As regards the provisions of the law, one must distinguish between the British Colonies and the Dutch Republics. In the former the ordinary civil rights of whites and blacks are precisely the same, though there exist certain police provisions which are applicable only to the latter. Cape Colony has a so-called "curfew law," requiring natives who are out of doors after dark to be provided with a pass—a law which is found oppressive by the best class of natives, educated and respectable men, though defended as necessary for public order, having regard to the large black population of the lower class, and their propensity to drink and petty offences. There are also certain "labour laws," applying to natives only, and particularly to those on agricultural locations, which are intended to check the disposition of Kafirs living on native reserves to become idle or to take to vagrancy. Doubtless there is a risk that people who have never acquired habits of steady industry—for the tribal Kafir leaves to his wives the cultivation of his plot of maize or sorghum—may relapse into a laziness hurtful to their own progress, seeing that a few weeks' labour is sufficient to provide all the food needed for a whole year. In the transition from one state of society to another exceptional legislation is needed, and a prima facie case for the so-called "Glen Grey Act" and similar laws may, therefore, be made out.

The friends of the natives whom I consulted on the subject, and one or two of the most educated and representative Kafirs themselves, did not seem to object to this Act in principle, though they criticized its methods and many of its details. But as all such laws are prompted not only by regard for the welfare of the Kafir, but also by the desire of the white colonist to get plenty of labour and to get it cheap, they are obviously open to abuse and require great care in their administration. The whole subject of native labour and native land tenure is an intricate and difficult one, which I have not space to discuss here, though I obtained a good deal of information regarding it. It is also an urgent one, for the population which occupies the native reserves is in some districts growing so fast that the agricultural land will soon cease to feed them, while the pasture is suffering from being overstocked. Most of my informants agreed in thinking that the control of the British magistrate over the management of lands in reservations was better than that of the native headman, and ought to be extended, and that the tenure of farms by individual natives outside the reservations ought to be actively encouraged. They deemed this a step forward in civilization; and they also held that it is necessary to prevent native allotments, even when held by individuals, from being sold to white men, conceiving that without such a prohibition the whites will in course of time oust the natives from the ownership of all the best land.

One law specially applicable to natives has been found most valuable in Natal, as well as in the territories of the Chartered Company, and ought to be enacted in Cape Colony also, viz., an absolute prohibition of the sale to them of intoxicating spirits. The spirits made for their consumption are rough and fiery, much more deleterious than European whisky or brandy or hollands. Unfortunately, the interests of the winegrowers and distillers in the Colony have hitherto proved strong enough to defeat the bills introduced for this purpose by the friends of the natives. Though some people maintain that the Dutch and anti-native party resist this much-needed measure because they desire through strong drink to weaken and keep down the natives, I do not believe in the existence of any such diabolical motive. Commercial self-interest, or rather a foolish and short-sighted view of self-interest,—for in the long run the welfare of the natives is also the welfare of the whites,—sufficiently accounts for their conduct; but it is a slur on the generally judicious policy of the Colonial Legislature.

In the two Dutch Republics the English principle of equal civil rights for white and black finds no place. One of the motives which induced the Boers of 1836 to trek out of the Colony was their disgust at the establishment of such equality by the British Government. The Grondwet (fundamental law) of the Transvaal Republic declared, in 1858, and declares to-day, that "the people will suffer no equality of whites and blacks, either in state or in church."[69] Democratic Republics are not necessarily respectful of what used to be called human rights, and neither the "principles of 1789" nor those of the American Declaration of Independence find recognition among the Boers. Both in the Transvaal and in the Orange Free State a native is forbidden to hold land, and is not permitted to travel anywhere without a pass, in default of which he may be detained. (In the Free State, however, the sale of intoxicants to him is forbidden, and a somewhat similar law, long demanded by the mine-owners, has very recently been enacted in the Transvaal.) Nor can a native serve on a jury, whereas in Cape Colony he is legally qualified, and sometimes is empanelled. The whites may object to his presence, but a large-minded and strong-minded judge can manage to overcome their reluctance. For a good while after they settled in the Transvaal the Boers had a system of apprenticing Kafir children which was with difficulty distinguishable from predial serfdom: and though they have constantly denied that they sanctioned either the kidnapping of children or the treatment of the apprentices as slaves, there is reason to think that in some parts of the country these abuses did for a time exist. It seems clear, however, that no such practices are now legal.

Political rights have, of course, never been held by persons of colour in either of the Dutch Republics, nor has it ever been proposed to grant them. Boer public opinion would scout such an idea, for it reproaches the people of Cape Colony now with being "governed by black men," because the electoral franchise is there enjoyed by a few persons of colour. In the two Colonies the history of the matter is as follows. When representative government was established, and the electoral franchise conferred upon the colonists in 1853, no colour-line was drawn; and from that time onward black people have voted, though of course not very many were qualified under the law to vote. Some years ago, however, the whites, and the Dutch party in particular, became uneasy at the strength of the coloured element, though it did not vote solid, had no coloured leaders, and was important only in a very few constituencies. Accordingly, an Act was passed in 1892, establishing a combined educational and property qualification—that is to say, the ownership of a house or other building of the value of L75 or upwards, or the being in receipt of a salary of L50 per annum, with the ability to sign one's name and write one's address and occupation This Act, which did not apply to those already registered in any particular district and claiming to be re-registered therein, is expected to keep down the number of coloured voters; and as it applies to whites also there is no inequality of treatment. Tribal Kafirs have, of course, never had the franchise at all. Neither the natives—the most substantial and best educated among whom possess the qualifications required—nor their friends complain of this law, which may be defended on the ground that, while admitting those people of colour whose intelligence fits them for the exercise of political power, it excludes a large mass whose ignorance and indifference to public questions would make them the victims of rich and unscrupulous candidates. It is, perhaps, less open to objection than some of the attempts recently made in the Southern States of America to evade the provisions of the amendments to the Federal Constitution under which negroes obtained the suffrage. In Natal nearly all the Kafirs live under native law, and have thus been outside the representative system; but the Governor has power to admit a Kafir to the suffrage, and this has been done in a few instances. As stated in Chapter XVIII, the rapid increase of Indian immigrants in that Colony alarmed the whites, and led to the passing, in 1896, of an Act which will practically debar these immigrants from political rights, as coming from a country in which no representative institutions exist. Thus Natal also has managed to exclude coloured people without making colour the nominal ground of disability. I need hardly say that whoever has the suffrage is also eligible for election to the Legislature. No person of colour is now, however, a member of either chamber in either Colony.

It is easy for people in Europe, who have had no experience of the presence among them of a semi-civilized race, destitute of the ideas and habits which lie at the basis of free government, to condemn the action of these Colonies in seeking to preserve a decisive electoral majority for the whites. But any one who has studied the question on the spot, and especially any one who has seen the evils which in America have followed the grant of the suffrage to persons unfit for it, will form a more charitable judgment. It is indeed impolitic to exclude people merely on the score of their race. There are among the educated Kafirs and Indians persons quite as capable as the average man of European stock, and it is wholesome that the white, too apt to despise his coloured neighbour, should be made to feel this, and that the educated coloured man should have some weight in the community as an elector, and should be entitled to call on his representative to listen to and express the demands he may make on behalf of his own race. As the number of educated and property-holding natives increases, they will naturally come to form a larger element in the electorate, and will be a useful one. But to toss the gift of political power into the lap of a multitude of persons who are not only ignorant, but in mind children rather than men, is not to confer a boon, but to inflict an injury. So far as I could judge, this is the view of the most sensible natives in Cape Colony itself, and of the missionaries also, who have been the steadiest friends of their race. What is especially desirable is to safeguard the private rights of the native, and to secure for him his due share of the land, by retaining which he will retain a measure of independence. The less he is thrown into the whirlpool of party politics the better.

Let me again repeat that there is at present no serious friction between the black and the white people in South Africa. Though the attitude of most of the whites—there are, of course, many exceptions—is contemptuous, unfriendly, and even suspicious, the black man accepts the superiority of the white as part of the order of nature. He is too low down, too completely severed from the white, to feel indignant. Even the few educated natives are too well aware of the gulf that divides their own people from the European to resent, except in specially aggravated cases, the attitude of the latter. Each race goes its own way and lives its own life.

