In preceding chapters I have endeavoured to present a picture of South Africa as it stands to-day, and to sketch the leading events that have made its political conditions what they are. Now, in bringing the book to a close, I desire to add a few reflections on the forces which have been at work, and to attempt the more hazardous task of conjecturing how those forces are likely to operate in the future.

The progress of the country, and the peculiar form which its problems have taken, are the resultant of three causes. One of these is the character which nature has impressed upon it. Of this I have already spoken (Chapter VI), pointing out how the high interior plateau, with its dry and healthy climate, determined the main line of European advance and secured the predominance, not of the race which first discovered the country, but of the race which approached it, far later in time, from its best side. It is also in this physical character that one must seek the explanation of the remarkably slow progress of the country in wealth and population. South Africa began to be occupied by white men earlier than any part of the American continent. The first Dutch settlement was but little posterior to those English settlements in North America which have grown into a nation of seventy-seven millions of people, and nearly a century and a half prior to the first English settlements in Australia. It is the unhealthiness of the east coast and the dryness of the rest of the country that are mainly accountable for this tardy growth—a growth which might have been still more tardy but for the political causes that drove the Boers into the far interior. And again, it is the physical configuration of the country that has made it, and is likely to keep it, one country. This is a point of cardinal importance. Though divided into two British Colonies, with several other pieces of British territory, and two Boer Republics, the habitable parts of South Africa form one community, all the parts of which must stand or fall together. The great plateau is crossed by no lines of physical demarcation all the way from the Zambesi to the Hex River (some fifty miles north-east of Cape Town), and the coast regions are closely bound by economic ties to the plateau, which through them touches the outer world. Popular speech which talks of South Africa as one whole is scientifically right.

The two other causes that have ruled the fortunes and guided the development of the country have been the qualities and relations of the races that inhabit it, and the character of the Government which has sought from afar to control the relations of those races. These deserve to be more fully considered.

English statesmen have for more than fifty years been accustomed to say that of all the Colonies of Great Britain none has given to the mother country so much disquiet and anxiety as South Africa has done. This is another way of expressing the fact which strikes the traveller—that no other British Colony has compressed so much exciting history into the last sixty or seventy years. The reason is undoubtedly to be found in the circumstance that South Africa has had two sets of race questions to deal with: questions between the whites and the aborigines, questions between the Dutch and the English. It is this latter set of questions that have been the main thread of South African annals. Why have they proved so troublesome? Why are they so troublesome to-day, when we ought to be able to look at them with a vision enlarged and a temper mellowed by wide experience? Partly from an element inherent in all race questions. They are not questions that can be settled on pure business lines, by an adjustment of the material interests of the parties concerned. They involve sentiment, and thus, like questions of religion, touch the deeper springs of emotion. And they spring from, or are involved with, incompatibilities of character which prevent the men of either stock from fully understanding, and therefore fully trusting, the men of the other. Suspicion, if not positive aversion, makes it difficult for two races to work together, even where the political arrangements that govern their relations are just and reasonable. But something may also be ascribed to certain malign accidents which blasted the prospect, once fair, of a friendly fusion between the Dutch and the English peoples that seemed eminently fit to be fused. The British annexation of Cape Colony occurred at an unfortunate time. Had it happened thirty years earlier no difficulties would have arisen over the natives and slavery, because at that time the new philanthropy had not begun to influence English opinion or the British Government. Had it happened in later days, when steam had given quicker and more frequent ocean communication, Britain and the Colony would each have better known what the other thought and wished, and the errors that alienated the Boers might never have been committed. The period which followed the annexation was precisely the period in which the differences between English feeling and colonial feeling were most marked and most likely to lead to misunderstanding and conflict.

For there has been in the antagonism of the Boers and the English far more than the jealousy of two races. There has been a collision of two types of civilisation, one belonging to the nineteenth century, the other to the seventeenth. His isolation, not only in a distant corner of the southern hemisphere, but in the great, wide, bare veldt over which his flocks and herds roam, has kept the Boer fast bound in the ideas and habits of a past age, and he shrinks from the contact of the keen restless modern man, with new arts of gain and new forms of pleasure, just as a Puritan farmer of Cromwell's day might shrink were he brought to life and forced to plunge into the current of modern London. Had the Boers been of English stock, but subjected to the same conditions as those which kept the seventeenth century alive in the country behind the Cape, they too would have resisted the new ways of the new rulers; but their identity of race and speech with those rulers would have abridged the struggle. It is the fact that the old Cape settlers had a language of their own, and a sense of blood-kinship to hold them together that has enabled the Dutch element to remain cohesive, and given them an Afrikander patriotism of their own—a patriotism which is not Dutch, for they care nothing for the traditions of Holland, but purely Africander.

