnight sky studded with stars is but the covering of the plain where sheep feed; and that the most infinite sky over him when he off-saddles alone at midday in a vastplainis but that to which he looks up in order to find the time.But this is not so. The great analytical reasoner may find, labouring in his laboratory, the great thinker in his study, watching the processes of his own mind, may discover, that which the vast man-untouched processes of nature testify of; it is exactly on the simple purely receptive mind that the silence and solitude of vast unmodified natural surroundings have the most educative effect.

Driving on a hot summer's day in a cart across a great African plain, with the light pouring down on the brak bushes and karroo, till it seemed to shimmer out of them, the Boer who drove us was, as usual, silent. He was a man six feet in height, large-boned and powerful, with a still blue eye, an iron will, and indomitable persistency. Living in a remote part of the country, he seldom went to church more than once in the year, and could with great difficulty read a chapter in the Bible. During the years we had known him we had never heard him refer to anything more profound than his sheep and cattle, and the habits of tiger-leopards, upon which he was an authority. After driving about two hours, the horses' feet sinking into the sand and coming out again with a sucking sound, but no movement breaking the hot stillness, he looked round at us, with that peculiar shy glance which marks men who live much alone, and do not often try mentally to approach their fellow-men, and said slowly in the Taal: "There is something I have long wanted to ask you. You are learned. When you are alone in the veld like this, and the sun shines so on the bushes, does it ever seem to you that something speaks? It is not anything you hear with the ear, but it is as though you grew so small, sosmall, and the other so great. Then the little things at the house seem all nothing. Do you hear it, too—you who are so learned?"

We are aware of the guffaw of laughter which would greet such a statement from souls on the stock exchange, in drinking-bars and fashionable clubs, and perhaps the national assemblies where the representatives of civilized nations meet. This man, it would be said, had lived so much alone with nature that he had become a fool. If he had been fifteen years in the share marketor the diplomatic service, and had lunched at his club and spent his evening at the theatre or the café chantant, he would never have felt himself or his affairs small, nor would he have perceived anything greater than himself. It will be said it was all ignorance and superstition.

We reply: "This may be so; but if it is, then burn your world's bibles, and destroy your world's temples, for that which the world's bibles were written to express and its temples built to symbolize is an 'ignorance and superstition.' Yet, before we accept your verdict finally, answer us these two things: Where were you and I eighty years ago? Where shall we be eighty years hence, when this throbbing hand that writes to-night is a handful of dust, and your mouth that smiles is quiet beneath six feet of earth? Answer these questions without 'ignorance and superstition,' and we, too, will allow that the man—who, in the presence of the vast life of nature which existed for ages before he was and will continue for millions after he has ceased to see, which waxes and wanes without regard of him or his ends—is a fool, when he feels himself less than a fine grain of sand in the mighty circle of that life in which we live and move and have our being and are continually sustained."

The day may come when, with changing conditions of life, the Boer will no more live in the presence of these large realities, and then his religion will be dead; whatever external form it may take.

It may be, that then he will have much of the learning of the schools, and his own material life will have become infinitely complex, and his knowledge how to govern the powers of nature for the gratification of his own instincts almost unlimited; he may have luxuries, comforts, amusements he knows not now—but it may not be so well with him.

It may be, the day will come when he shall rear for himself vast cities, and walk, with the kings that have been, upon their walls, crying, "Behold this is Babylon, my great city, whichIhave built"—and know not that the sands of the desert shall cover it, and the little shrew-mouse build her nest there.

And, if that day come, when the desert shall hold no more for him any burning bush, and no spot on earth be longer sacred to him; when, with increased external knowledge and material wealth, the littleIgrows always greater and greater for him, and the universe beyond less and less, then he will no longer fight so bravely on his kopjes or live so peacefully on his plains or fall asleep so quietly when the time comes to lie beneath the sand and bushes—and it will not be so well with him.

When the day comes, when he exchanges the voice of the desert for the ignorance and superstition of the city, then, however vast his expansion in certain directions, the secret fountain of strength of this strange little people will have dried up, and they will be even as others.

Finally, it has been said of the African Boer that he does not regard the African native as his brother, nor treat him with that consideration with which man should treat his brother man.

The consciousness of human solidarity, with its resulting sense of social obligation, has in all ages developed itself in proportion to the nearness of man to man. Initiated in the relation of mother to child, where the union is visible, physical and as complete as is compatible with distinct existence, it has spread itself out successively, as the sentient creature developed, through the relations of family and the tribe to that of nation, and has extended, even though in a partial and undeveloped condition, to the limits of race; but here, almost always, in the average human creature as up to the present time evolved, the growth has stopped. Even the most ordinary man or woman, in the bulk of the societies existing on the earth to-day, is conscious of a certain union with, and more or less strong social obligation towards, the members of his own family; most men are conscious of some sense of solidarity with, and of some social obligation towards, the members of their own national organization; and probably few are wholly unconscious of a certain dim sense of identity with, and a vague (though it may be very vague) sense of obligation towards, men of their owncolour and racial development. But only the few, and they the very few, most fully evolved and exceptionally endowed humans have been in the past or are even at the present day capable of carrying the sense of solidarity and social obligation across the limit of race. Nor, when we consider how intermittent and often feebly active is the social instinct even within the domain of the family, the nation, and the race, is it to be wondered at that its action should cease almost entirely when the vast chasm of racial distinction is reached. While humanity as a whole is still in so primitive a condition that even the bonds of family kinship, the close interactions of a common nationality with common language, common tradition, and common institutions, the similitude which binds nations of a common race, are yet continually inoperative in insuring any approach to truly socialized action; when nations as closely knit by ties of physical resemblance, common racial habits of thought and ideals, as are all the European nations, are yet continually animated by the bitterest antagonism; while Frenchman hates Englishman and Englishman German and German Italian, it is assuredly in no way to be wondered at, that, when humans are brought into contact with those as widely dissevered from themselves, not merely in colour and external configuration, but in the much more important matters of anatomical structure and the racial ideals and habits of life, the results of countless ages of growth, as are Mongolian and Aryan, European and African, that social instinct should become in the main entirely inoperative.