The condition of the wild or tribal Kafirs can be much more shortly described, for they have as yet entered into few relations with the whites. They are in many different grades of civilisation, from the Basutos, an industrious and settled population, among whom Christianity has made great progress, to the fierce Matabili of the north, and the Tongas of the east coast, who remain complete savages. There are probably six millions of Kafirs living under their chiefs south of the Zambesi, many of them entirely unaffected by Europeans, with not even a white magistrate or a native commissioner to collect hut-tax; and besides these there are the Korannas (akin to the Bushmen) and Namaquas (akin to the Hottentots) of the desert country between Bechuanaland and the Atlantic. In many of the districts where a regular British or Boer Government has been established, the tribal natives are now settled in regular locations, where the land is reserved from the intrusion of Europeans. Here they live under their chiefs in the old way (see Chapter X), and in the remoter districts continue to practise their old ceremonies. In Cape Colony and Natal, however, in both of which Colonies there are hundreds of thousands of tribal Kafirs, the more offensive of these ceremonies are now forbidden by the Government. Nowhere is anything done for their education, except by the missionaries, who, however, receive some little assistance from the two Colonial Governments. The ancient rites and beliefs gradually decay wherever the whites come, and, except beyond the Zambesi, intertribal wars and raids have now practically ceased. Yet the tribal hatreds survive. Not long ago the Zulus and the Kosa Kafirs employed as platelayers on the Cape Government Railway fought fiercely with each other. One powerful influence is telling upon them, even where they live uncontrolled by any white government. The diamond-mines at Kimberley, the gold-mines in the Witwatersrand and in various parts of Mashonaland and Matabililand, offer large wages for native labour, and cannot (except at Kimberley) obtain as much native labour as they need. Accordingly a steady though still insufficient stream of Kafirs sets towards these mining centres, not only from Basutoland, Natal, and Bechuanaland, but also from the Portuguese territories, where the Shangans live, and from the banks of the Zambesi. Most of the workmen remain for a few weeks or months only, and return home when they have earned as much money as will purchase two oxen, heretofore the usual price of a wife. They are paid in English coin, and thus the English twenty-shilling gold piece has become known, and to-day passes current in villages where no white man has yet been seen, even beyond the Zambesi, on the shores of Lake Bangweolo. With the use of coin there will come in time a desire for European goods, which, in its turn, will draw more labour toward the mines, and perhaps at last create even among the home-keeping Kafirs a disposition to till the land or raise cattle for sale. The destruction of cattle by the murrain which has been raging over the country may accelerate this change. Already wandering traders and gold-prospectors traverse regions beyond the border of civilization; and to keep these people, who are often reckless and lawless, from injuring the natives and provoking them to take vengeance on the next white man who comes their way, is one of the greatest difficulties of the British Government, a difficulty aggravated by the absence in nearly all cases of sufficient legal evidence—for all over South Africa native evidence is seldom received against a white man. The regions in which white influence is now most active, and which will most quickly become assimilated to the two British Colonies, are those through which railways have been or are now being constructed—Bechuanaland, Matabililand, and Mashonaland. Should the mines in these countries turn out well, and means be found for replacing by new stock the cattle that have perished, these regions may in fifteen or twenty years possess a considerable population of non-tribal and semi-civilised natives. Within the next half-century it is probable that, at least in the British territories as far as the Zambesi, as well as in the Transvaal and Swaziland, the power of the chiefs will have practically vanished and the natives be in a position similar to that which they now hold in Natal and the greater part of Cape Colony; that is to say, they will either dwell among the whites under the ordinary law, or will be occupying reservations under the control of a European magistrate, their old land customs having been mostly superseded and their heathen rites forbidden or disused.

The position which the whites and the blacks hold toward one another in South Africa is sufficiently similar to that of the two races in the Southern States of America to make a short comparison between the two cases instructive. There are no doubt many differences. In the United States the Southern negroes are strangers and therefore isolated, with no such reserve of black people behind them as the Kafirs have in the rest of the African continent. In South Africa it is the whites who are new-comers and isolated, and they are numerically inferior to the blacks, not, as in America, in a few particular areas (the three States of South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana), but all over the country. In the whole United States the whites are to the blacks as ten to one; in Africa south of the Zambesi it is the blacks who are ten to one to the whites. Or if we compare the four South African Colonies and Republics with the fifteen old slave States, the blacks are in the former nearly four times as numerous as the whites, and the whites in the latter twice as numerous as the blacks. In point of natural capacity and force of character the Bantu races are at least equal, probably superior, to the negroes brought from Africa to North America, most of whom seem to have come from the Guinea coasts. But in point of education and in habits of industry the American negroes are far ahead of the South African; for the latter have not been subjected to the industrial training of nearly two centuries of plantation life or domestic service, while comparatively few have had any industrial contact with white workmen, or any stimulation like that which the grant of the suffrage after the War of Secession has exercised upon a large section of the American negroes, even in places where they have not been permitted to turn their legal rights to practical account. The American negroes are, moreover, all nominally Christians; the South African Kafirs nearly all heathens. Yet, after allowing for these and other minor points of contrast, the broad fact remains that in both countries we see two races in very different stages of civilisation dwelling side by side, yet not mingling nor likely to mingle. In both countries one race rules over the other. The stronger despises and dislikes the weaker; the weaker submits patiently to the stronger. But the weaker makes in education and in property a progress which will some day bring it much nearer to the stronger than it is now.

The social and political troubles which the juxtaposition of the two races has caused in North America, and which have induced many Americans to wish that it were possible to transport the whole seven millions of Southern negroes back to the Niger or the Congo, have as yet scarcely shown themselves in South Africa. Neither in the British Colonies nor in the Boer Republics is there any cause for present apprehension. The coloured people are submissive and not resentful. They have, moreover, a certain number of friends and advocates in the legislatures of the Colonies, and a certain amount of public opinion, the opinion of the best part of the community, disposed to protect them. Nevertheless, no traveller can study the colour problem in South Africa without anxiety—anxiety, not for the present, but for the future, a future in which the seeds that are now being sown will have sprung up and grown to maturity.

What is the future of the Kafirs likely to be? Though a writer may prophesy with an easy mind when he knows that the truth or error of the prophecy will not be tested till long after he has himself quitted the world, still it is right to make the usual apologies for venturing to prophesy at all. These apologies being taken as made, let us consider what is likely to come to pass in South Africa.

The Kafirs will stay where they are and form the bulk of the population all over South Africa. Some sanguine men think they will move off to the hotter north, as in America the centre of negro population has shifted southward toward the Gulf of Mexico. This is improbable, because the South African white seems resolved to rely upon natives for all the harder and rougher kinds of labour, not to add that, although the European can thrive and work, the Kafir is more truly the child of the soil and of the climate. And not only will he stay, but, to all appearances, he will increase faster than does the white man.

The Kafirs, now divided into many tribes and speaking many languages and dialects, will lose their present tribal organization, their languages, their distinctive habits. Whether some sort of native lingua Franca will spring up, or whether they will all come to speak English, is doubtful; but probably in the long run English will prevail and become the common speech of the southern half of the continent. They will also lose their heathenism (though many superstitions will survive), and will become, in name at least, Christians. Thus they will form to a far greater extent than now a homogeneous mass pervaded by the same ideas and customs.

While thus constituting one vast black community, they will probably remain as sharply marked off from the whites as they are to-day. That there will be no intermarriage may safely be assumed from the fact that mixture of blood has greatly diminished since the days of slavery, just as it has diminished in the Southern States of America. White opinion universally condemns it, and rightly, for as things are now the white race would lose more by the admixture than the coloured race would gain.

The Kafirs will be far more generally educated than they are now, and will have developed a much higher intelligence. That they will remain inferior to the whites in all intellectual pursuits and in most handicrafts may be concluded from American experience; but they will doubtless be able to compete with white men in many trades, will to some extent enter the professions, will acquire property, and (assuming the law to remain as at present) will form a much larger part, though probably for a very long time a minority, of the electorate. From among them there will doubtless arise men fit to lead them for social and political purposes. A talent for public speaking is already remarked as one of their gifts.

Thus the day will arrive when South Africa will see itself filled by a large coloured population, tolerably homogeneous, using the same language, having forgotten its ancient tribal feuds, and not, like the people of India, divided by caste or by the mutual hatred of Hindus and Mussulmans. Most of this population will be poor, and it may, unless successive Colonies are led off to the more thinly peopled parts of Africa, tread hard upon the means of subsistence which the land offers; I say the land, for the mines—or at least the gold-mines—will have been exhausted long before the day we are contemplating arrives.

When will that day arrive? Probably not for at least a century, possibly not for two centuries. Fast as the world moves in our time, it must take several generations to develop a race so backward as the Kafirs. Many political changes may occur before then; but political changes are not likely to make much difference to a process like this, which goes on under natural laws—laws that will continue to work, whatever may happen to the Boers, and whatever may be the future relations of the Colonies to the mother country. It is only some great change in human thought and feeling, or some undreamt-of discovery in the physical world, that can be imagined as likely to affect the progress of the natives and the attitude of the whites toward them.