Their local position as half-nomadic inhabitants of a wide interior gave a peculiar character to that struggle between the mother country and her colonists which has arisen more than once in British history. They were so few and so poor, as compared with the people of the thirteen Colonies of the North American coast in 1776, that it was useless for them to rebel and fight for independence, as those Colonies had done. On the other hand, they were not, like the French of lower Canada, rooted in the soil as agriculturists. Hence a middle course between rebellion and submission offered itself. That course was secession. They renounced not only their political allegiance, but even the very lands where they dwelt, seeking the protection of the desert as other emigrants before them had sought that of the ocean. Thus again, and more completely, isolated since 1836, the emigrant Boers, and especially those of the Transvaal, have been able to retain their old ways for sixty years longer, and have grown more anti-English than ever. On the other hand, the English of the Colony, whose English sentiment was quickened by these events, have remained more thoroughly English than those of most British Colonies, and have never conceived the idea of severing their own connection with the mother country.

That the emigrant Boers became republicans was due rather to circumstance than to conscious purpose. A monarch they could not have, because there was no one designated for the place, as well as because they had the instinct of general disobedience. But for a long time they tried to rub along with no more government or leadership than the needs of war required. Seldom has any people been so little influenced by abstract political ideas, yet seldom has a people enjoyed so perfect an opportunity of trying political experiments and testing the theories of political philosophers. But the Boers were, and are still, a strictly practical people. Their houses give them cover from sun and rain, but nothing more; there is little comfort and no elegance. So their institutions were the fewest and simplest under which men have ever governed themselves. It is therefore no theoretical attachment to democracy that has helped the Boers to resist the English; it is merely the wish to be left alone, and a stubbornness of will that made independence seem more desirable the more it was threatened.

Even this admirable stubbornness would hardly have carried them through but for the dispersion over vast spaces. That dispersion, while it retarded their political growth and social progress, made them hard to reach or to conquer. The British Government despaired of over-taking and surrounding them, for they were scattered like antelopes over the lonely veldt, and there was a still vaster and equally lonely veldt behind them into which they could retire. To pursue them seemed a wild-goose chase, and a costly one, in which there was much to spend and little to gain. Thus their weakness has proved their strength, and the more settled they become in the future, the less can they hope to escape the influences they have so long resisted.

But for the maintenance of the sentiment of Boer nationality by the two Boer Republics, the antagonism of Dutch and English in Cape Colony would have ere now died out, for there has been little or nothing in colonial politics to sustain it. The interests of the farmers of both stocks are identical, their rights are in all respects the same, and the British Government has been perfectly impartial. The Boers in the Colony are good citizens and loyal subjects. It is only the character of the country and the conditions of their pastoral life that have retarded their social fusion with the English, as it is only the passions aroused by the strife of Boers and Englishmen in the Transvaal that evoked in 1881, and again evoked in 1896, a political opposition between the races. Fortunately, the sentiments of the Dutch have possessed a safe outlet in the colonial Parliament. The wisdom of the policy which gave responsible government has been signally vindicated; for, as constitutional means have existed for influencing the British Government, feelings which might otherwise have found vent in a revolt or a second secession have been diverted into a safe channel.

The other set of race troubles, those between white settlers and the aborigines of the land have been graver in South Africa than any which European governments have had to face in any other new country. The Red Men of North America, splendidly as they fought, never seriously checked the advance of the whites. The revolts of the aborigines in Peru and Central America were easily suppressed. The once warlike Maoris of New Zealand have, under the better methods of the last twenty-five years, become quiet and tolerably contented. Even the French in Algeria had not so long a strife to maintain with the Moorish and Kabyle tribes as the Dutch and English had with the natives at the Cape. The south-coast Kafirs far outnumbered the whites, were full of courage, had a rough and thickly wooded country to defend, and were so ignorant as never to know when they were beaten. A more intelligent race might have sooner abandoned the contest. The melancholy chapter of native wars seems to be now all but closed, except perhaps in the far north. These wars, however, did much to retard the progress of South Africa and to give it a bad name. They deterred many an English farmer from emigrating thither in the years between 1810 and 1870. They annoyed and puzzled the home government, and made it think the Colony a worthless possession, whence little profit or credit was to be drawn in return for the unending military expenditure. And they gave the colonists ground for complaints, sometimes just, sometimes unjust, against the home government, which was constantly accused of parsimony, of shortsightedness, of vacillation, of sentimental weakness, in sending out too few troops, in refusing to annex fresh territory, in patching up a hollow peace, in granting too easy terms to the natives.