Ignorant persons may suppose, when they hear to-day of Americans who belong to what is probably, on the whole, the most enlightened and humane state on the globe, first mutilating and partially dismembering the Negro, and then applying the fire gradually to parts of his body that he may roast the more slowly, that the men performing such deed must of necessity be cut off from the rest of their race by a fiendish ferocity peculiar to themselves and an anti-social structure of mind. Such ignorant persons also undoubtedly picture to themselves the owners of the English slave-ships (who have perhapsinflicted a larger amount of suffering on the human race than any other body of men of equal number in the history of the race) as persons wholly devoid of human sympathies, who could not be trusted to deal justly or generously with their own wives or children, and possessed of no sense of social obligation. But we, who have obtained a sorrowful knowledge through personal experience of racial problems, we know that this is not so. We know well that a man may bristle with all the ordinary domestic and private virtues, may be a loyal husband, a devoted son, a thoughtful father, a citizen who abides within the law and would give his life for his nation, and may even be a man who would not easily inflict an uncalled-for wrong or wanton cruelty on any man of his own race and colour, though divided from him by national and lingual differences; and yet, when the limit of racial continuity is reached in this same man, there may be a sudden, complete and abysmal hiatus in the action of the moral sense and the socialized instincts. (Strangely enough, in our own personal experience, several cases of the most painful cruelty and injustice, on the part of white men towards black, have been cases in which the white men concerned were exceptionally good-hearted, generous and open-handed men. In one instance of particular cruelty, where two white men were concerned, upon seeing our manifest discomfort at their action, they were sincerely distressed. "If I had any idea you would take on like that about a miserable nigger, I would never have touched the wretched beggar!" remarked one. Persons ignorant of the racial problem may regard it as improbable, if not impossible, that men who could perform acts of ruffianly brutality towards an African should yet be so sensitive as to be deeply concerned that they had momentarily distressed a looker-on, whom they hardly knew and had no personal friendship for, but who was of their own race. Yet, persons who have practically no knowledge of inter-racial relations know that not merely is this psychologic attitude possible, but that it is a matter of universal occurrence.)

Social instinct has never in the past, and does notto-day, except in a few and exceptional instances, spontaneously tend to cross the limits of race.

The sooner this truth is recognized as axiomatic by all who attempt to deal with problems of race, the greater will be the possibility of dealing with them in a spirit of wisdom.

To blind our eyes to this fact, and then attempt to comprehend or deal rationally with race-problems, is to act as would a schoolboy who sets himself to solve an arithmetical puzzle in which he had failed to set down the leading term. The sooner it is recognized as axiomatic that the distinctions of race are not imaginary and artificial, but real and operative; that they form a barrier so potent that the social instincts and the consciousness of moral obligation continually fail to surmount them; that the men or the nations which may safely be trusted to act with justice and humanity within the limits of their own race are yet, in the majority of cases, wholly incapable of so acting beyond those limits; that only in the case of exceptional individuals gifted with those rare powers of sympathetic insight which enable them, beneath the multitudinous and real differences, mental and physical, which divide wholly distinct races, to see clearly those far more important elements of a common humanity which underlie and unite them, is the instinctive and unconscious extension of social feeling beyond the limits of race possible; that, for all others, wholly just and humane action beyond the limits of their own race, can be only attained as the result of a stern, conscious, unending, mental discipline; and that perhaps no individual man or woman is at the present day so highly developed as regards social instinct as to be certain that they can at all times depend on themselves to act with perfect equity where inter-racial relations are concerned; that no individual is so highly developed morally as to be able wholly to dispense with a most careful intellectual self-examination when dealings with persons of alien race and colour are entered on; and, finally, that the great moral and intellectual expansion which humanity has during the ensuing centuries to undergo, if harmonized human life on the globe is everto be, is in the direction of extending the social instincts beyond those limits of the family, the nation, and the race, to the humanity beyond those limits:—the sooner we recognize as axiomatic these truths, the quicker will be our progress towards the comprehension and satisfactory solution of racial problems; and, failing to recognize these truths, it is perhaps wholly useless for anyone to attempt to deal with the moral and social aspects of inter-racial questions.

With perfect uniformity throughout the whole history of the human race in the past, we find strong anti-sociality appearing at the point where the light Aryan race comes into contact with darker races; and it appears to make little difference which nations are concerned.

We Anglo-Saxons have the unhappy priority of having caused to the natives of Africa, in our functions as slave-traders, slave-owners, and explorers, probably more than fifty times as much suffering as any other European nation. It appears, indeed, to have been our unhappy prerogative to have been born to be the perpetual scourge and torture of this vast, wonderful, attractive continent and its interesting children. Probably at least fifty Africans have perished under the lash, have borne the manacles, or been shot by the guns of Anglo-Saxons, for every one that has been lashed, manacled, or shot by a Frenchman, German, Spaniard, or European of any other variety; but this has arisen, not at all because other nations were more socially inclined towards the African, but because the love of material wealth being dominant in us and trade our speciality, the African, whom all white nations have regarded as mainly a means of producing or procuring wealth, has naturally fallen most into our hands. Where Spaniard has dealt with Indian, German, Frenchman or Dutchman with African or Asiatic, exactly the same lack of lofty social feeling, and the same mental attitude regarding them merely as means for production of increased benefits for themselves, and not as individuals who are ends within themselves, has prevailed.

Irrespective of nationality or time, the line at which light race meets dark is the line at which human socialityis found at the lowest ebb; and, wherever that line comes into existence, there are found the darkest shadows which we humans have cast by our injustice and egoism across life on earth.