When, perhaps in the twenty-first century, the native population has reached the point of progress we have been imagining, the position may be for both races a grave or even a perilous one, if the feeling and behaviour of the whites continue to be what they are now. The present contented acquiescence of the coloured people in the dominance of the whites, and the absence of resentment at the contempt displayed toward them, cannot be expected from a people whose inferiority, though still real, will be much less palpable. And if trouble comes, the preponderance of numbers on the black side may make it more serious than it could be in the United States, where the Southern whites are the outmost fringe of an enormous white nation. These anxieties are little felt, these problems are little canvassed, in South Africa, for things which will not happen in our time or in the time of our children are for most of us as though they would never happen; and we have become so accustomed to see the unexpected come to pass as to forget that where undoubted natural causes are at work—causes whose working history has examined and verified—a result may be practically certain, uncertain as may be the time when and the precise form in which it will arrive.

There are, however, some thoughtful men in the Colonies who see the magnitude of the issues involved in this native problem. They hold, so far as I could gather their views, that the three chief things to be done now are to save the natives from intoxicating liquor, which injures them even more than it does the whites, to enact good land laws, which shall keep them from flocking as a loafing proletariate into the towns, as well as just labour laws, and to give them much better opportunities than they now have of industrial education. Manual training and the habit of steady industry are quite as much needed as book education, a conclusion at which the friends of the American negro have also arrived. Beyond this the main thing to be done seems to be to soften the feelings of the average white and to mend his manners. At present he considers the native to exist solely for his own benefit. He is harsh or gentle according to his own temper; but whether harsh or gentle, he is apt to think of the black man much as he thinks of an ox, and to ignore a native's rights when they are inconvenient to himself.

Could he be got to feel more kindly toward the native, and to treat him, if not as an equal, which he is not, yet as a child, the social aspect of the problem—and it is the not least serious aspect—would be completely altered.

[Footnote 69: The Boers are a genuinely religious people, but they have forgotten 1 Cor. xii. 13, Gal. iii. 28, and Col. iii. 11. Many nations have been inspired by the Old Testament, but few indeed are the instances in which any has paid regard to the New.]



CHAPTER XXII

MISSIONS

The strength and vitality of a race, and its power of holding its own in the world, depend less on the quickness of its intelligence than on the solidity of its character. Its character depends upon the moral ideas which govern its life, and on the habits in which those ideas take shape; and these, in their turn, depend very largely upon the conceptions which the race has formed of religion, and on the influence that religion has over it. This is especially true of peoples in the earlier stages of civilization. Their social virtues, the beliefs and principles which hold them together and influence their conduct, rest upon and are shaped by their beliefs regarding the invisible world and its forces. Races in which religious ideas are vague and feeble seldom attain to a vigorous national life, because they want one of the most effective bonds of cohesion and some of the strongest motives that rule conduct. It may doubtless be said that the religion of a people is as much an effect as a cause, or, in other words, that the finer or poorer quality of a race is seen in the sort of religion it makes for itself, the higher races producing nobler religious ideas and more impressive mythologies, just as they produce richer and more expressive languages. Nevertheless, it remains true that a religion, once formed, becomes a potent factor in the future strength and progress of a people. Now the religious ideas of the Bantu races, as of other negroes, have been scanty, poor, and unfruitful. And accordingly, one cannot meditate upon their condition and endeavour to forecast their progress without giving some thought to the influence which better ideas, and especially those embodied in Christianity, may have upon them.

Neither the Kafirs nor the Hottentots have had a religion in our sense of the word. They had no deities, no priesthood, no regular forms of worship. They were, when Europeans discovered them, still in the stage in which most, if not all, primitive races would seem to have once been—that of fearing and seeking to propitiate nature spirits and the ghosts of the dead, a form of superstition in which there was scarcely a trace of morality. Hence the first task of the missionaries who came among them was to create a religious sense, to give them the conception of an omnipotent spiritual power outside natural objects and above man, and to make them regard this power as the source of moral ideas and the author of moral commands. To do this has been a difficult task.

Besides this constructive work, which was less needed in some other more advanced heathen races, the missionaries had also a destructive work to do. Though the Kafirs had no religion, they had a multitude of superstitious rites and usages closely intertwined with the whole of their life and with what one may call their political system. These usages were so repugnant to Christian morality, and often to common decency, that it became necessary to attack them and to require the convert to renounce them altogether. Renunciation, however, meant a severance from the life of the tribe, contempt and displeasure from the tribesmen, and possibly the loss of tribal rights. These were evils which it required courage and conviction to face, nor had the missionary any temporal benefits to offer by way of compensation. There was, however, very little direct persecution, because there were no gods who would be incensed, and the witch-doctors were less formidable opponents than a regular priesthood would have been. The chiefs were often friendly, for they recognized the value of missionary knowledge and counsel. Even the ferocious Mosilikatze showed kindness to Robert Moffat, and Livingstone complained far more of the Boers than he ever did of Kafir enemies. Lo Bengula protected the missionaries: Gungunhana listened, and made his chiefs listen, to their discourses, though his nearest approach to conversion was his expression of detestation for Judas Iscariot. But it rarely befell that a chief himself accepted Christianity, which would have meant, among other things, the departure of all his wives but one, and possibly the loss of his hold upon his tribe. All these things being considered, it need excite no surprise that the Gospel should have made comparatively little progress among the wild or tribal Kafirs.

It has been preached to them for nearly a century, by German (chiefly, I think, Moravian) and French, as well as by English, Scottish, and American missionaries. At present there are not a few British societies and denominations in the field. The French Protestants have done some excellent work, especially in Basutoland, and have also stations near the east coast and on the Upper Zambesi. There are also French Roman Catholic missions, mostly in the hands of Jesuit fathers, many of whom are men of learning and ability. Between the Roman Catholics, the Protestant Episcopalians (Church of England), and the missionaries of the English Nonconformists and Scottish or French Presbyterians there is little intercourse and no co-operation. Here, as in other mission fields, this absence of intercourse and sympathy puzzles the native. I was told of an English (Protestant Episcopal) clergyman who made it one of his prime objects to warn the Kafirs against attending the services of the French Protestant missionaries, whom he apparently regarded as outside the pale of the true Church. In the Boer Republics there are fewer missions in proportion to the number of natives than in British territories; but no district, except the deserts of the west, seems to be wholly unprovided for, and in some cases stations have been pushed far beyond the limits of European administration, as, for instance, among the Barotse, who dwell north of the Upper Zambesi. The native congregations are usually small, and the careers of the converts not always satisfactory. This is so natural that it is odd to find Europeans, and most conspicuously those whose own life is not a model of Christian morality, continually growling and sneering at the missionaries because their converts do not all turn out saints. The savage is unstable in character, and baptism does not necessarily extinguish either his old habits or the hold which native superstitions have upon him. It is in this instability of his will, and his proneness to yield to drink or some other temptation, rather than in his intellect, that the weakness of the savage lies. And a man with hundreds of generations of savagery behind him is still, and must be, in many respects a savage, even though he reads and writes, and wears European clothes, and possibly even a white necktie. The Kafirs are not such bad Christians as the Frankish warriors were for two or three generations after the conversion of Clovis. We must wait for several generations before we can judge fairly of the influence of his new religion upon the mind of a Kafir whose ancestors had no religion at all, and were ruled by the lowest forms of superstition.

These facts are better recognized by the missionaries to-day than they were sixty years ago, and they have in consequence made some changes in their methods. They are no longer so anxious to baptize, or so apt to reckon success by the number of their converts. They are more cautious in ordaining native pastors. The aid of such pastors is indispensable, but the importance of the example which the native preacher or teacher sets makes it necessary to be careful in selection. The dogma of the equality of the black man and the white, which was warmly insisted on in the old days, and often roused the wrath of the Boers, has now been silently dropped. It was a dogma wholesome to inculcate so far as equality of protection was concerned, but its wider application led the early philanthropists of South Africa, as it led their excellent contemporaries, the Abolitionists of America, to some strange conclusions. Perceiving that other influences ought to go hand in hand with religion in helping the natives forward, the missionaries now devote themselves more than formerly to secular instruction, and endeavour to train the people to habits of industry. The work of education is indeed entirely in their hands. Special mention is due to one admirable institution, that which was founded by the Free Church of Scotland at Lovedale, in the Eastern Province, not far from King William's Town, nearly fifty years ago. Conducted on wholly non-sectarian lines, it receives coloured people, together with some whites, not only from the Colony, but from all parts of Africa—there are even Galla boys from the borders of Abyssinia in it—and gives an excellent education, fitting young men and women not only for the native ministry, but for the professions: and it is admitted even by those who are least friendly to missionary work to have rendered immense services to the natives. I visited it, and was greatly struck by the tone and spirit which seemed to pervade it, a spirit whose results are seen in the character and careers of many among its graduates. A race in the present condition of the Kafirs needs nothing more than the creation of a body of intelligent and educated persons of its own blood, who are able to enter into the difficulties of their humbler kinsfolk and guide them wisely. Dr. Stewart, who has directed the institution for many years, possesses that best kind of missionary temperament, in which a hopeful spirit and an inexhaustible sympathy are balanced by Scottish shrewdness and a cool judgment.