Whoever reviews the whole South African policy of the British Government during the ninety-three years that have elapsed since 1806 cannot but admit that many errors were committed. Many precious opportunities for establishing British authority on a secure basis were lost. Many things were done imperfectly, and therefore had to be done over and over again, which it would have been cheaper as well as wiser to have finished off at once. Many steps, prudent in themselves, and dictated by excellent motives, were taken at a moment and in a way which made them misunderstood and resisted. Reflecting on these mistakes, one sometimes wonders that the country was not lost altogether to Britain, and thinks of the saying of the old Swiss statesman: Hominum negligentia, Dei providentia, regitur Helvetia. It may nevertheless be truly said for the British Government that it almost always sought to act justly, and that such advances as it made were not dictated by an aggressive spirit, but (with few exceptions) compelled by the necessities of the case. And it must not be forgotten that, as all home governments err in their control of Colonies—Spain, Portugal, and France have certainly erred in their day far more fatally than England—so many of the errors which now most startle us in the annals of South Africa were all but inevitable, because the wisest man could not have foreseen the course which things have in fact taken. Who ever tries to look at the events of sixty, thirty, or even twenty years ago with the eyes of those times, and remembers that Colonial ministers in England had to consider not only what they thought best, but what they could get the uninstructed public opinion of their own country to accept, will be more indulgent than the colonists are in their judgment of past mistakes. For instance, it is apt to be forgotten that the Cape was not occupied with a view to the establishment of a European Colony, in our present sense of the word. The Dutch took it that they might plant a cabbage-garden; the English took it that they might have a naval station and half-way house to India. Not till our own time did people begin to think of it as capable of supporting a great civilised community and furnishing a new market for British goods; not till 1869 was it known as a region whence great wealth might be drawn. Hence Britain, which during the first half of this century was busy in conquering India, in colonising Australasia, and in setting things to rights in Canada, never cared to bend her energies to the development of South Africa, then a less promising field for those energies, spent no more money on it than she could help, and sought to avoid the acquisition of new territory, because that meant new troubles and new outlays.

The views of colonial policy which prevailed in England down till about 1870 were very different from those which most of us now hold. The statesmen of the last generation accepted that consilium coercendi intra terminos imperii which, according to Tacitus, Augustus held sound for an empire less scattered than is that of Britain; they thought that Britain had already more territory than she could hope to develop and (in the long run) to govern; and they therefore sought to limit rather than increase her responsibilities. And they believed, reasoning somewhat too hastily from the revolt of the North American Colonies, that as soon as the new English communities to which self-government had been or was in due course to be granted, reached a certain level of wealth and population they would demand and receive their independence. That the fruit would fall off the old tree as soon as it was ripe was the favourite metaphor employed to convey what nearly all publicists took to be an obvious truth. No one stated it so trenchantly as Disraeli when he wrote: "These wretched Colonies will all be independent too in a few years, and are a millstone round our necks;" but the dogma was generally accepted by politicians belonging to both the great parties in the state. Those, moreover, were days in which economy and retrenchment were popular cries in England, and when it was deemed the duty of a statesman to reduce as far as possible the burdens of the people. Expenditure on colonial wars and on the administration of half-settled districts was odious to the prudent and thrifty contemporaries or disciples of Sir Robert Peel and Richard Cobden. Accordingly, the chief aim of British statesmen from 1830 till 1870 was to arrest the tide of British advance, to acquire as little territory as possible, to leave restless natives and emigrant Boers entirely to themselves. Desperate efforts were made to stop the Kafir wars. We can now see that the tendency—one may almost call it a law of nature—which everywhere over the world has tempted or forced a strong civilised power to go on conquering the savage or half-civilised peoples on its borders, the process that has carried the English all over India and brought the Russians from the Volga to the Pamirs in one direction and to the mouth of the Amur in another, was certain to compel the British Government to subdue and annex one Kafir tribe after another until either a desert or the territory of some other civilised State was reached. But fifty years ago this was not clearly perceived; so the process, which might have inflicted less suffering if it had been steadily and swiftly carried through, went on slowly and to the constant annoyance of statesmen at home.

