secured to everyone his share in the land. The Act was also intended to prompt the native to go from his home and seek employment and so increase the labour supply. Another object was to familiarise him with local government. The part of the Act most criticised is that which puts pressure on the natives to quit their homes and go out to work in the mines or on the farms. This is the kernel of the Act.

Every male native residing in the district, exclusive of natives in possession of lands under ordinary quit rent titles, or in freehold, who in the judgment of the resident magistrate is fit for, and capable of, labour, shall pay to the public revenue a tax of 10s. per annum ; provided that upon any native satisfying the resident magistrate that he has been in service or employment beyond the borders of the district for a period of at least three months during the twelve months preceding the date on which the said tax is payable, such native shall become exempt from payment of the tax for that year; and provided further that such native shall become exempt from any further payment of such tax, so soon as he shall have satisfied the resident magistrate that he has been in service or employment beyond the borders of the district for a total period, consecutive or otherwise, of not less than three years, &c. (Section 33).

The Glen Grey Act-a complicated measure which is marked, if I am not mistaken, by true constructive genius-applies to the districts of Glen Grey, and to other districts which are mainly occupied by aboriginal inhabitants, and which are brought within its operation by proclamation. At present the Act, in whole or in part, is in force only in a few districts of Cape Colony.

Many persons, and some of them no doubt true friends of the natives, would extend the measure all over South Africa. So far the Act has worked fairly well; the sections as to local government have, it is generally admitted, worked admirably, the natives showing capacity and good sense in the district councils. The labour clauses have been almost a nullity. Attracted by high wages, the young men have not needed the stimulus of the labour tax to go out in search of employment. The objection to such a measure is that it is irritating to the natives; that it is probably needless when wages are good and unjust when they are low; and that, so far as it helps to destroy the communal tenure, it hastens a consummation which may come only too quickly. At present the land question is not urgent. Should, however, the native population continue to increase, and the locations become, as indeed some already are, overcrowded; should the communal system, which, notwithstanding its faults, finds a place for all members of the tribe, break up; should there be no improvement in irrigation and no reduction in the size of farms, land-hunger may be one day serious.

The crucial question is that of labour. The need of the hour, it is said, is a free flow of cheap labour. At present it is dear and irregular. The Kaffir, who has been brought at great expense to the mines, breaks off work capriciously and returns home with his earn

ings to buy a wife or cows. At the annual meeting of the Rhodesia Chamber of Mines the Chairman said:

Every producing mine was hampered by an insufficiency of native labour, and, in some cases, the mines would not commence crushing until a more abundant and steady supply was assured. If their wants could be met at once, their production would be immediately increased by many thousand ounces per month. To meet the difficulty it had been proposed that they should import Asiatic labourers under stringent regulations for their deportation to their native country at the expiration of the period of service. To this course the Chamber of Commerce assented, provided the regulations for preventing the settlement in that country of undesirable immigrants were sufficiently drastic. Personally he was just as averse to the importation as anyone else, but he failed to see what other course was to be adopted in the absence of legislation to compel the thousands of natives loafing about the kraals to do an honest day's work. With the financial assistance of the British South Africa Company they were engaging 2,000 natives from the East Coast at a heavy expense, and they proposed to expend a large sum of money, advanced by the British South Africa Company, who fully appreciated the seriousness of the situation, in endeavouring to obtain a supply from Africa, north of the Zambesi.

Lord Harris at the general meeting of the Consolidated Gold Fields Company in November said:

Civilisation is based on work. The white man who lives in this country has to do his eight hours of work, but the aboriginal native of South Africa sits and smokes-while the women toil in the fields and glean the crops-and lives a quiet life; but when he comes into contact with civilisation if he is idle he becomes a mischievous member of the community. Unless he has got work he gets brandy and other things connected with civilisation. . . . Another great point on which the Government can help us is in the matter of the duration of services, a thing which has not been dwelt on much lately. When I was managing director of the De Beers, a native was not allowed to contract for services under three months. But what has been happening at the Rand? The native comes to work for a month, gets his fill of meat, we fatten him up, and when he is beginning to be useful he goes back again. He is not worth the money we are paying him, and when he has got into shape he leaves us. I think by-laws might be made by which no native should be allowed to contract for work under three months. This law was made in the diamond fields, where it proved very successful, and I would impress it on the Government. But beyond that, some inducement or some policy of the Government should be started that will get us the labour we require out of the ten millions of natives in Southern Africa.