One of the greatest among the difficulties which confront the missionaries is to know how to deal with polygamy, a practice deeply rooted in Kafir life. A visitor from Europe is at first surprised to find how seriously they regard it, and asks whether the example of the worthies of the Old Testament does not make it hard for them to refuse baptism to the native who seeks it, though he has more than one wife. The clergy of the Church of England, however, and those of the French Protestant Church—and I think other missionaries also—are unanimous in holding that, although they may properly admit a polygamist as a catechumen, they should not baptize such a one; and they say that the native pastors hold this view even more strongly than they do themselves. Polygamy is so bound up with heathen customs, and exerts, in their view, so entirely baneful an influence upon native society, that it must be at all hazards resisted and condemned.[70] One is reminded of the Neoplatonic philosophers, the last professors of the Platonic academy at Athens, who in the sixth century of our era sought an asylum from Christian persecution at the court of Chosroes Anurshirwan, in Persia. They forced themselves to tolerate the other usages of the people among whom they came, but polygamy was too much for them, and rather than dwell among those who practised it, they returned to the unfriendly soil of the Roman Empire.

The missionaries, and especially those of the London Missionary Society, played at one time a much more prominent part in politics than they now sustain. Within and on the borders of Cape Colony they were, for the first sixty years of the present century, the leading champions of the natives, and as they enjoyed the support of an active body of opinion in England and Scotland, they had much influence in Parliament and with the Colonial Office. Outside the Colony they were often the principal advisers of the native chiefs (as their brethren were at the same time in the islands of the Pacific), and held a place not unlike that of the bishops in Gaul in the fifth century of our era. Since, in advocating the cause of the natives, they had often to complain of the behaviour of the whites, and since, whenever a chief came into collision with the emigrant Boers or with colonial frontiersmen, they became the channel by which the chief stated his case to the British Government, they incurred the bitter hostility of the emigrant Boers and some dislike even in the Colony. To this old cause much of the unpopularity that still attaches to them seems due. Unpopular they certainly are. They are reproached with the paucity of their converts, and that by white men whose own treatment of the Kafirs might well make the white man's religion odious to a native. They are also accused of abusing their position to enrich themselves by trade with the Kafirs. This abuse has sometimes occurred, and clearly ought to be checked by the home societies. But probably it does not disgust the wandering white trader any more than the fact that the missionary often warns the native against the exorbitant prices which the trader demands for his goods. They are blamed for making the converted Kafir uppish, and telling him that he is as good as a white man, an offence which has no doubt been often committed. A graver allegation, to which Mr. Theal has given some countenance in his historical writings, is that they used to bring groundless or exaggerated charges against the Boer farmers, and always sided with the natives, whatever the merits of the case. I do not venture to pronounce on the truth of this allegation, which it would take much time and labour to sift. As there have been some few missionaries whose demeanour was not creditable to their profession, so there have doubtless been instances in which partisan ardour betrayed them into exaggerations. But whosoever remembers that but for the missionaries the natives would have lacked all local protection, and that it was only through the missionaries that news of injustice or cruelty practised on a native could reach the ears of the British Government, will look leniently on the errors of honest zeal, and will rejoice that ministers of religion were found to champion the cause of the weaker race and keep the home Government alive to a sense of one of its first duties.

Notwithstanding the slowness of the progress hitherto made, the extinction of heathenism in South Africa may be deemed certain, and certain at no distant date. There is here no ancient and highly organized system of beliefs and doctrines, such as Hinduism and Islam are in India, to resist the solvent power which European civilisation exerts. In forty years there will probably be no more pagan rites practised in Cape Colony. In eighty years there will be none in Matabililand, or perhaps even sooner, if the gold-reefs turn out well; for though a mining-camp is not a school of Christianity, it is a destroyer of paganism. Already I found, in traversing Mashonaland, that the poor ghosts were ceasing to receive their wonted offerings of native beer.

What will happen when heathenism and the tribal system have vanished away? Such morality, such principles of manly conduct as the natives now have, are bound up with their ghost-worship and still more with their tribal system, which prescribes loyalty to the chief, courage in war, devotion to the interests of the tribe or clan. When these principles have disappeared along with the tribal organization, some other principles, some other standard of duty and precepts of conduct, ought to be at hand to replace them. Where are such precepts to be found, and whence are the motives and emotions to be drawn which will give the new precepts a power to command the will? Although the Kafirs have shown rather less aptitude for assimilating Christian teaching than some other savage races have done, there is nothing in the experience of the missions to discourage the hope that such teaching may come to prevail among them, and that through it each generation may show a slight moral advance upon that which has gone before. As the profession of Christianity will create a certain link between the Kafirs and their rulers which may soften the asperity which the relations of the two races now wear, so its doctrines will in time give them a standard of conduct similar to that accepted among the whites, and an ideal which will influence the superior minds among them. So much may certainly be said: that the Gospel and the mission schools are at present the most truly civilizing influences which work upon the natives, and that upon these influences, more than on any other agency, does the progress of the coloured race depend.

[Footnote 70: After listening to their arguments, I did not venture to doubt that they were right.]



CHAPTER XXIII

SOCIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE TWO BRITISH COLONIES

The two South African Colonies have not yet had time to develop new and distinctive types of life and character. Though Cape Colony is nearly as old as Massachusetts or Virginia, it has been less than a century under British rule, and the two diverse elements in its population have not yet become blent into any one type that can be said to belong to the people as a whole. One must therefore describe these elements separately. The Dutch are almost all country folk, and the country folk are (in Cape Colony) mostly Dutch. Some, especially near Cape Town, are agriculturists, but many more are ranchmen or sheep-masters. They are a slow, quiet, well-meaning hospitable people, extremely conservative in their opinions as well as their habits, very sparing, because they have little ready money, very suspicious, because afraid of being out-witted by the English traders, and many of them so old-fashioned in their theory of the universe as to object to legislation against sheep scab, because they regard it as a visitation of Providence, to be combated only by repentance and not by ordinary human means. The women are usually ill-educated and often unattractive; but they have strong characters. Nothing was more remarkable in the wars of the emigrant Boers against the Kafirs than the courage and devotion which the women displayed. That love of cleanliness for which their kinsfolk in Holland are famous has vanished under the conditions of a settler's life and the practice of using negro servants, and they are now apt to be slatternly. These country folk live in a simple, old-fashioned way, loving solitude and isolation, yet very hospitable, and enjoying the rare occasions on which they meet for festivities at one another's farmhouses. Such meetings are almost their only recreations, for hunting is less attainable now that the larger game has disappeared, and they care nothing for the intellectual pleasures of reading or art or music. Education is beginning to spread among them, but it has not yet done much to quicken their minds or give them new interests. The population is so extremely thin, the towns so few and so small, that it is not surprising that a people who came out from the least educated strata of society in Holland should, under the difficult conditions of a settler's life, have remained at a low level of mental culture. They would probably have been still more backward, and have produced fewer men of ability, but for the infusion of French Huguenot blood, which still proclaims itself in the names of some of the leading families.

Compared to the Dutch, the English are recent immigrants. They have all arrived within the present century, and few of them can point to grandfathers born in South Africa. Partly for this reason, partly from their desire to be unlike the Dutch, they have remained markedly English, both in their speech, in their ideas, and, so far as the differences of climate permit, in their way of life. Nevertheless, they have been affected by the Dutch. They have taken from the latter the aversion to field labour, the contempt for the blacks, the tendency to prefer large pastoral farms to agriculture, and, in some districts, a rather sleepy and easy-going temperament. Even in Mashonaland I was told that the English ranchmen were apt to fall into the habits of their Boer neighbours. They form the large majority of the town population, for not only the seaports, but also such inland places as Graham's Town, King William's Town, and Kimberley are quite English, and nearly all the commerce and finance of the country are in their hands. They have more enterprise than the Dutch, and are much less antiquated in their ideas, so it is to them that the profits of the new mining ventures have chiefly fallen, so far as these have not been appropriated by keener and more ingenious adventurers from Europe, mostly of Semitic stock.

There has been hardly any Irish immigration; and though one meets many Scotchmen among the bankers and merchants, the Scottish element seems smaller than in Ontario or most of the Australasian Colonies. Many settlers have come from Germany, but these have now become blended with the English. There are no better colonists than the Germans; and indeed the Europeans whom the last ninety years have brought have been mostly of excellent stocks, superior to the mid-European races that have lately inundated the United States.