It was the same as regards the great plateau and the Boer emigrants who dwelt there. Not from any sympathy with their love of independence, but because she did not want the trouble of pursuing and governing them and the wide lands they were spread over, England resolved to abandon the interior to them. In 1852 and 1854 she made a supreme effort to check her own onward career, first by recognizing the independence of the Transvaal emigrants whose allegiance she had theretofore claimed, then by actually renouncing her rights to the Orange River Sovereignty, and to those within it who desired to continue her subjects. What more could a thrifty and cautious and conscientious country do? Nevertheless, these good resolutions had to be reconsidered, these self-denying principles foregone. Circumstances were too strong for the Colonial Office. In 1869 it accepted the protectorate of Basutoland. In 1871 it yielded to the temptation of the diamond-fields, and took Griqualand West. Soon after it made a treaty with Khama, which gave the British a foothold in Bechuanaland. In 1877 it annexed the Transvaal. By that time the old ideas were beginning to pass away, and to be replaced by new views of the mission and destiny of Britain. The wish of the British Government to stand still had been combated all along by powerful inducements to move on. The colonists always pressed for an advance of the frontier. The Governor usually pressed for it. The home government was itself haunted by a fear that if it abandoned positions of vantage its successors might afterwards have reason to rue the abandonment. These were the considerations that drove British statesmen to the most momentous forward steps that were taken. Two things, and two only, were really vital to British interests—the control of the coasts, and the control of an open road to the north. Accordingly, the two decisive steps were the occupation of Natal in 1842-3, which shut off the Boers from the sea, and the taking of Griqualand West in 1871 (followed by the taking of southern Bechuanaland in 1884), which secured between the Transvaal on the one side and the Kalahari Desert on the other a free access to the great northern plateau.

The tide of English opinion began to turn about 1870, and since then it has run with increasing force in the direction of what is called imperialism, and has indeed in some cases brought about annexations that are likely to prove unprofitable, because the territory acquired is too hot and unhealthy to be fit for British settlement. The strides of advance made in 1884-5 and 1890 have been as bold and large as those of earlier days were timid and halting; and the last expiring struggles of the old policy were seen in 1884, when Lord Derby, who belonged to the departing school, yielded a new convention to the importunity of the Transvaal Boers and allowed Germany to establish herself in Damaraland. But it is due to Britain, which has been accused, and so far as regards South Africa unjustly accused (down to 1896), of aggressive aims, to recall the fact that she strove for many years to restrict her dominion, and did not cease from her efforts until long experience had shown that it was hard to maintain the old policy, and until the advent on the scene of other European powers, whom it was thought prudent to keep at a distance from her own settled territories, impelled her to join in that general scramble for Africa which has been so strange a feature of the last two decades.

There have been moments, even since the occupation of two points so important as Basutoland (in 1869) and Griqualand West (in 1871) when it has seemed possible that South Africa might become Dutch rather than English, such is the tenacity of that race, and so deep are the roots which its language has struck. With the discovery of the Witwatersrand gold-fields, drawing a new body of English immigrants into the country, that possibility seems to have passed away. The process of territorial distribution is in South Africa now complete. Every Colony and State has become limited by boundaries defined in treaties. Every native tribe has now some legal white superior, and no native tribe remains any longer formidable. The old race questions have passed, or are passing, into new phases. But they will be at least as difficult in their new forms as in their old ones. I will devote the few remaining pages of this book to a short consideration of them and of the other problems affecting the future of South Africa with which they are involved.

Reasons have been given in a preceding chapter for the conclusion that both the white and the black races are likely to hold their ground over all the country, and that the black race will continue to be the more numerous. Assuming the conditions of agriculture to remain what they are at present, and assuming that the causes which now discourage the establishment of large manufacturing industries do not pass away, there will probably be for the next seventy years a large white population on the gold-field and at the chief seaports, and only a small white population over the rest of the country. Even should irrigation be largely introduced, it would be carried on chiefly by black labourers. Even should low wages or the discovery of larger and better deposits of iron and coal stimulate the development of great manufacturing industries, still it is a black rather than a white population that would be therewith increased. Various causes may be imagined which would raise or reduce the birth-rate and the infant death-rate among the natives, so that one cannot feel sure that the existing proportion between them and the whites will be maintained. But if we regard the question from the point of view of labour, and take the natives to represent that part of the community which in Europe does the harder and less skilled kinds of work, both in country and in town, it may be concluded that they will continue to form the majority even where they live among the white people, without taking account of those areas where they, and they alone, are settled on the land. It is, however, impossible to conjecture how large the majority will be.