I might cite other statements by eminent financiers to the effect that 'it was preposterous to pay a Kaffir the present wages,' and that they are unreasonable' and 'exorbitant.' Sometimes the 'reasonable

wage' is said to be 1s. 3d. to 28. a day. These statements, which might be indefinitely multiplied, are made by men of experience who have no desire to oppress the natives. Throughout most of them, so far as they are not complaints of the inconveniences incident to the employment of free labour, and unconscious repetitions of the oldest arguments for slavery, appear to run fallacious or questionable assumptions. First, the assumption that the natives are the only large class of idlers in South Africa-a statement which those

plot, at all events The picture of the Kaffir

acquainted with the habits of the bywoner will not entirely approve. There is also the assumption that the natives are necessarily idle or loafing when not working for a white employer. Often the so-called 'loafer' works in his own way on his own sufficiently to satisfy himself, if not others. basking in the sun while his wives toil hard in the fields is a picture until lately true of several parts of Europe. It is less true of South Africa than it was; the introduction of the plough has in this respect worked wonders; men who disdained to use the hoe do not think it unmanly to follow the plough. It is a little unfair to dwell on the incapacity or disinclination of the native to work, when every mile of railway from Capetown to Bulawayo, every public work in the colony, has been constructed by him."

'The Kaffirs do all the work, and the overseers do all the swearing and flogging,' is far from being the whole truth; but there is, at least, an abstention from modesty when complaints about the reluctance of the native to toil come from men who never, in that climate, did a day's work in their lives. In all this talk about the idleness of the native-which one would be tempted to think insincere but for the character of some of those who join in it— there is the further assumption that, while the white labourer is free to sell his services as dearly as he can, there is a wage for the native which it is unreasonable should be exceeded; and that if he does not accept that which is deemed good for him, he is to be compelled directly or indirectly to do so, or labour is to be imported to undersell him. Arguments for this policy are advanced by persons whose sincerity is above question, but I venture to think that the policy is a mistake. In truth, in all that is dark in the present situation, one thing is pretty clear-that one of the greatest civilising agencies in recent times in South Africa has been the high rate of wages for the natives; and that in all probability the higher it is, consistently with permanence and a fair remuneration for the capitalist, the better for them. The receipt of high wages is an education altogether practical and open to none of the objections freely brought against that given in the mission school. Such wages mean new wants, at first no doubt more wives, more cows, gaudy apparel, revolvers and greater consumption of 'Cape smoke,' but gradually the acquisition of a higher standard of life, an appreciation of the best things of civilisation, a drawing together as to tastes and habits of the white and coloured races. Nowadays, in our

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5 Any intelligent grumbler, if asked where the country would now be standing without the black, would confess nowhere. All successful South African enterprises have been made by black labour. The Kimberley diamond mines are worked by one hundred blacks to one white man. The gold mines standing to-day, the most successful the world has ever seen, would not be worth touching without black labour. The Cape and Natal railways, thoroughly successful enterprises, were made and are maintained by black labour.'-British Africa, p. 103.