Though the English and the Dutch form distinct social elements which are not yet fused, and though these elements are now politically opposed, there is no social antagonism between the races. The Englishman will deride the slowness of the Dutchman, the Dutchman may distrust the adroitness or fear the activity of the Englishman, but neither dislikes nor avoids the other. Neither enjoys, or even pretends to, any social superiority, and hence neither objects to marry his son or his daughter to a member of the other race. Both are, as a rule, in fairly easy circumstances; that is to say, nearly everybody has enough, and till lately hardly anybody had more than enough. Within the last few years, however, two changes have come. The diamond mines and the gold-mines have given vast riches to a small number of persons, some half-dozen or less of whom continue to live in the Colony, while the others have returned to Europe. These great fortunes are a disturbing element, giving an undue influence to their possessors, and exciting the envy or emulation of the multitude. The other change is the growth of a class of people resembling the "mean whites" of the Southern States of America, loafers and other lazy or shiftless fellows who hang about and will not take to any regular work. I heard them described and deplored as a new phenomenon, but gather that they are not yet numerous. Their appearance, it is to be feared, is the natural result of that contempt for hard unskilled labour which the existence of slavery inspired in the whites; and they may hereafter constitute, as they now do in the Southern States of America, the section of the population specially hostile to the negro, and therefore dangerous to the whole community.

To an Englishman or American who knows how rapidly his language has become the language of commerce over the world; how it has almost extinguished the ancient Celtic tongues in Scotland and Ireland; how quickly in the United States it has driven Spanish out of the South West, and has come to be spoken by the German, Scandinavian, and Slavonic immigrants whom that country receives, it is surprising to find that Dutch holds its ground stubbornly in South Africa. It is still the ordinary language of probably one-half of the people of Cape Colony (although most of these can speak some English) and of three-fourths of those in the Orange Free State, though of a minority in Natal. Englishmen settling in the interior usually learn it for the sake of talking to their Dutch neighbours, who are slow to learn English; and English children learn it from the coloured people, for the coloured people talk it far more generally than they do English; in fact, when a native (except in one of the coast towns) speaks a European tongue, that tongue is sure to be Dutch. Good observers told me that although an increasing number of the Africanders (i.e., colonists born in Africa) of Dutch origin now understand English, the hold of Dutch is so strong that it will probably continue to be spoken in the Colony for two generations at least. Though one must call it Dutch, it differs widely from the cultivated Dutch of Holland, having not only preserved some features of that language as spoken two centuries ago, but having adopted many Kafir or Hottentot words, and having become vulgarized into a dialect called the Taal, which is almost incapable of expressing abstract thought or being a vehicle for any ideas beyond those of daily life. In fact, many of the Boers, especially in the Transvaal, cannot understand a modern Dutch book, hardly even an Amsterdam newspaper. This defect might give English a great advantage if the Boers wished to express abstract ideas. But they have not this wish, for they have no abstract ideas to express. They are a people who live in the concrete.

The rise of great fortunes, which I have noted, has been too recent and too exceptional a phenomenon to have affected the generally tranquil and even tenor of South African social life. Among both Dutch and English months and years flow smoothly on. Few new immigrants enter the rural districts or the smaller towns; few new enterprises are started; few ambitions or excitements stir the minds of the people. The Witwatersrand gold-field is, of course, a startling exception, but it is an exception which tends to perpetuate the rule, for, by drawing off the more eager and restless spirits, it has left the older parts of both the Colonies more placid than ever. The general equality of conditions has produced a freedom from assumption on the one hand, and from servility on the other, and, indeed, a general absence of snobbishness, which is quite refreshing to the European visitor. Manners are simple, and being simple, they are good. If there is less polish than in some countries, there is an unaffected heartiness and kindliness. The Dutch have a sense of personal dignity which respects the dignity of their fellows, and which expresses itself in direct and natural forms of address. An experienced observer dilated to me on the high level of decorum maintained in the Cape Parliament, where scenes of disorder are, I believe, unknown, and violent language is rare. One expects to find in all Colonies a sense of equality and an element of sans gene in social intercourse. But one usually finds also more roughness and more of an off-hand, impatient way of treating strangers than is visible in South Africa. This may be partly due to the fact that people are not in such a hurry as they are in most new countries. They have plenty of time for everything. The climate disinclines them to active exertion. There is little immigration. Trade, except in the four seaports,[71] is not brisk, and even there it is not brisk in the American sense of the word. The slackness of the black population, which has to be employed for the harder kinds of work, reacts upon the white employer. I have visited no new English-speaking country where one so little felt the strain and stress of modern life. This feature of South African society, though it implies a slow material development, is very agreeable to the visitor, and I doubt if it be really an injury to the ultimate progress of the country. In most parts of North America, possibly in Australia also, industrial development has been too rapid, and has induced a nervous excitability and eager restlessness of temper from which South Africa is free. Of course, in saying this, I except always the mining districts, and especially the Witwatersrand, which is to the full as restless and as active as San Francisco or Melbourne.

The comparative ease of life disposes the English part of the population to athletic sports, which are pursued with almost as much avidity as in Australia. Even one who thinks that in England the passion for them has gone beyond all reasonable limits, and has become a serious injury to education and to the taste for intellectual pleasures, may find in the character of the climate a justification for the devotion to cricket, in particular, which strikes him in South Africa. Now that the wild animals have become scarce, hunting cannot be pursued as it once was, and young people would have little incitement to physical exertion in the open air did not the English love of cricket flourish in the schools and colleges. Long may it flourish!

The social conditions I have been describing are evidently unfavourable to the development of literature or science or art. Art has scarcely begun to exist. Science is represented only by a few naturalists in Government employment, and by some intelligent amateur observers. Researches in electricity or chemistry or biology require nowadays a somewhat elaborate apparatus, with which few private persons could provide themselves, and which are here possessed only by one or two public institutions. English and American writers have hitherto supplied the intellectual needs of the people, and the established reputation of writers in those countries makes competition difficult to a new colonial author. The towns are too small, and their inhabitants too much occupied in commerce to create groups of highly educated people, capable of polishing, whetting, and stimulating one another's intellects. There are few large libraries, and no fully equipped university to train young men in history or philosophy or economics or theology. Accordingly, few books are composed or published, and, so far as I know, only three South African writers have caught the ear of the European public. One of these was Robert Pringle, a Scotchman, whose poems, written sixty or seventy years ago, possess considerable merit, and one of which, beginning with the line,

Afar in the desert I love to ride,

remains the most striking picture of South African nature in those early days when the wilderness was still filled with wild creatures. Another, Miss Olive Schreiner (now Mrs. Cronwright-Schreiner), has attained deserved fame. A third, Mr. Scully, is less known in England, but his little volume of Kafir Tales is marked by much graphic power and shows insight into native character.

These three writers, and indeed all the writers of merit, belong to the English or Anglified section of the population. The Dutch section is practically disqualified by its language (which, be it remembered, is not the language of Holland, but a debased dialect) from literary composition, even were it otherwise disposed to authorship. Literature will always, I think, remain English in character, bearing few or no traces of the Dutch element in the people. But otherwise things are likely to change in a few years. The conditions which have been described as unfavourable to intellectual production are not necessarily permanent, and the time will probably come when the Europeans of South Africa will emulate their kinsfolk at home or in North America in literary and artistic fertility. The materials for imaginative work, whether in poetry or in prose, lie ready to their hand. The scenery deserves some great native landscape-painter, and such a genius will, no doubt, one day arise.

Journalism has now everywhere become, in point of quantity, the most important part of literature. The South African newspapers impress a visitor favourably. Several of them are written with great ability, and they were in 1895 comparatively free from that violence of invective, that tawdriness of rhetoric, and that proneness to fill their columns with criminal intelligence which are apt to be charged against the press in some other new countries. No journal seems to exert so great a political power as is wielded by several of the Australian dailies. As might be expected, the Press is chiefly English, that language having sixty-one papers, against seventeen printed in Dutch and twenty-three in both languages.

Although the dispersion of the small European population over an exceedingly wide area makes it difficult to provide elementary schools everywhere,[72] education is, among the whites, well cared for, and in some regions, such as the Orange Free State, the Boer element is just as eager for it as is the English. Neither are efficient secondary schools wanting. That which is wanting, that which is urgently needed to crown the educational edifice, is a properly equipped teaching university. There are several colleges which provide lectures,[73] and the Cape University holds examinations and confers degrees; but to erect over these colleges a true university with an adequate teaching staff seems to be as difficult an enterprise at the Cape as it has proved to be in London, where thirteen years had to be spent in efforts, not successful till 1898, to establish a teaching university. It is strange to find that in a new country, where the different religious bodies live on good terms with one another, one of the chief obstacles in the way is the reluctance of two of the existing colleges, which have a denominational character, to have an institution superior to them set up by the State. The other obstacles are the rivalry of the eastern province with the western, in which, at Cape Town, the natural seat of a university would be found, and the apathy or aversion of the Dutch section of the people. Some of them do not care to spend public money for a purpose whose value they cannot be made to understand. Others, knowing that a university would necessarily be mainly in English hands and give instruction of an English type, fear to establish what would become another Anglifying influence. Thus several small colleges go on, each with inadequate resources, and the Cape youth who desires to obtain a first-rate education is obliged to go to Europe for it. He cannot even get a full course of legal instruction, for there is no complete law school. It is no doubt well that a certain number of young men should go to Europe and there acquire a first-hand knowledge of the ideas and habits of the Old World; but many who cannot afford the luxury of a European journey and residence remain without the kind of instruction to which their natural gifts entitle them, and the intellectual progress of the country suffers. Were Cape Colony somewhere in the United States, a millionaire would forthwith step in, build a new university, and endow it with a few millions of dollars. But South Africa is only just beginning to produce great fortunes; so the best hope is that some enlightened and tactful statesman may, by disarming the suspicions and allaying the jealousies I have described, succeed in uniting the existing colleges, and add to their scanty revenues an adequate Government grant. This may possibly be effected. But the jealousies and ambitions which those who control an institution feel for it are often quite as tenacious as is the selfishness of men where their own pockets are concerned; and since these jealousies disguise themselves under a cloak of disinterestedness, it is all the more hard to overcome them by the pressure of public opinion.