If then, when the statement is made that the South African Boer has not treated the South African native as it is desirable man should treat man, it be meant to imply that in his treatment of the dark races his conduct has been at one with that of all other European races, and that he has not entered on that loftier and more socialized course of action toward subject and dark races, to which it is our hope that the humanity of the future will attain, then the statement is wholly and unmitigatedly true. But if, on the other hand, it be intended by the assertion to imply that the South African Boer, in his treatment of the dark races with whom he has been thrown into contact, has been less governed by just and humane instincts than men of other races under like conditions, that the English slave-trader or speculator, the Portuguese adventurer, the Spanish conqueror, the Jamaica planter have treated the African native better, then the statement is wholly and unmitigatedly false.

As the student of racial problems has continually occasion to repeat, there has been no wide difference between the attitude of different white races when brought into contact with dark, whether in Asia, Africa, or America; but on the whole the relation of the African Boer with the African native, sorrowful as are all inter-racial relations, has yet probably tended to be rather slightly more and not less pacific than those of other races. This results in no way from the higher humanitarian standpoint of the Boer, but from his circumstances.

Firstly, from the fact that his numbers have always been small and insignificant as compared with those of the Bantus, the African people with which he has mainly had to deal, and that the Bantus, being one of the most virile and powerful of all dark races, it has not been possible for him to dominate them as he might have done a feebler people. (Were the natives of India of the sameindependent and resolute spirit as the Bantus of South Africa, England could never have subjected and held them down, as she has done at the point of the bayonet, for sixty years.)

Secondly, the African Boers are a peculiarly pacific and even-tempered people, not quickly roused to anger or any other emotion, though when roused yet difficult to appease; and, as acts of violence towards subject people are most often the results of sudden outburst of passion, the native has probably fared somewhat better at their hands than in those of a more quick-blooded race.

The strange, gentle, slow and somewhat dreamy element, which forms so important a charm in the character of the Boer, is by no means peculiar to the Dutch South African. It is a quality which is found almost quite as markedly in the grandsons of the British settlers of 1820 and other South African born men of English descent, and is especially marked in many of the young English farmers in the Eastern and Frontier districts, who form the flower of our English population, and who are often South Africans of the third generation. It is by this peculiar mental attitude more even than by their muscular build and prominent bony structure, that one tells almost invariably and without fail the South African born man of whatever descent from the foreigners and newcomers who fill our seaports and mining centres. It has in it something slightly reminiscent of the Italiandolce far niente, and partly finds expression in the Dutch motto of the Free State: "Wacht een bietje: alles zal recht kom" (Wait a little: all will come right); but it differs wholly from the Italian quality, in that this gentleness and slowness covers almost invariably a power of stern, persistent, concentrated emotion which we have not found equally common in the Italian. It takes on the average five times as long to rouse the African-born man into action and powerful emotion as the average foreigner of English or any other nationality; and it takes ten times as much to pacify him again!

Speaking once to a noted American traveller and military man, who had journeyed all over the world andnoted keenly, we asked him, after spending two years in South Africa, what had most struck him in the country. He replied: "The strange gentleness of the African men. I hardly knew whether to be most surprised or touched by it when I first came. I have seen nothing like it in the world."

When we ourselves returned to South Africa after ten years' absence in Europe, and were therefore able to view our birth-fellows almost impartially, the true born South African man, whether Dutch or English, reminded us of nothing so much as those huge shaggy watch-dogs, which lie before their masters' houses placid and kindly, whom you may stumble over and kick, almost with impunity; but when once you have gone too far and he rises and shakes himself, you had best flee. There is little doubt that, in the great blended South African nation that is coming to its birth, this mental attitude will be a leading characteristic; exactly as quickness and alertness is a distinguishing mark of the Americans of the Northern and Western States. It appears probable that exactly as we shall be marked by our large, powerful bony structure and heavy muscular strength, we shall be marked by a certain gentle passivity, covering immense emotional intensity and dogged persistency; that the great men we shall produce will not be so often keen financiers and speculators as artists and thinkers; that our national existence will culminate, not in producing versatility and skill, but persistency and depth, in our most typical individuals. We shall probably always be a people more easily guided through our affections and sympathies than almost any other, and more impossible to subdue by force.

Whether the cause lie mainly in the nature of the Boer or the Bantu, this is certain, that the African native has not tended to melt away with anything of the rapidity with which the Indian was exterminated by the English American in the north, and by the Spaniard in the south of the American continent; nor in the two hundred years the Dutch have been in South Africa is any incident so painful recorded as that which is universally accepted, and has not, we believe, been authentically denied, withregard to the treatment of the natives of India, when men who, however brutally, had been fighting in defence of their native land, were, before being blown from the gun's mouth, compelled to lick up the blood of the persons they had killed, in order that the fear of eternal damnation might be added to the other horrors of death. No analogous incident, sinking civilized man so far below the level of the wild beast and the primitive savage, has we believe ever been recorded of the African Boer, even when his women and children have been killed and mutilated by scores.

The same equality in the treatment of the dark races, whichever may be the white race concerned, is illustrated when we consider the condition of the African native in the different States into which South Africa is divided.

In the Cape Colony, where the majority of the white inhabitants are Dutch, though at present a British Colony, the position of the native is more favourable than in most other states. Theoretically the aboriginal native has in the Cape Colony almost the same rights as a white man; he is allowed to vote at elections, and theoretically he is allowed to sit on juries; though practically were he to attempt to substantiate his right to try cases in which white and black men were concerned by sitting on a jury he would probably be lynched; and in no case has a native ever been returned for Parliament. Yet his position, in spite of past laws and recently introduced laws—that he may not walk on the pavement, etc.—is far more satisfactory than in any other state.