The Kafirs, as has been already suggested, will gradually lose their tribal organisation and come to live like Europeans, under European law. They will become more generally educated, and will learn skilled handicrafts; many—perhaps, in the long run, all—will speak English. They will eventually cease to be heathens, even if they do not all become Christians. This process of Europeanisation will spread from south to north, and may probably not be complete in the north—at any rate, in the German and Portuguese parts of the north—till the end of the next century. But long before that time the natives will in many places have begun to compete (as indeed a few already do) with the whites in some kinds of well-paid labour. They will also, being better educated and better paid, have become less submissive than they are now, and a larger number of them will enjoy the suffrage.

What will be the relations of the two races when these things have come about, say within two or three generations? Consider what the position will then be. Two races will be living on the same ground, in close and constant economic relations, both those of employment and those of competition, speaking the same language and obeying the same laws, differing, no doubt, in strength of intelligence and will, yet with many members of the weaker race superior as individual men to many members of the stronger. And these two races, separated by the repulsion of physical differences, will have no social intercourse, no mixture of blood, but will each form a nation by itself for all purposes save those of industry and perhaps of politics. There will, no doubt, be the nexus of industrial interest, for the white employer will need the labour of the blacks. But even in countries where no race differences intervene, the industrial nexus does not prevent bitter class hatreds and labour wars.

That such a state of things will arrive is rendered probable not only by the phenomena to be observed to-day in South Africa, but by the experience of the Southern States of the American Union, where almost exactly what I have described has come to pass, with the addition that the inferior race has in theory the same political rights as the superior. How will the relations of two races so living together be adjusted? The experience of the Southern States is too short to throw much light on this problem. It is, however, a painful experience in many respects, and it causes the gravest anxieties for the future. Similar anxieties must press upon the mind of any one who in South Africa looks sixty or eighty years forward; and they are not diminished by the fact that in South Africa the inferior race is far more numerous than the superior. But although the position I have outlined seems destined to arrive, it is still so distant that we can no more predict the particular form its difficulties will take than the mariner can describe the rocks and trees upon an island whose blue mountains he begins to descry on the dim horizon. Whatever those difficulties may be, they will be less formidable if the whites realize, before the coloured people have begun to feel a sense of wrong, that their own future is bound up with that of the natives, and that the true interests of both races are in the long run the same.

Although the facts we have been considering suggest the view that the white population of South Africa will be very small when compared with that of the North American or Australasian Colonies, they also suggest that the whites will in South Africa hold the position of an aristocracy, and may draw from that position some of the advantages which belong to those who are occupied only on the higher kinds of work, and have fuller opportunities for intellectual cultivation than the mass of manual labourers enjoy. A large part of the whites will lead a country life, directing the field work or the ranching of their servants. Those who dwell in the towns will be merchants or employers of labour or highly skilled artisans, corresponding generally to the upper and middle strata of society in North America or Australia, but probably with a smaller percentage of exceptionally wealthy men. There is, of course, the danger that a class may spring up composed of men unfit for the higher kinds of work, and yet too lazy or too proud to work with their hands; and some observers already discover signs of the appearance of such a class. If its growth can be averted the conditions for the progress and happiness of the white race in South Africa seem favourable; and we are approaching an age of the world when the quality of a population will be more important than its quantity.

In this forecast I have said nothing of the gold mines, because they will not be a permanent factor. The present gold fever is a fleeting episode in South African history. Gold has, no doubt, played a great part in that history. It was the hope of getting gold that made the Portuguese fix their first post at Sofala in 1505, and that carried the English pioneers to Mashonaland in 1890. It was the discovery of the banket gold beds on the Witwatersrand in 1885 that finally settled the question whether South Africa was to be an English or a Dutch country. Yet gold mining will pass away in a few decades, for the methods which the engineer now commands will enable him within that time to extract from the rocks all the wealth now stored up in them. A day will come when nothing will be left to tell the traveller of the industry which drew hundreds of thousands of men to a barren ridge, except the heaps of refuse whose ugliness few shrubs will, in that dry land, spring up to cover. But South Africa will still be a pastoral and agricultural country, and none the less happy because the gold is gone.