One other intellectual force remains to be mentioned—that of the churches. In the two British Colonies no religious body receives special State recognition or any grants from the State.[74] All are on an equal footing, just as in Australia and in North America. In the two Boer Republics the Dutch Reformed Church is in a certain sense the State church. In the Transvaal it is recognized as such by the Grondwet ("Fundamental Law"), and receives a Government subvention. In that Republic members of other churches were at one time excluded from the suffrage and from all public offices, and even now Roman Catholics are under some disability. In the Orange Free State the Dutch Reformed Church receives public aid, but I think this is given, to a smaller extent, to some other denominations also, and no legal inequalities based on religion exist. In these two Republics nearly the whole of the Boer population, and in the Free State a part even of the English population, belong to the Dutch Reformed communion, which is Presbyterian in government and Calvinistic in theology. In the British Colonies the Protestant Episcopal Church (Church of England) comes next after the Dutch Reformed, which is much the strongest denomination; but the Wesleyans are also an important body; and there are, of course, also Congregational and Baptist churches. The Presbyterians seem to be less numerous (in proportion to the population) than in Canada or Australia, not merely because the Scottish element is less numerous, but also because many of the Scottish settlers joined the Dutch Reformed Church as being akin to their own in polity and doctrine. The comparative paucity of Roman Catholics is due to the paucity of Irish immigrants.[75] These bodies live in perfect harmony and good feeling one with another, all frankly accepting the principle of equality, none claiming any social pre-eminence, and none, so far as I could learn, attempting to interfere in politics. Both the bishops and the clergy of the Church of England (among whom there are many gifted men) are, with few exceptions, of marked High-church proclivities, which, however, do not appear to prevail equally among the laity. The Dutch Reformed Church has been troubled by doubts as to the orthodoxy of many of its younger pastors who have been educated at Leyden or Utrecht, and for a time it preferred to send candidates for the ministry to be trained at Edinburgh, whose theological schools inspired less distrust. It is itself in its turn distrusted, apparently without reason, by the still more rigid Calvinists of the Transvaal.

One curious feature of South African society remains to be mentioned, which impressed me the more the longer I remained in the country. The upper stratum of that society, consisting of the well-to-do and best educated people, is naturally small, because the whole white population of the towns is small, there being only four towns that have more than ten thousand white residents. But this little society is virtually one society, though dispersed in spots hundreds of miles from one another. Natal stands rather apart, and has very little to do either socially or in the way of business with Cape Colony, and not a great deal even with the Transvaal. So too the four or five towns of the eastern province of Cape Colony form a group somewhat detached, and though the "best people" in each of them know all about the "best people" in Cape Town, they are not in close touch with the latter. But Cape Town, Kimberley, Bloemfontein, Johannesburg, and Pretoria, the five most important places (excluding the Natal towns), are for social purposes almost one city, though it is six hundred and fifty miles from Cape Town to Kimberley, and one thousand miles from Cape Town to Johannesburg. All the persons of consequence in these places know one another and follow one another's doings. All mix frequently, because the Cape Town people are apt to be called by business to the inland cities, and the residents of the inland cities come to Cape Town for sea air in the summer, or to embark thence for Europe. Where distances are great, men think little of long journeys, and the fact that Cape Town is practically the one port of entrance and departure for the interior, so far as passengers are concerned, keeps it in constant relations with the leading men of the interior, and gives a sort of unity to the upper society of the whole country, which finds few parallels in any other part of the world. Johannesburg and Cape Town in particular are, for social purposes, in closer touch with each other than Liverpool is with Manchester or New York with Philadelphia. When one turns to the map it looks a long way from the Cape to the Witwatersrand; but between these places most of the country is a desert, and there is only one spot, Bloemfontein, that deserves to be called a town. So I will once more beg the reader to remember that though South Africa is more than half as large as Europe, it is, measured by population, a very small country.

[Footnote 71: Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, East London and Durban.]

[Footnote 72: In Cape Colony 28.82 of the male and 28.02 of the female population could not (census of 1891) read or write.]

[Footnote 73: Five colleges receive Government grants.]

[Footnote 74: The small grant for religious purposes made in Cape Colony was in 1895 being reduced, and was to expire shortly.]

[Footnote 75: The census of 1891 gives the numbers as follows: Dutch Reformed Church, 306,000; Church of England, 139,000; Wesleyans, 106,000; Congregationalists, 69,000; Presbyterians, 37,000; Roman Catholics, 17,000; Mohammedans, 15,000.]



CHAPTER XXIV

POLITICS IN THE TWO BRITISH COLONIES

The circumstances of the two South African Colonies are so dissimilar from those of the British Colonies in North America and in Australasia as to have impressed upon their politics a very different character. I do not propose to describe the present political situation, for it may change at any moment. It is only of the permanent causes which give their colour to the questions and the movements of the country that I shall speak, and that concisely.

The frame of government is, in Cape Colony as well as in Natal, essentially the same as in the other self-governing British Colonies. There is a Governor, appointed by the home Government, and responsible to it only, who plays the part which belongs to the Crown in Great Britain. He is the nominal head of the executive, summoning and proroguing the Legislature, appointing and dismissing ministers, and exercising, upon the advice of his ministers, the prerogative of pardon. There is a cabinet of five persons, including the heads of the chief administrative departments, who are the practical executive of the Colony, and are responsible to the Legislature, in which they sit, and at whose pleasure they hold their offices. There is a Legislature consisting of two houses—an Assembly, whose membership was raised in December, 1898, from seventy-nine to ninety-five, and a Legislative Council, with twenty-three members, besides the Chief Justice, who is ex officio President. In Cape Colony (for of the arrangements in Natal I have spoken in a previous chapter) both houses are elected on the same franchise—a low one; but the districts for the election of members of the Council are much larger, and therefore fewer, than the Assembly districts, so the former body is a small and the latter a comparatively numerous one.[76] The rights and powers of both houses are theoretically the same, save that money bills originate in the Assembly; but the Assembly is far more powerful, for the ministry holds office only so long as it has the support of a majority in that body, whereas it need not regard a hostile vote in the Council. Either the English or the Dutch language may be used in debate. Ministers have the right of speaking in both houses, but can, of course, vote only in the one of which they are members by popular election. If it happens that there is no minister who has a seat in the Council (as was the case in 1896), it is usual for the cabinet to allot one to be present in and look after that chamber for the day.

This cabinet system, as it is called, works pretty smoothly, on lines similar to that English original whence it is copied. The most interesting peculiarity is the Cape method of forming the smaller House. In England the Upper House is composed of hereditary members; in the Canadian confederation, of members nominated for life—both of them methods which are quite indefensible in theory. Here, however, we find the same plan as that which prevails in the States of the North American Union, all of which have senates elected on the same franchise, and for the same term, as the larger house, but in more extensive districts, so as to make the number of members of the senate or second chamber smaller. Regarding the merits of the Cape scheme, I heard different views expressed. Nobody seemed opposed in principle to the division of the Legislature into two houses, but many condemned the existing Council as being usually composed of second-rate men, and apt to be obstructive in its tendencies. Some thought the Council was a useful part of the scheme of government, because it interposed delay in legislation and gave time for reflection and further debate. One point came out pretty clearly. No difficulty is deemed to arise from the fact that there exist two popularly elected houses equally entitled to control the administration,[77] for custom has settled that the Assembly or larger house is that whose vote determines the life of a ministry. But it follows from this circumstance that the most able and ambitious men desire a seat in the more powerful chamber, leaving the smaller house to those of less mark. This is the exact reverse of what has happened in the United States; where a seat in the Senate is more desired than one in the House; but it is a natural result of the diverse arrangements of the two countries, for in the Federal Government the Senate has some powers which the House of Representatives does not enjoy, while in each of the several States of the Union, although the powers of the two houses are almost the same, the smaller number of each Senate secures for a senator somewhat greater importance than a member of the larger body enjoys. The Cape Colony plan of letting a minister speak in both houses works very well, and may deserve to be imitated in England, where the fact that the head of a department can explain his policy only to his own House has sometimes caused inconvenience.