In Natal, another British Colony, where the majority of the white inhabitants are English, the position of the aboriginal native is far less satisfactory, and that of the Asiatic as intolerable as it well can be. Large numbers of Indians from India have been deliberately imported on the plantations; but they are both hated and feared, and vigorous endeavours are made to prevent their trading or acquiring property in a land into which they have been deliberately introduced.

In the two Republics of the Free State and the Transvaal, the native has not the same theoretic rights as inthe Cape Colony. He has neither the theoretic right to sit on juries or become a member of Parliament, which in theory, though not in fact, he has in the Cape Colony, nor is he recognized by the law as the equal of the white man. Practically, in the Transvaal he increases and multiplies as fast as elsewhere, if not faster, but his condition is in many ways far less desirable than in the Cape Colony.

On the other hand, it is in the purely British possessions of Matabele and Mashonaland that his condition is worst. Probably a larger number of natives have been exterminated in these territories during the last eight years than throughout the whole of the rest of South Africa by Dutch and English together in any like period. And it is here that, during the last few years, a determined and practical attempt has been made to introduce a modified form of slavery under the name of compulsory labour. The unhappy condition of the natives in these territories rises, however, not at all from the fact that the men dominating them are English, nor at all from the fact that the few genuine white settlers in the country are of a lower stamp than those elsewhere in South Africa, for this is emphatically not the case; but to the form of government.

A body of speculators, mainly non-resident in the land, chartered for commercial purposes and given despotic rule over a vast country and its people, must always be the form of rule most productive of evil to the subject people, whether the speculators so incorporated be French, Jewish, English, Belgian, or German. The rule of such a speculative and commercial body must necessarily be devoid of those personal sympathies with the ruled which may soften even the government of an individual tyrant; the conscience of such a body, if in its collective capacity it may be said to have one, must of necessity exercise itself merely in a conscientious striving to extract the largest possible percentage of interest for the corporate shareholders from the land and labour of the subject people. Under no possible circumstances can it exhibit those virtues of consideration and self-abnegation for the subjectpeoples which even a purely military conqueror might exhibit; and the rule of such a body must always remain the most oppressive for the ruled and the most demoralizing for the ruling people. To blame, primarily, the men who are the mere instruments in carrying out such a form of government would be unjust in the highest degree; and even these speculators and adventurers who form the ruling chartered body can only be blamed in a secondary degree, having but obeyed the instincts of their kind, which compels individuals of a certain class to employ their lives on earth in seeking to attain the largest amount of profit with the smallest amount of outlay to themselves. The primary blame must rest with that people which at the end of the nineteenth century can allow so hoary an anachronism as a commercial chartered company to usurp its place in the government of primitive peoples, and, from under the ægis of its flag, to stretch forth in safety the long, grasping fingers and the grotesque, greedy face of a Financial Chartered Company, which should long since have been relegated to the past among the extinct evils of the human race.

The native is best off and happiest in South Africa where, as amid the mountains of Basutoland, he still maintains a semi-independence. Both Dutchmen and Englishmen have carried on bloody wars against this people, but neither the Boers nor the English have been able wholly as yet to break up their tribal organization; and, guarded by their mountains and their courage, they are slowly absorbing modern civilization, in a manner more healthful than would be possible under a sudden dislocation of their social and moral system. How long this interesting phenomenon in national African development will be allowed by circumstances to continue, it is difficult to say. Should gold or precious stones be found in their territory, it would then be worth while expending many millions in destroying the people and taking complete possession of the land.

Thus, viewing the South African states as a whole, we find that the question of the condition of the native does not depend on the nationality of the governingpower, or of the majority of the white inhabitants, but on other and more intricate causes.

The question is frequently asked one when visiting in Europe: "Which treats the African native the best, the Dutchman or the Englishman?" It is a question which awakens a certain silent amusement. It is as though, after spending ten years in Europe in the study of labour problems, one had been asked on one's return to South Africa: "Who treats his employees best, a Scotchman or an Englishman?" The true answer is, that the relation of white man to black, as of employer to employed, depends on far deeper and more complex conditions than any racial variety of the white man or the employer will explain.

The individual equation always tells for much; but, roughly speaking (one can but deal roughly with the delicate, complex, organic intricacies of social life), there are in South Africa, as a whole, four attitudes among white men as regards the native, which attitudes have no causative relation with the matter of race.

Firstly:—There is the attitude of the farming population who, more especially in frontier districts and to the north and east, are, and have been for generations, thrown into close contact with the aboriginal native in his most crude and primitive form, and who are compelled by the conditions of their life to live in close relations with him, and to act upon and to be re-acted on by him. These men and women, whether Boer fore-trekkers and their descendants, or British settlers of 1820 and their children and grand-children, have borne, and to a certain extent still bear, the crude brunt of the first impact between light and dark races, with their widely opposing ideals, manners of life, and physical differences. These people and their ancestors, whether Dutch-Huguenots who landed in Africa two hundred years ago, or British settlers who came eighty years ago, have in almost all cases passed through a life-and-death struggle with the natives for the possession of the land, a struggle which, even in the case of the British settlers who were backed by the soldiers and the power of the British nation, was bitter enough; and this struggle has left behind it in many cases thatintense, curious bitterness which is engendered by a race feud. Further, it is these folk who to-day are brought directly face to face with the difficulties which must arise at the point where the divergent ideals, social, ethical and racial of the Aryan and the African, are first brought into contact.

Generally speaking (and allowing for the many exceptions which will always occur where men are spoken of in large masses), there is, in this class of the population, a strong tendency, not so much towards scorn and indifference towards the native, as of keen, bitter resentment, which can sometimes not be described otherwise than as hatred: a feeling which is not generally found in any other large class of the community. Nor is this in any way to be wondered at, when we recall the century-long bitterness between folk so closely allied as are Highland Scots and Lowland English, and the deathless feuds of the border, and, above all, when we recall the fact that in modern times a whole civilized nation has howled frantically for the blood of a brother nation, to avenge defeat sustained by superior numbers of its own men, fighting against inferior numbers, inferiorly placed, of the fellow nation.