Neither have I said anything as to the influence of any foreign power or people upon the South Africans, because they will to all appearance remain affected in the way of literature and commerce, as well as of politics, by Britain only. There is at present no land trade from British or Boer States with the territories of Germany and the Congo State which lie to the north; and spaces so vast, inhabited only by a few natives, lie between that no such trade seems likely to arise for many years to come. Continental Europe exerts little influence on South African ideas or habits; for the Boers, from causes already explained, have no intellectual affinity with modern Holland, and the Germans who have settled in British territories have become quickly Anglified. Commerce is almost exclusively with English ports. Some little traffic between Germany and Delagoa Bay has lately sprung up, aided by the establishment of a German line of steamers to that harbour. Vessels come with emigrants from India to Natal, though the Government of that Colony is now endeavouring to check the arrival of any but indentured coolies; and there are signs that an important direct trade with the United States, especially in cereals and agricultural machinery, may hereafter be developed. In none of these cases, however, does it seem probable that commercial intercourse will have any considerable influence outside the sphere of commerce. With Australia it is different. Having ceased, since the opening of the Suez Canal, to be the halfway house to India, the Cape has become one of the halfway houses from Britain to Australasia. The outgoing New Zealand steamers, as well as the steamers of the Aberdeen Australian line, touch there; grain is imported, although the high tariff restricts this trade, and many Australian miners traverse Cape Colony on their way to the Witwatersrand. A feeling of intercolonial amity is beginning to grow up, to which a happy expression was given by the Cape Government when they offered financial assistance to the Australian Colonies during the recent commercial crisis.

With the other great country of the Southern hemisphere there seems to be extremely little intercourse. Britain did not use, when she might have legitimately used, the opportunity that was offered her early in this century of conferring upon the temperate regions of South America the benefits of ordered freedom and a progressive population. Had the territories of the Argentine Republic (which now include Patagonia), territories then almost vacant, been purchased from Spain and peopled from England, a second Australia might have arisen in the West, and there would now be a promise not only of commerce, but ultimately of a league based upon community of race, language, and institutions between three great English-speaking States in the south temperate zone. That opportunity has, however, passed away; and southern South America, having now been settled by Spaniards and Italians, with a smaller number of Germans, seems destined to such fortunes as the Hispano-American race can win for her. But it may well be hoped that as trade increases between South Africa and Australia, there may come with more frequent intercourse a deepening sense of kinship and a fuller sympathy, inspiring to both communities, and helpful to any efforts that may hereafter be made to knit more closely together the English-speaking peoples all over the world.

Although the relations of the white race to the black constitute the gravest of the difficulties which confront South Africa, this difficulty is not the nearest one. More urgent, if less serious, is the other race problem—that of adjusting the rights and claims of the Dutch and the English.

It has already been explained that, so far as Cape Colony and Natal are concerned, there is really no question pending between the two races, and nothing to prevent them from working in perfect harmony and concord. Neither does the Orange Free State provide any fuel for strife, since there both Boers and English live in peace and are equally attached to the institutions of their Republic. It is in the Transvaal that the centre of disturbance lies; it is thence that the surrounding earth has so often been shaken and the peace of all South Africa threatened. I have already described the circumstances which brought about the recent troubles in that State. To comment upon what has happened since the rising, to criticize either the attitude of the President or the various essays in diplomacy of the British Government, would be to enter that field of current politics which I have resolved to avoid. What may fitly be done here is to state the uncontroverted and dominant facts of the situation as it stands in the autumn of 1897.[90]

What are these facts? The Boer population of the Transvaal is roughly estimated at 65,000, of whom about 24,000 are voting citizens. The Uitlanders, or alien population, five-sixths of whom speak English, are estimated at 180,000, of whom nearly one-half are adult males. These Uitlanders hold sixty-three per cent. of the landed and ninety per cent. of the personal property in the country. In December, 1895, their number was increasing at the rate of one thousand per week through arrivals from Cape Town alone; and though this influx fell off for a time, while political troubles were checking the development of the mines, it rose again with the renewal of that development. Should the Deep Level mines go on prospering as is expected, the rate of immigration will be sustained, and within ten years there will probably be at least 500,000 Uitlanders in the Republic, that is to say, nearly eight times the number of the Boers.

The numerical disproportion between these excluded persons—a very large part of whom will have taken root in the country—and the old citizens will then have become overwhelming, and the claim of the former to enjoy some share in the government will be practically irresistible. The concession of this share may come before 1907—I incline to think it will—or it may come somewhat later. The precise date is a small matter, and depends upon personal causes. But that the English-speaking element will, if the mining industry continues to thrive, become politically as well as economically supreme, seems inevitable. No political agitation or demonstrations in the Transvaal, much less any intervention from outside, need come into the matter. It is only of the natural causes already at work that I speak, and these natural causes are sufficient to bring about the result. A country must, after all, take its character from the large majority of its inhabitants, especially when those who form that large majority are the wealthiest, most educated, and most enterprising part of the population.