So much for the machinery. Now let us note the chief points in which the circumstances of Cape Colony and of Natal (for in these respects both Colonies are alike) differ from those of the other self-governing Colonies of Britain.

The population is not homogeneous as regards race, but consists of two stocks, English and Dutch. These stocks are not, as in Canada, locally separate, but dwell intermixed, though the Dutch element predominates in the western province and in the interior generally, the English in the eastern province and at the Kimberley diamond-fields.

The population is homogeneous as regards religion, for nearly all are Protestants, and Protestants of much the same type. Race difference has fortunately not been complicated, as in Canada, by ecclesiastical antagonisms.

The population is homogeneous as respects material interests, for it is wholly agricultural and pastoral, except a few merchants and artisans in the seaports, and a few miners at Kimberley and in Namaqualand. Four-fifths of it are practically rural, for the interests of the small towns are identical with those of the surrounding country.

The population is not only rural, but scattered more thinly over a vast area than in any other British Colony, except north-western Canada, and parts of Australasia. In Natal there are only two white men to the square mile, and in Cape Colony less than two. Nor is this sparseness incidental, as in North America, to the early days of settlement. It is due to a physical condition—the condition of the soil—which is likely to continue.

Below the white citizens, who are the ruling race, there lies a thick stratum of coloured population numerically larger, and likely to remain so, because it performs all the unskilled labour of the country. Here is a condition which, though present in some of the Southern States of America, is fortunately absent from all the self-governing Colonies of Britain, and indeed caused Jamaica to be, some time ago, withdrawn from that category.

The conjunction of these circumstances marks off South Africa as a very peculiar country, where we may expect to find a correspondingly peculiar political situation. Comparing it to other Colonies, we may say that the Cape and Natal resemble Canada in the fact that there are two European races present, and resemble the Southern States of America in having a large mass of coloured people beneath the whites. But South Africa is in other respects unlike both; and although situated in the southern hemisphere, it bears little resemblance to Australia.

Now let us see how the circumstances above described have determined the political issues that have arisen in Cape Colony.

Certain issues are absent which exist, not only in Europe and the United States, but also in Australia and in Canada. There is no antagonism of rich and poor, because there are very few poor and still fewer rich. There is no working-man's or labour party, because so few white men are employed in handicrafts. There is no Socialist movement, nor is any likely soon to arise, because the mass of workers, to whom elsewhere Socialism addresses itself, is mainly composed of black people, and no white would dream of collectivism for the benefit of blacks. Thus the whole group of labour questions, which bulks so largely in modern industrial States, is practically absent, and replaced by a different set of class questions, to be presently mentioned.

There is no regularly organized Protectionist party, nor is the protection of native industry a "live issue" of the first magnitude.

The farmers and ranchmen of Cape Colony no doubt desire to have custom duties on food-stuffs that will help them to keep up prices, and they have got such duties. But the scale is not very high, and as direct taxation is difficult to raise in a new country with a scattered population, the existing tariff, which averages twelve and a half per cent, ad valorem (but is further raised by special rates on certain articles), may be defended as needed, at least to a large extent, for the purposes of revenue. Natal had a lower tariff, and has been more favourable in principle to free trade doctrine, but she has very recently (1898) entered the S. African Customs Union, therewith adopting a higher tariff. Manufactures have been so sparingly developed in both Colonies that neither employers nor workmen have begun to call for high duties against foreign goods. Here, therefore, is another field of policy, important in North America and Australia, which has given rise to comparatively little controversy in South Africa.

As there is no established church, and nearly all the people are Protestants, there are no ecclesiastical questions, nor is the progress of education let and hindered by the claims of sects to have their respective creeds taught at the expense of the State.

Neither are there any land questions, such as those which have arisen in Australia, for there has been land enough for those who want to have it, while few agricultural immigrants arrive to increase the demand. Moreover, though the landed estates are large, their owners are not rich, and excite no envy by their possession of a profitable monopoly. If any controversy regarding natural resources arises, it will probably turn on the taxation of minerals. Some have suggested that the State should appropriate to itself a substantial share of the profits made out of the diamond and other mines, and the fact that most of those profits are sent home to shareholders in Europe might be expected to make the suggestion popular. Nevertheless, the idea has not, so far, "caught on," to use a familiar expression, partly, perhaps, because Cape Colony, drawing sufficent income from its tariff and its railways, has not found it necessary to hunt for other sources of revenue.

Lastly, there are no constitutional questions. The suffrage is so wide as to admit nearly all the whites, and there is, of course, no desire to go lower and admit more blacks. The machinery of government is deemed satisfactory; at any rate, one hears of no proposals to change it, and, as will be seen presently, there is not in either Colony a wish to alter the relations now subsisting between it and the mother country.

The reader may suppose that if all these grounds of controversy, familiar to Europe, and some of them now unhappily familiar to the new democracies also, are absent, South Africa enjoys the political tranquillity of a country where there are no factions, and the only question is how to find the men best able to promote that economic development which all unite in desiring. This is by no means the case. In South Africa the part filled elsewhere by constitutional questions, and industrial questions and ecclesiastical questions, and currency questions, is filled by race questions and colour questions. Colour questions have been discussed in a previous chapter. They turn not, as in the Southern States of America, upon the political rights of the black man (for on this subject the ruling whites are in both Colonies unanimous), but upon land rights and the regulation of native labour. They are not at this moment actual and pungent issues, but they are in the background of every one's mind, and the attitude of each man to them goes far to determine his political sympathies. One cannot say that there exist pro-native or anti-native parties, but the Dutch are by tradition more disposed than the English to treat the native severely, and, as they express it, keep him in his place. Many Englishmen share the Dutch feeling, yet it is always by Englishmen that the advocacy of the native case is undertaken. In Natal both races are equally anti-Indian.

The race question among the whites, that is to say the rivalry of Dutch and English, would raise no practical issue were Cape Colony an island in the ocean, for there is complete political and social equality between the two stocks, and the material interests of the Dutch farmer are the same as those of his English neighbour. It is the existence of a contiguous foreign State, the South African Republic, that sharpens Dutch feeling. The Boers who remained in Cape Colony and in Natal have always retained their sentiment of kinship with those who went out in the Great Trek of 1836, or who moved northward from Natal into the Transvaal after the annexation of Natal in 1842. Many of them are connected by family ties with the inhabitants of the two Republics, and are proud of the achievements of their kinsfolk against Dingaan and Mosilikatze, and of the courage displayed at Laing's Nek and Majuba Hill against the British. They resent keenly any attempt to trench upon the independence of the Transvaal, while most of the English do not conceal their wish to bring that State into a South African Confederation, if possible under the British flag. The ministries and legislatures of the two British Colonies, it need hardly be said, have no official relations with the two Dutch Republics, because, according to the constitution of the British empire, such relations, like all other foreign relations, belong to the Crown, and the Crown is advised by the British Cabinet at home. In South Africa the Crown is represented for the purpose of these relations by the High Commissioner, who is not responsible in any way to the colonial legislatures, and is not even bound to consult the colonial cabinet, for his functions as High Commissioner for South Africa are deemed to be distinct from those which he has as Governor of Cape Colony. Matters relating to the two Republics and their relation to the Colonies are, accordingly, outside the sphere of action of the colonial legislatures, which have, in strict theory, no right to pass resolutions regarding them. In point of fact, however, the Cape Assembly frequently does debate, and pass resolutions on, these matters; nor is this practice disapproved, for, as the sentiments of the Colony are, or ought to be, an important factor in determining the action of the home Government, it is well that the British Cabinet and the High Commissioner should possess such a means of gauging those sentiments. The same thing happens with regard to any other question between Britain and a foreign Power which may affect the two Colonies. Questions with Germany or Portugal, questions as to the acquisition of territory in South Central Africa, would also be discussed in the colonial Legislatures, just as those of Australia some years ago complained warmly of the action of France in the New Hebrides. And thus it comes to pass that though the Governments and Legislatures of the Colonies have in strictness nothing to do with foreign policy, foreign policy has had much to do with the formation of parties at the Cape.