With the wild-beast cry of "Avenge Amajuba" still ringing in our ears, it appears rather wonderful than otherwise that so much of pacific human feeling should prevail between frontier farmer and fore-trekker and the aboriginal races as still does exist.

There are few old frontier families in Dutch or English in the Cape Colony, Transvaal, Free State, or Natal, who, if their past family history were written, would not have to record hair-breadth escapes of women and children who have fled for miles at night to avoid sudden attacks, of farm-houses destroyed, of men coming home to find the women and children killed and mutilated; this in addition to the record of countless open battles in which their ancestors or they themselves took part. And, on the native side, are even bitterer memories, and the consciousness, in many cases, that the land on which the white man now lives, and where he dominates, was once his father's. Alike among Dutch and English, these memories have left their bitter mark. We havenever heard the natives so bitterly and fiercely denounced as by descendants of English settlers whose ancestors had suffered racially from them. "I almost hate you," has cried a friend belonging to one of the most cultured and intelligent of our English Cape families, "when you talk of raising and educating the natives. Hewers of wood and drawers of water they shall be to us to the end, in spite of you." "I feel a shudder of hatred go up my spine when I look at a Kaffir," said another refined and, in many respects, noble frontier English woman to us once; "I feel as if I could just put out my foot and crush them."

On the other hand, it would be very easy to exaggerate the universality and intensity of this antipathy. We have known, not isolated instances, but scores of cases, where both English and Dutch farmers have entertained the kindliest feelings towards natives generally, and their own servants in particular. We have known intimately an unlettered Boer, so innately gifted with the power of ruling wisely that for fifteen years, during which time he had always from fifteen to thirty natives on his farm, he had never found it necessary to punish, or even to threaten, one, and who was so beloved by his servants that, during a long illness, when he was obliged to leave his farm for months in the care of his Kaffir servants, he found on his return not one head of stock missing, and the farm managed as though he had been there himself. We have known both English and Dutch farmers who have kept their servants twenty years, cared for them in old age, and aided them in illness. We have known a Boer woman, herself an invalid, who would go evening by evening to the hut of her sick servant to comfort and help her; we have seen a whole Boer family gathered weeping round the grave of a black Bantu; we have known both English and Dutch farmers who have treated their native servants with far more consideration and kindness than the average English landowner shows towards the labourers on his estates; and, on the other hand, we have known both English and Dutch farmers with whom no native would willingly remain in service; who were as cordially hated as they hated;and whose whole relation with the native was a series of petty oppressions, with occasional acts of gross injustice or cruelty. But we believe that every one who has attentively and impartially studied this matter on the spot will allow that it is a question into which the Dutch or English extraction of the farmer does not materially enter.

In the notorious Hart case of a few years back when, in the Cape Colony, an English farmer of that name flogged a Bantu to death in cold blood, they were English and not Dutch farmers who offered to subscribe to pay the small fine inflicted on him, and who resented his being punished at all. The most hopeful sign with regard to this feeling of "race feud" is that, on the whole, it is a decaying feeling. To find it in its full intensity among Dutch or English one must always go to the older men and women of forty, fifty, seventy, or older, who in their youth went through bitter experiences of conflict with the native, or remember the experiences of their parents. It is far less intense among the younger men and women of from twenty-five and under, now growing up, and in another generation it will probably be all but extinct in the form of a true race feud.

We would not, however, for a moment have it understood that an anti-social attitude towards the native is peculiar to the African-born farmer. So far is this from being the case, that, where men newly arrived from Europe are thrown into the same close contact and come into conflict with aboriginal natives, their attitude is generally far less human,and has in it an element of complete callousness and cold contempt, seldom or never found among men born in South Africa, who have grown up among the native races. This may appear strange, but an analogous phenomenon has often been noted in America, where it has been observed that the slave-owners in the Southern States, in spite of their dominance over the slaves and occasional acts of brutality and oppression, really regarded them more as fellow humans and were emotionally nearer to them, than were, in many cases, the Northerners who came to live in the South, and who, on first meeting them, were often filled with shrinking and disgust.

The African-born farmer, Dutch or English, who has grown up among the natives, has been nursed by them in childhood, often speaks their language, and knows something of their manners and ideas, may hate them; but always, in his heart of hearts, he recognizes them as men; and his very hatred and bitterness is a kind of tribute to the common humanity that he feels binds them. Man only hates man.

To the newcomer from Europe, on the other hand, who becomes a farmer, or is otherwise thrown into contact with the aboriginal native, he is often an object, not merely of hatred, but of contempt and sport; there is no mere assumption of cynicism when he speaks of the native merely as an object of the chase; he has often no other view with regard to him. We have heard a brilliant young English officer, who had only been a few years in the country, but had been employed in what is called a "Native War," dwell with manifest and almost boyish delight on the pleasures of Bantu-hunting. He described the curious delight you feel in finding the mark of a naked foot and tracing it down. "It is," he said, "like the pleasure of the hunting field—with something added!" We have also known a skilful English doctor, a man of singular tenderness and generosity towards persons of his own nationality, who had been only eight years in the country, but had served in two native campaigns, remark that the only two purposes for which natives were of any use were to serve as targets for rifle-shooting and as good subjects for vivisection; while his inhumanity towards wounded and other natives was a matter of common remark among the South African burghers. And a fine young English trooper who had been two years in the country, after hearing our view on the native question, remarked thoughtfully: "Well, you know, all this is quite new to me; I have never regarded the nigger as anything but something to shoot." To the South African-born man this light-hearted, callous, sporting attitude is quite foreign. He may take the life of a native, but he takes it sternly, bitterly; it is something much more than hunting down the indigenous black game of the country; he knows in his heart of hearts that thething he hunts is aman, and a strong man; and in his hatred of him there is even an element of fear as well as revenge. This attitude forms a far more promising field for the growth of possible socialized feeling, than any attitude of callous contempt can even do. Hate is nearer to love than scorn can ever be; and, paradoxical as it may seem, we hold strongly that if, in South Africa to-day, sincere personal affections and sympathies are to be found crossing the line of race, they will be found most often between the African-born farming population, Dutch and English, and their domestic servants. The warmest expressions of affection towards individual natives which we have ever heard have been expressed by English and Dutch farmers towards their old servants.