Whether this inevitable admission of the new-comers to citizenship will happen suddenly or gradually, in quiet or in storm, no one can venture to predict. There are things which we can perceive to be destined to occur, though the time and the manner may be doubtful. But as it will be dictated by the patent necessities of the case, one may well hope that it will come about in a peaceable way and leave behind no sense of irritation in either race. Boers and Englishmen cannot in the Transvaal so easily blend and learn to work together as they have done in the Orange Free State, because they were in the latter State far less socially dissimilar. But the extension of the suffrage, while it will be followed by legislation beneficial to the mining industry, need not involve legislation harmful to the material interests of the Boer element. On the contrary, the Boers themselves will ultimately profit by any increase in the prosperity of the country. An improved administration will give a more assured status to the judiciary, as well as a better set of laws and better internal communications, advantages which will be helpful to the whole Republic.

That the change should come about peaceably is much to be desired in the interest not only of the Transvaal itself, but of all South Africa. The irritation of the Dutch element in Cape Colony, both in 1881 and again in 1896, was due to an impression that their Transvaal kinsfolk were being unfairly dealt with. Should that impression recur, its influence both on the Dutch of Cape Colony, and on the people of the Free State, whose geographical position makes their attitude specially important, would be unfortunate. The history of South Africa, like that of other countries nearer home, warns us how dangerous a factor sentiment, and especially the sense of resentment at injustice, may become in politics, and how it may continue to work mischief even when the injustice has been repented of. It is, therefore, not only considerations of magnanimity and equity, but also considerations of policy, that recommend to the English in South Africa and to the British Government an attitude of patience, prudence, and strict adherence to legal rights. They are entitled to require the same adherence from the Transvaal Government, but it is equally their interest not to depart from it themselves, and to avoid even the least appearance of aggression. The mistakes of the past are not irremediable. Tact, coolness, and patience—above all, patience—must gradually bring about that reconcilement and fusion of the two races to which, it can scarcely be doubted, South Africa will at last attain.

When, by the enfranchisement of the Uitlanders, the Transvaal has ceased to be a purely Boer State, questions will arise as to its relations with the other States of South Africa. Cape Colony and the Orange Free State, as well as Basutoland and the Bechuanaland Protectorate, already form a Customs Union, and they have long sought to induce the Transvaal and Natal to enter into it and thereby establish internal free trade throughout the country. Natal at last consented (in 1898); but the Transvaal people steadily refused, desiring to stand as much aloof as possible from Cape Colony, as well as to raise for themselves a revenue on imports larger than that which they would receive as partners in the Customs Union. A reformed Transvaal Government would probably enter the Customs Union; and this would usher in the further question of a confederation of all the States and Colonies of South Africa. That project was mooted by Sir George Grey (when Governor) more than thirty years ago, and was actively pressed by Lord Carnarvon (when Colonial Secretary) and Sir Bartle Frere between 1875 and 1880. It failed at that time, partly owing to the annoyance of the Orange Free State at the loss of the diamond-fields in 1871, partly to the reluctance of the Dutch party at the Cape, who were roused against the proposal by their Transvaal kinsfolk. The desire for it is believed to have moved some of those who joined in the Transvaal Uitlander movement of 1895-96, and no one can discuss the future of the country without adverting to it. The advantages it offers are obvious. A confederation would render in Africa services similar to those which the federal system has rendered in the United States and Canada, and which are expected by the colonial statesmen who have laboured to establish such a system in Australia. I heard not only railways and finance (including tariff and currency), but also commercial law and native questions, suggested as matters fit to be intrusted to a federal authority; while it seemed to be thought that the scope of such an authority should, on the whole, be narrower than it is under the Canadian Constitution, or under that of the United States. The love of local independence is strong in South Africa, but might be deferred to and appeased, as is being done in Australia, by appropriate constitutional provisions. So far, no fatal obstacle stands in the way; but a difficulty has been thought to arise from the fact that whereas Cape Colony, Natal, and the other British territories are part of the dominions of the British Crown, the Orange Free State is an independent Republic, and the Transvaal may be so when federation becomes a practical issue. "Can a federal tie," it is asked, "bind into one body communities some of which are Republics, while others, though practically self-governing, are legally parts of a monarchy?"

To this it may be answered that there have been instances of such confederations. In the Germanic Confederation, which lasted from 1815 till 1866, there were four free Republics, as well as many monarchies, some large, some small. The Swiss Confederation (as established after the Napoleonic wars) used to contain, in the canton of Neuchatel, a member whose sovereign was the King of Prussia. And as it is not historically essential to the conception of a federal State that all its constituent communities should have the same form of internal government, so practically it would be possible, even if not very easy, to devise a scheme which should recognize the freedom of each member to give itself the kind of constitution it desired. Such an executive head as either the President of the United States or the Governor-General of Canada is not essential to a federal system. The name "confederation" is a wide name, and the things essential to it may be secured in a great variety of ways. The foreign policy of a South African Confederation is perhaps the only point which might raise considerations affecting the international status of the members of the Confederation; and as to this, it must be remembered that neither the Orange Free State nor the Transvaal can come into direct contact with any foreign power except Portugal, because neither has any access to the sea, or touches (save on the eastern border of the Transvaal) any non-British territory.