colonies at all events, it is not deemed good citizenship to introduce the labour of races with lower requirements of life in order to beat down the wages of white men. That has become the policy of the civilised world: it is written in Statutes passed by every colonial community menaced by an importation of low-graded Asiatic labour. It is at least questionable whether a policy intolerable to whites is good for coloured races. According to a scheme which has, it is understood, been lately agreed to by most of the chief companies interested, the whole labour procurable from Portuguese South Africa is to be pooled; instead of competing labour touts' or 'runners' there will be one agent or set of agents; and care will be taken to facilitate the journeys of the natives to the mines-a great improvement, no doubt, the natives now suffering in going to and from work many hardships, and being subjected to much imposition. No stress need be laid on the troubles which have already arisen with the labourers lately imported into Rhodesia; such difficulties may not be repeated when the newcomers understand their situation. Even, however, if the traffic were surrounded by the safeguards to be found in the Labour Acts of Australian colonies; even if Government inspectors see that the immigrants are not coerced, maltreated or cheated—and it may be assumed that our Government and the Portuguese Government will not ratify the compact until this is provided for the policy is questionable. For what, looking a little ahead, must be the effect of the continuance of this traffic? It must tend still further to disintegrate and break up native primitive communities, not so ill-organised as they seem at first sight, in what have been called the 'hunting grounds' of the mining companies. In Natal the presence of the Indian immigrants has caused difficulties; they may be created elsewhere on a larger scale if there is an influx of strangers who come only to earn their wages and then depart. One is inclined to say with Swift: 'A kingdom can be no more rich by such an importation than a man can be fatter by a wen.' Both in the districts from which they come and those to which they are brought will be created a large shifting, floating class, landless, homeless, without tribal, almost without family ties-a true proletariat. Looking to the probable effect of such a policy, may it not be said with some truth ?

You cut adrift a vast number of people, ill-prepared for independence, from their old ties of government and traditions. You do your best to create quickly, and on a large scale, a proletariat. You extend with the good things of civilisation some of the worst evils incidental thereto. You break up family life, and disintegrate the old elements too rapidly to permit of their slow and easy absorption in a new order. You might have let down gradually and gently those primitive social structures; you are likely to bring them down with a run. You had in the complex, though ancient, system of

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government in some parts of Africa the germ of true civilisation, the instinct of orderly life; you have destroyed it in some regions, you would maim it in others. You have done little to carry over, smoothly and gradually-in places you have done much to prevent the carrying over-into a civilised state the people of whom the break-up of semi-civilised communities may leave you the guardians.

So far as I know, the economic situation in South Africa has not been examined with the care with which the late Professor Cairnes and Mr. Olmstock examined a situation somewhat similar in the Southern States of America. And yet the economic conditions appear to be here the most important factors. Much of the reasoning in the Slave Power' of Professor Cairnes is applicable to South Africa; and I fear that the likeness may become closer if there is an importation of cheap labour on a large scale. The late Mr. Pearson, with the growth of the black population in Natal in his mind, predicted that the fate of Natal is bound to be the fate of those parts of the African Continent which lie north of Natal and south of the Desert of Sahara.' In dwelling on the growth of numbers and the lowering of wages thereby, Mr. Pearson did not indicate the whole peril ahead. In a country the climate of which disinclines the white to severe manual toil, it must, with the introduction of a low class of labour, be less and less held in honour; it will be barely fit for respectable whites, who will become more and more officials, lawyers and overseers; an evil in any case, and a grave misfortune if it be true that 'the chief want in South Africa is increased European population.' There is the danger that the whites who are without capacity or education to qualify them to be more than hewers of stone and drawers of water will drift more and more into the position of the mean whites or 'white trash.' Indeed, the germs of such a class, the concomitant of a servile or semi-servile economy, are already to be noted. Such a policy in the long run must widen the gulf between the two races. In the long run, too, it must assimilate the economic condition to that of communities based on slavery. And probably there is no better way of averting this than permanently maintaining, so far as possible, the high wages of the native. At present he may be imprisoned if he runs away from his employer, and in certain circumstances he may be whipped (it is fair to say the law of master and servant applies to whites also). He cannot move freely to and fro as whites may: the pass system hampers him. There will be a pretty close approximation to the substance of slavery if his wages are beaten down by a large importation of cheap labour.

In regard to the third group of questions-those relating to the political status of the natives, their government, and the maintenance of their laws and customs-those who are best acquainted with the situation speak with diffidence and are prone to confess perplexity. I hazard one remark somewhat remote from the arguments