Secondly:—There is the attitude of the townsman, Dutch, South-African-English, or Newcomer, who most often never comes into any contact with the aboriginal natives at all, and whose employees or domestics are all more or less civilized natives or half-castes. Here, as a rule, the element of intense racial bitterness is wholly lacking. The townsman treats his civilized servant very much, in the main, as men of all European nationalities treat their domestics and dependants. As far as wages, food, and the amount of labour expected is concerned, the civilized domestic servant and town labourer is rather better off than in most European countries. On the other hand, there is always a hard-and-fast line, dividing the white man from the dark, which is never overstepped. The only real drawback to the condition of the civilized native in towns lies in the fact that, the moment he attempts to transcend the limits of domestic servitude, he is met by a stern barrier, socially obstructing him;a barrier raised quite as much by the instinct of the descendant of the Anglo-Saxon as the Dutch-Huguenot. At present this matters little, as the attempt is seldom made; but in fifty years' time this harmonizing of black and white men in the higher walks of life will probably form a great part of the South African problem. It is not, however, a problem which the question of the descent of the white South African from Dutch or English ancestors will in any way affect. Every one who has any knowledge of SouthAfrican life will allow that at the present day it makes not the slightest difference in the condition of the civilized servant in towns whether the doctor, lawyer, or merchant who employs him be of Dutch or English descent. We have, indeed, sometimes been inclined to fancy that there was a tendency, as between women, for a slightly more friendly and harmonious condition to be common between the mistress of Dutch descent in towns and her domestic, than between the English woman and hers. The Dutch descended woman is often more easy going and has less of that curious reserve which marks the attitude of the Anglo-Saxon towards his dependants, and even his equals, but there is probably no material difference along racial lines in the treatment of civilized domestics and employees in town and their employers.

Thirdly:—There is what, for want of a better name, we may define as the financial and speculative attitude towards the native. This is the attitude of the great labour employers. These in South Africa are practically never individuals but great syndicates, companies, and chartered bodies, the individual members of which are seldom or never brought into any personal contact with the natives whose lives they control. In the majority of cases they are non-resident in South Africa, wholly or for the larger part of their lives. For them the native is not a person hated or beloved, but a commercial asset. To these persons the native question sums itself in two words "cheap labour." Their view of the native question is as clear-cut and simple as the outline of a gallows. There is no intricacy or sentiment about it. The native is the machine through the action of which companies and speculators have to extract the wealth of the South African continent; and the more the machinery costs to keep at work, the smaller the percentage of South African wealth which reaches the hands of the speculator.

For them the native problem is in a nutshell: "In how far, and by what means, can the rate of native wages be diminished, so raising profits?"

It must be remembered that the natives form almost the entire body of the true wage-earning labouring class of South Africa. The European, working in mines orelsewhere, becomes almost at once in the majority of cases simply the overseer or guider of the native labourer; and in mining and other fields of labour natives are rapidly fitting themselves for even the more skilled forms of manual labour.

The question of the relation between the great foreign syndicates and companies and the native races of this country is thus the great labour-question of Europe and America, but complicated enormously by two facts.

Firstly, by the fact that the mass of speculators, company-controllers, and their shareholders are Jews, Englishmen, Americans, or Continentals, wholly non-resident in South Africa, or residing here merely while they make sufficient wealth to ensure their retirement to a life of ease and luxury in Europe, or, in the case of ambitious Englishmen, till they are enabled, by means of their wealth, to enter the English Parliament or obtain titles. From this fact it follows that a decrease in the wages of our native labouring-class and an increase in dividends, while it makes larger the number of yachts on the Mediterranean, the palaces of Jewish and other parvenus in London and on the Continent, and while it increases the gains of the tables at Monte Carlo and of the racing grounds of England, and replenishes the purse of debilitated and degenerate English aristocrats, yet not only addsnothingto the material wealth of South Africa, but positively diminishes those very small returns which, under existing legislation, is all she receives from her mines. European skilled miners and overseers, as a rule, take their extensive earnings back to Europe with them; and, with the exception of what the Government railways may earn, it is mainly through the wages of the native labourer, expended in buying the necessaries of life, and to no inconsiderable extent in supporting his schools and churches, that the legitimate commerce of the country and its general population are benefited by its mineral wealth. Thus, on this all-important point, our native problem, which is also our labour problem, differs materially and most essentially from the labour problem of Europe, in that it is not merely a question of dividing the wealth of the country between one class or another (as is generally thecase in Europe and America), but of retaining the products of the land in the land of all.

It has been said by a leading speculator and millionaire in South Africa that, if the States of South Africa could be broken down and crushed into one, a united and uniform labour system might then be adopted, and the wages of natives brought down; and he has held up as an ideal for imitation the condition in India where natives are supposed to labour for twopence a day, living therefore so closely upon the border of starvation that the slightest rise in the price of foodstuffs renders them liable to widespread famine and destruction, and therefore also eager to accept the smallest amount of remuneration which will maintain life.

To this end the Speculator and Capitalist, among others, have sought to enter political life in South Africa, and in order that, by the passing of laws dispossessing the native by indirect means of his hold on the land, and breaking up his tribal tenure, and by the making of direct wars upon him, the native, at last being absolutely landless, may be unable to resist any attempt to lower wages, and may then sink into the purely proletariat condition of a working class always on the border of starvation, and therefore always glad to sell his toil for the lowest sum that will maintain life.