Another remark occurs in this connection. The sentiment of national independence which the people of the Free State cherish, and which may probably survive in the Transvaal even when that State has passed from a Boer into an Anglo-Dutch Republic, is capable of being greatly modified by a better comprehension of the ample freedom which the self-governing Colonies of Britain enjoy. The non-British world is under some misconception in this matter, and does not understand that these Colonies are practically democratic Republics, though under the protection and dignified by the traditions of an ancient and famous monarchy. Nor has it been fully realized that the Colonies derive even greater substantial advantages from the connection than does the mother country. The mother country profits perhaps to some extent—though this is doubtful—in respect of trade, but chiefly in the sentiment of pride and the consciousness of a great mission in the world which the possession of these vast territories, scattered over the oceans, naturally and properly inspires. The Colonies, on the other hand, have not only some economic advantages in the better financial credit they enjoy, but have the benefit of the British diplomatic and consular service all over the world and of the status of British citizens in every foreign country. It is also a political convenience to them to be relieved by the presence of the Governor whom the mother country sends out as an executive figure-head of their Cabinet system, from the necessity of electing an executive chief, a convenience which those who know the trouble occasioned by Presidential elections in the United States can best appreciate. And, above all, the British Colonies have the navy of Britain to defend them against molestation by any foreign power. It may be said that they have also the risk of being involved in any war into which Britain may enter. This risk has, however, never become a reality; for during the last eighty years no Colony has ever been even threatened with attack by a foreign State, while during all that time the Colonies have been relieved from the cost and trouble of maintaining the naval and military armaments which are needed to ensure their safety. Thus, even leaving sentiment aside, the balance of material advantage to the Colonies is great and real; while their self-government is complete, for the mother country never interferes with any matters of colonial concern, unless in the rare cases where a matter primarily local may affect the general relations and interests of the whole empire. When these facts have been fully realized in the Free State and the Transvaal, it may well be that those States will be ready to enter a confederation of which the British monarchy would be, as in Canada and (probably before long) in Australia, the protecting suzerain, for there would be in that suzerainty no real infringement of the independence which the Free State has so happily enjoyed. It is premature to speculate now on the best form which a scheme for South African Confederation may take. All that need here be pointed out is that the obstacles now perceived are not insurmountable obstacles, but such as may be overcome by a close study of the conditions of the problem, and by reasonable concessions on the part of South African statesmen in the different States concerned.

These observations are made on the assumption that the South African Colonies will desire to maintain their political connection with the mother country. It is an assumption which may safely be made, for nowhere in the British empire is the attachment to Britain more sincere. Strong as this feeling is in Canada and in Australasia, it is assuredly no less strong in South Africa. The English there are perhaps even more English than are the people of those other Colonies. Those of Dutch origin, warm as is their Africander patriotism, have never been hostile to the British Crown. And both English and Dutch feel how essential to them, placed as they are, is the protection of a great naval power. They have as near neighbours in the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans two great European powers bent on colonial expansion, and to either of whom, even apart from colonial expansion, such a position as Simon's Bay or Table Bay offers would be invaluable. Both the mother country, therefore, whose naval and commercial interests require her to retain the Cape peninsula, and her South African children, have every motive for cleaving to one another, and, so far as our eyes can pierce the mists of the future, no reason can be discerned why they should not continue so to cleave. The peoples of both countries are altogether friendly to one another. But much will depend on the knowledge, the prudence, the patience, the quiet and unobtrusive tact, of the home government.

While Britain continues to be a great naval power, the maintenance of her connection with South Africa will ensure the external peace of that country, which, fortunately for herself, lies far away in the southern seas, with no land frontiers which she is called on to defend. She may not grow to be herself as populous and powerful a State as will be the Canadian or the Australian Confederations of the future, for her climatic conditions do not promise so large an increase of the white race; but her people may, if she can deal wisely with the problems which the existence of the coloured population raises, become a happy and prosperous nation. They are exempt from some of the dangers which threaten the industrial communities of Europe and North America. The land they dwell in is favoured by nature, and inspires a deep love in its children. The stock they spring from is strong and sound; and they have carried with them to their new home the best traditions of Teutonic freedom and self-government.