Now as to the parties themselves. Hitherto I have spoken of Natal and the Cape together, because their conditions are generally similar, though the Dutch element is far stronger in the latter than in the former. In what follows I speak of the Cape only, for political parties have not had time to grow up in Natal, where responsible government dates from 1893. In the earlier days of the Cape Legislature parties were not strongly marked, though they tended to coincide with the race distinction between Dutch and English, because the western province was chiefly Dutch, and the eastern chiefly English, and there was a certain rivalry or antagonism between these two main divisions of the country. The Dutch element was, moreover, wholly agricultural and pastoral, the English party mercantile; so when an issue arose between these two interests, it generally corresponded with the division of races. Political organization was chiefly in English hands, because the colonial Dutch had not possessed representative government, whereas the English brought their home habits with them. However, down till 1880 parties remained in an amorphous or fluid condition, being largely affected by the influence of individual leaders; and the Dutch section of the electorate was hardly conscious of its strength. In the end of that year, the rising in the Transvaal, and the War of Independence which followed, powerfully stimulated Dutch feeling, and led to the formation of the Africander Bond, a league or association appealing nominally to African, but practically to African-Dutch patriotism. It was not anti-English in the sense of hostility to the British connection, any more than was the French party in Lower Canada at the same time, but it was based not only on the solidarity of the Dutch race over all South Africa, but also on the doctrine that Africanders must think of Africa first, and see that the country was governed in accordance with local sentiment, rather than on British lines or with a view to British interests. Being Dutch, the Bond became naturally the rural or agricultural and pastoral party, and therewith inclined to a protective tariff and to stringent legislation in native matters. Such anti-English tint as this association originally wore tended to fade when the Transvaal troubles receded into the distance, and when it was perceived that the British Government became more and more disposed to leave the Colony to manage its own affairs. And this was still more the case after the rise to power of Mr. Cecil Rhodes, who, while receiving the support of the Bond and the Dutch party generally, was known to be also a strong Imperialist, eager to extend the range of British power over the continent. At the same time, the attachment of the colonial Dutch to the Transvaal cooled down under the unfriendly policy of that Republic, whose government imposed heavy import duties on their food-stuffs, and denied to their youth the opportunities of obtaining posts in the public service of the Republic, preferring to fetch Dutch-speaking men from Holland, when it could have had plenty of capable people from the Cape who spoke the tongue and knew the ways of the country. Thus the embers of Dutch and English antagonism seemed to be growing cold when they were suddenly fanned again into a flame by the fresh Transvaal troubles of December, 1895, which caused the resignation of Mr. Rhodes, and the severance from him of his Dutch supporters. Too little time has elapsed since those events to make it possible to predict how parties may reshape themselves, nor is it any part of my plan to deal with current politics. In 1897 feeling still ran high, but it had not destroyed the previously friendly social relations of the races, and there was then reason to hope that within a few months or years mutual confidence would be restored.

So far as I could ascertain, both local government and central government are in the two Colonies, as well as in the Orange Free State, pure and honest. The judiciary is above all suspicion, and includes several distinguished men. The civil service is managed on English principles, there being no elective offices; and nothing resembling what is called the "caucus system" seems to have grown up. There are in the Cape Legislature some few members supposed to be "low-toned" and open to influence by the prospect of material gain, but, though I heard of occasional jobbing, I heard of little or nothing amounting to corruption. Elections were said to be free from bribery, but as they had seldom excited keen interest, this point of superiority to most countries need not be ascribed to moral causes.

Reviewing the course of Cape politics during the thirty years of responsible government, that course appears smooth when compared with the parallel current of events in the Australian Colonies. There have been few constitutional crises, and no exciting struggles over purely domestic issues. This is due not merely to the absence of certain causes of strife, but also to the temper of the people, and their thin dispersion over a vast territory. In large town populations excitement grows by the sympathy of numbers, but South Africa has only five or six towns in which a public meeting of even three hundred citizens could be gathered. The Dutch are tardy, cautious and reserved. The doggedness of their ancestors who resisted Philip II. of Spain lives in them still. They have a slow tenacious intensity, like that of a forest fire, which smoulders long among the prostrate trunks before it bursts into flame. But they are, except when deeply stirred, conservative and slow to move. They dislike change so much as to be unwilling to change their representatives or their ministers. A Cape statesman told me that the Dutch members of the Assembly would often say to him: "We think you wrong in this instance, and we are going to vote against you, but we don't want to turn you out; stay on in office as before." So President Kruger observed to me, in commenting on the frequent changes of government in England: "When we have found an ox who makes a good leader of the team, we keep him there, instead of shifting the cattle about in the hope of finding a better one;" and in saying this he expressed the feelings and habits of his race. To an Englishman the Dutch seem to want that interest in politics for the sake of politics which marks not only the English (and still more the Irish) at home but also the English stock in North America and Australia. But this very fact makes them all the more fierce and stubborn when some issue arises which stirs their inmost mind, and it is a fact to be remembered by those who have to govern them. The things they care most about are their religion, their race ascendency over the blacks, and their Dutch-African nationality as represented by their kinsfolk in the two Republics. The first of these has never been tampered with; the two latter have been at the bottom of all the serious difficulties that have arisen between them and the English. That which was in 1897 exciting them and forming the crucial issue in Cape politics was the strained condition of things which existed in the Transvaal. I propose in the following chapter to explain how that condition came about, and to sketch its salient features.

[Footnote 76: There are for the Council seven electoral provinces, each of which returns three members to the Council, besides one for Griqualand West and one for British Bechuanaland.

A Redistribution Act of 1898 altered the areas of some of the electoral divisions, and the number of members returned by some, so as to adjust representation more accurately to population.]

[Footnote 77: Some friction has, however, arisen from the right claimed by the Council of amending money bills, especially for the purpose (one is told) of securing grants to the electoral provinces they represent.]



CHAPTER XXV

THE SITUATION IN THE TRANSVAAL BEFORE THE RISING OF 1895

The agitation at Johannesburg, which Dr. Jameson's expedition turned into a rising, took place in December, 1895. I spent some time in Pretoria and Johannesburg in the preceding month, and had good opportunities of observing the symptoms of political excitement and gauging the tendencies at work which were so soon to break out and fix the eyes of the world upon the Witwatersrand. The situation was a singular one, without parallel in history; and though I did not know that the catastrophe was so near at hand, it was easy to see that a conflict must come and would prove momentous to South Africa. Of this situation as it presented itself to a spectator who had no personal interest involved, and had the advantage of hearing both sides, I propose to speak in the present chapter.

To comprehend the position of the Transvaal Boers one must know something of their history. From the brief sketch of it given in earlier chapters (Chapters XI and XII) the reader will have gathered how unlike they are to any European people or to the people of the United States. Severed from Europe and its influences two hundred years ago, they have, in some of the elements of modern civilisation, gone back rather than forward. They were in 1885, when the Rand goldfields were discovered, and many of them are to-day, a half-nomad race, pasturing their flocks and herds over the vast spaces of what is still a wilderness, and migrating in their waggons from the higher to the lower pastures according to the season of the year—

—Omnia secum Armentarius Afer agit, tectumque laremque Armaque, Amyclaeumque canem, Cressamque pharetram.

Living in the open air, and mostly in the saddle, they are strangely ignorant and old fashioned in all their ideas. They have no literature and very few newspapers. Their religion is the Dutch and Huguenot Calvinism of the seventeenth century, rigid and stern, hostile to all new light, imbued with the spirit of the Old Testament rather than of the New. They dislike and despise the Kafirs, whom they have regarded as Israel may have regarded Amalek, and whom they have treated with equal severity. They hate the English also,[78] who are to them the hereditary enemies that conquered them at the Cape; that drove them out into the wilderness in 1836; that annexed their Republic in 1877, and thereafter broke the promises of self-government made at the time of the annexation; that stopped their expansion on the west by occupying Bechuanaland, and on the north by occupying Matabililand and Mashonaland; and that were still, as they believed, plotting to find some pretext for overthrowing their independence.[79] This hatred is mingled with a contempt for those whom they defeated at Laing's Nek and Majuba Hill, and with a fear born of the sense that the English are their superiors in knowledge, in activity, and in statecraft. It is always hard for a nation to see the good qualities of its rivals and the strong points of its opponents' case; but with the Boers the difficulty is all the greater because they know little or nothing of the modern world and of international politics. Two centuries of solitary pastoral life have not only given them an aversion for commerce, for industrial pursuits, and for finance, but an absolute incapacity for such occupations, so that when gold was discovered in their country, they did not even attempt to work it,[80] but were content to sell, usually for a price far below its value, the land where the gold-reefs lay, and move off with the proceeds to resume elsewhere their pastoral life. They have the virtues appropriate to a simple society. They are brave, good-natured, hospitable, faithful to one another, generally pure in their domestic life, seldom touched by avarice or ambition. But the corruption of their Legislature shows that it is rather to the absence of temptation than to any superior strength of moral principle that these merits have been due. For politics they have little taste or gift. Politics can flourish only where people are massed together, and the Boer is a solitary being who meets his fellows solely for the purposes of religion or some festive gathering. Yet ignorant and slow-witted as they are, inborn ability and resolution are not wanting. They have indeed a double measure of wariness and wiliness in their intercourse with strangers, because their habitual suspicion makes them seek in craft the defence for their ignorance of affairs; while their native doggedness is confirmed by their belief in the continued guidance and protection of that Providence whose hand led them through the wilderness and gave them the victory over all their enemies.