Were this plan entirely successful, South Africa as a whole would lose all the native now gains, the increased profit going to enlarge the wealth of the foreign Speculator and often aristocratic shareholder; and South Africa would then be saddled with a proletariat class of the very lowest type. For, the only hope of the African native's rising, and becoming a valuable and intelligent labouring class, lies in his receiving such remuneration for his labour as shall enable him to grasp at least some of the subordinate advantages of civilization, along with those of its evils which are necessarily forced on him. If the South African native is not in the position to obtain primary education and in some measure to grasp such advantages and privileges as there are in our modern civilization, then, as his old tribal ideals and institutions are destroyed, he must inevitably sink into a condition lower and more terriblethan that of the lowest proletariat in Europe; and, as he forms (and must do for generations, in a land where white men refuse to perform the bulk of physical labours) the major part of the population, South Africa will permanently be weighted and degraded by the degradation and degeneracy of the great bulk of the inhabitants.

To the Company Director, Capitalist, or Speculator who never visits South Africa, or remains here only while financial reasons make it desirable, it can matter nothing what becomes in the present or in future generations, morally or intellectually, of the native. But to those of us, to whom South Africa is a home, to whom not only the present but the future of this land is our most intense human concern, and who with our descendants have got to sail with the African native permanently in the same ship across the sea of time, it matters everything.

The second, and even more important point, which differentiates our labour problem from that common in Europe, is that our labouring class is divided sharply from the employing class by the line of colour. Even in European countries, where employers and employed are of one race and physically identical, divided merely as being for the moment the haves and have-nots, the adjustment of the labour problem presents sufficient difficulty. But in South Africa, where racial and physical differences divide employer from employed, the difficulties are immeasurably and almost inconceivably increased. Any attempt on the part of our labouring class to better its position or resist oppressive exactions, being undertaken mainly by men of one colour against men of another, will always immediately awaken, over and above financial opposition, racial prejudice; so that even those white men, whose economic interests are identical with those of the black labourer, may be driven by race antagonism to act with the exactors.

The complete failure to grasp this aspect of our South African problem leads to much of the inability in other lands to comprehend the South African situation as a whole.

Thus, it is often said, "Why should the speculator, monopolist, and millionaire loom so large in South African life? Why should he be so much more of abugbear and threaten all free political and social institutions in South Africa in so much greater a degree than in other lands where he also exists?"

Our answer is, that, wherever in Europe or America the great millionaire and monopolist, Jewish or Christian, is found, with the pluto-aristocratic speculators and shareholders who draw their wealth through him, there also is found a great equipoise to their powers of exaction or aggression in the great more or less organized masses of the working classes. The limits are very sharply set, beyond which the greatest Jew or Christian speculators backed by the most powerful princes or plutocracy cannot go. We have no such counterpoise in South Africa. Owing to the difference of colour and race, our great labouring class dare not organize itself and use its strength; and we dare not organize and use it, for fear of awakening the baneful flames of racial antagonism. South Africa is the heaven of the Speculator, the Capitalist and Monopolist. Here, alone, the opposing forces which meet him in every European and civilized country do not exist.

The labour of resisting his endeavours to gain possession of the whole mineral and landed wealth of the country and its public works, and with them the exclusive control of the political machinery, lies with the necessarily small middle class section of the community, mainly farmers and small landed proprietors with a handful of skilled workmen. These have not only to act for themselves, but for the entire labouring class, which, on account of its difference in race and colour from the rest of the community, cannot act for itself.

Any one who has given thought to the study of modern social phenomena will understand at once how enormously our labour and racial problem, being interlaced in this way, complicates our whole social condition, and how almost helpless it throws South Africa into the hands of the Jew or Christian foreign speculator. Let us give a concrete example. In a town called Kimberley there is the richest diamond mine in the earth, once the property of South Africans and belonging to multitudes of them, but now fallen into the hands of a powerful syndicate of Jews, Englishmen, and others, who, withthe exception of a couple of South Africans, all reside wholly or mainly out of South Africa, and whose power is so enormous that they are able, by a mere expression of their will, to return eight or ten men to the Cape Parliament, irrespective of the wishes of the community. The action of this powerful syndicate has long formed a source of disease and corruption in South African public and social life, and the question is often asked, why the working men and other inhabitants of Kimberley and such places as the company dominates submit to this dictation? It is not so, as is sometimes supposed, because the skilled workmen and overseers in the great company are inferior to their compatriots in Europe in their love of freedom or independence; for they are, on the whole, picked men, and many of them are strongly democratic and freedom-loving; it is certainly not because the inhabitants of Kimberley are more indifferent to their manhood, or more willing to deliver up their right to exercise the franchise into the hands of a small knot of Jews and Speculators than other men; but because the forces opposed to them are so overpowering compared to their own that they feel crushed.

Were the thousands of working men labouring in the mines white and not black, and could they freely combine with the skilled European overseers and the townsmen, the monopoly of the power would be snapped in twenty-four hours. They would refuse to go into compounds, they would demand higher wages and the right to spend them where they pleased, and to vote for their own representatives, and the power for evil of the great company would be broken.

But the bulk of the workmen being black, and any attempt to organize or combine them being at once met with the cry "Black-men combining," the handful of skilled English workmen and townsmen are powerless.

Our situation is very grave, and differs radically for the worse from that of all other lands where kindred problems have to be faced. We have nothing to fall back upon but the fierce and indomitable love of freedom in a certain section of our farming population.

If it should be possible for the international Speculatorand Capitalist to carry out his dream, to break down the autonomy of the different African States, each one of which is a kind of redoubt behind which our African freedom is ensconsed, and, crushing us into one structureless whole, to introduce "a uniform native policy," dispossessing the natives wholly everywhere of their lands by means of labour, taxes and other devices, and bringing them down to the lowest wages on which life can be sustained; then, when we shall have inured the Bantu to the evils of our civilization, its drinking bars and its brothels, but have left him no means of attaining to the higher forms of knowledge or the fields of skilled labour, then we shall be left with a great, blind, stupefied Sampson in our midst who will assuredly some day stretch out his mighty much-wronged arms, and bring down upon our descendants the social structure which we are to-day with so much labour attempting to rear. Our gold and diamond mines may by that time be exhausted, and Jew and Speculator, and foreign Shareholder will long have carried off their gains and be here no more to feel the shock. Upon us whose portion of earth to inhabit this land is, and upon our descendants, will fall the blow.

This question of the relation between the foreign Speculator, Capitalist, and Shareholding class, and the black labouring class, is the very core within the core, and the kernel within the kernel, of the South African problem.

The old race-feud attitude of the farming population, whether Dutch or English, toward the native, embittered by the memory and tradition of old wars and early struggles, will tend to die out, and even now is softened by personal relations; the attitude of the employer towards his civilized native domestic has in it little that is detrimental to either, and suggests in itself no great coming evil. But the financial attitude is one which will increase in its importance and in the virulence of its evil effects with every year that passes. The small cloud upon the horizon, to-day no bigger than a man's hand, will in forty years have overspread the whole of our African sky, unless some great and at present unforeseen revolution should occur. It is upon the skill with which white man and black man combine to avert the threatened evil,that the fate of Africa in the middle of next century will depend. It may be easy to break down and demoralize our great, and at present noble, Bantu races; but it may be very hard ever to build them up again.

For the moment the men holding the purely financial attitude towards the native happen mainly to be English or Jewish foreigners; but there is really nothing racial in this attitude. Were the Hollander or the Italian head of a great gold-mining, railway-building, or diamond syndicate, there is not the very slightest reason to suppose that he would regard the native South African less purely as a "commercial asset" than his brother, the English financier, does.

The more profoundly one studies the question of the relations of the white man to the black in South Africa, the more clear it becomes that the determining factor in that relation is something far other and deeper than the mere fact that the white man belongs to this or that European variety.

Fourthly, and finally:—There is the attitude of a body of persons, small in number, of no invariable occupation, sex, nationality or creed, but gathered from every part of the white community. So small in number is this body of persons holding this attitude, that again and again have men and women belonging to it felt inclined to draw aside, and in bitterness of spirit to cry with the ancient Hebrew at the door of his cave: "I, only I, am left." Yet this body has never been wholly extinct in South Africa, and, we believe, never will be. As we hope later to deal exhaustively with the aims and attitude of this section, it is not now necessary to do more than passingly to glance at them.

This attitude cannot be better summed up than by saying that it is the extreme antithesis to the financial attitude. The man compelled by his mental organization to take this view is of necessity obliged to regard the native not merely as a means to an end, but as an end in himself. Consistently with his whole view of life, he cannot regard the native merely as a "commercial asset"; he is compelled to apply to him the categorical imperative: "Deal with thy fellow man as, wert thou in his place,thou wouldst have him deal with thee." He does not write up as the motto which is to govern all the relations of black men with white: "Cheap labour," but rather: "Noblesse oblige." He is compelled always to see before him the moral fact that, if the native be his equal in mental power and moral vigour, his place is beside him; but, if the African native benothis equal in mental power and moral vigour, then there rests upon him the mighty obligation of all strength towards weakness, of all wisdom towards ignorance, of the God towards the man: "Rank confers obligation."

To the man holding this view the African native always presents himself as the little dark brother of the great family-human, who stands looking wistfully through the open door into the great hall of the nineteenth-century civilization in which we fair-skinned Aryans disport ourselves; and we are compelled to go to the door and say: "Come in, little brother, come in; there are many better things out there in the open where you have been than we have here; yet, if you must enter, give us your hand, and we will try to show you what in this great carnival of ours is best, and what most to fear. Walk in, little brother, this hall was built for the sons of the children of man."

It is manifest that men holding such a view must ever be in deadly conflict with men holding the financial view. The future of South Africa depends largely on the result of this struggle. If the financial attitude predominate absolutely, and the native be dispossessed of his land by wars and the skilfully devised legislation, which, breaking up his tribal tenure everywhere, throws him and his lands entirely into the hands of the financial speculator, and if low wages at the same time deprive him of the means of education, he must become a helot, having no stake in the general welfare of the land of his birth—always its menace, and at length its downfall.

If the other attitude prevail to any large extent, and the men holding it are strong enough to set their mark on legislation and institutions, the native may morally and intellectually survive the shock (as he certainly will physically) of sudden transplantation from his moral andsocial atmosphere into ours. He may grasp what is great in our civilization along with its evils and may yet become the most valuable element and the ablest defender of a social organization in which he has much at stake. But even were this not so, the stern demands of human obligation towards human would yet compel an uncompromising justice towards him.

It will be obvious, to any person skilled in the study of human nature, that persons, compelled by their mental organization to assume this attitude towards the African native races, are not of necessity of any particular European race, sex, or social condition. In the past some of the men who have the most courageously and persistently upheld this attitude have been Englishmen. More notable than all was Sir George Grey, most gifted and most farseeing of all the Colonial Governors whom England has ever sent out, a man of whose type it would appear a country can only produce once in a century. There has also been Sir William Porter, a great Irishman, whose name still recalls noble ideals and generous performance to South African hearts, and who during his stay exemplified the fact that the greatest gift which the old European lands can send the new is one of their great sons, a man with a heart large enough to be able to wrap itself about the people and institutions and things in a new world, and, through loving, to comprehend them. Another man who in the past has been noted for this attitude was Saul Solomon, a man of brilliant gifts, said to be of Jewish extraction, who through a long life amid endless difficulties fought an heroic battle and never fell from the side of justice and generosity towards the African native, and who has left a permanent mark on the legislation of South Africa.

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