ACHIEVEMENT.

We have now come to the point where an answer must be given to the question: If the African Natives are on the whole endowed with a mental capacity equal to that possessed by the Europeans why have they never achieved any civilisation at all comparable with those cultures which have been successively set up by the people of Europe, Asia and Ancient America?

If we take it for granted that the Africans have never achieved a civilisation similar to those that date back beyond the limits of history, a premiss by no means assured seeing that there are signs of cycles of civilisations coming before those of which we have written or monumental records and of whose ethnic origin there is no certain knowledge, then the question may appear to have no other answer than the assumed lack of inherent capacity in the black race, but let us consider the matter closely.

The question asked depends upon the proposition that achievement is the sole test of capacity or, in other words, that achievement must necessarily follow capacity, and this is a proposition by no means free from doubt. It is plain that a desire to achieve is a condition precedent to achievement but it is equally plain that there may well be ability without ambition. The question why civilisation has not followed apparent capacity may with equal propriety be asked about races whose mental abilities have never been doubted. Consider, for instance, two such widely separated races as the Red Indians of our own times and the Northmen who roamed over the seas in the days of Alfred the Great.

The North American Indians, though they achieved no civilisation to be compared with the cultures of Mexico and Peru, yet conserved a very high degree of initiative in other directions. According to competent observers, these people have shown a capacity for wiliness and a power of divination of the obscured workings of nature and of the human mind which have never been surpassed elsewhere. That the high moral and mental status of these people is fully recognised by their European successors is proved by the fact that many Americans in high stations to-day actually boast of having in their veins the blood of the North American Indian. And yet these highly gifted people had not when Columbus discovered America attained to the knowledge of iron. Despite the advantages of a most favourable environment and a stimulating climate, the Red Indians were in point of mechanical development behind the earliest Bantu; they had no iron implements, no tillage and no settled or permanent abodes, and whatever may have been the cause of their lack of development, the fact remains that there was no achievement despite undeniable capacity.

The early Scandinavians who lived in a state of barbarism ages before and long after Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, Greece and Rome developed their various civilisations, furnish another illustration of the fact that there may well be capacity without accomplishment, for no one can doubt the keenness of the minds of these people who have advanced to the front ranks of human endeavour. These rude sea-rovers must have lived in what is generally supposed to have been a most stimulating climate during long ages while other races in Southern Europe and in Asia built up mighty civilisations within environments that seem to have been far less incitative of progress.

Although the broad facts of history are known to us the causes that have contributed in the past to keep down some races while other peoples who were no better endowed or situated rose to the greatest heights of human effort cannot be stated with certainty. It is easy to cite the circumstances that are commonly conjectured as accounting for the origin and growth of civilisation, such as soil, climate and geographical position, but it is equally easy to point to times and places when and where great civilisations have arisen under conditions that have concurred elsewhere with miserable stagnation in rude barbarism.

Climate is, perhaps, the factor which is most generally condescended upon as being the chief of the causes that contribute to that collective accomplishment which we call civilisation, but the connection between the two things is far from clear, indeed it seems to be often negatived by actual facts. Seeing, for instance, that the easy fruition of desire which is possible in tropical and sub-tropical latitudes does away with the idea of necessity as the mother of invention in those parts of the world it becomes difficult to see how tool-using man, who is generally supposed to have originated somewhere in the warm belts, came to take the first and the most difficult steps in the upward progress where there was so little, if any, incentive to that sustained effort and concentration of the mind which is required for the thinking out of the most difficult of all thoughts, the first principles of any art or craft. Why, we may well ask, should the primitive African have worried about cultivating the soil where edible roots and berries abounded? Why should he have bothered about making fire where there was no need of artificial warmth or for the cooking of food? Why should he have cudgeled his brains to fashion weapons and to contrive snares for the killing of game of which he was in no more need than his vegetarian cousins, the anthropoid apes? Why should there have been progress where the environment provided no stimuli therefore, in other words, why should primitive man have moved forward where indulgent nature allowed him to stand still?

If we believe, with Darwin and other students, that our primitive ancestors emerged from somewhere within the warm zones, we cannot avoid the difficulty of reconciling that supposition with the theory that civilisation is in the first instance the result of a stimulating environment. If on the other hand, we surmise that homo sapiens originated in the colder parts of the world we still have to account for the fact that his further progress was made not in those parts but in warmer latitudes where a genial climate afforded no apparent provocation for continued effort in the way of invention and general development.

It would seem that the innate tendency to conservatism latent in man, the disposition to leave things as they are and to stick to the familiar devil rather than fly to unknown gods, is in itself sufficient to account for those lapses in mass-achievement and those long periods of stagnation which mark the course of mankind everywhere. We see how Egypt hovered for centuries on the brink of the discovery of the alphabet but never attained thereto. The exponents of the so-called "pulsatory hypothesis" can hardly claim that a change in the climate will explain the fact seeing that the neighbouring people were able to accomplish this great feat under very similar climatic conditions. We see how China developed a wonderful civilisation while the Western world lay steeped in barbarism, and then went to sleep till now. The size of that great country made possible always the friction between people coming from widely separated localities, which we believe to be conducive to progress, and the climate and general environment seems to have been no less favourable than in Europe and America. We see how the Arabs made great conquests and enriched the world with many patient and accurate observations and then came to a standstill and remained as they are to-day in serene contentment, strangers to the very idea of progress. Can it be said that mental capacity and collective will-power were lacking in any of these people? On the contrary, it is admitted that they were possessed of mental powers as great as those of the restless Europeans of to-day who are rushing onward in a ceaseless pursuit of change, a pursuit made possible only by continuous victory over the forces of conservatism, and this victory, as I think, is gained not through the outward circumstances of climate and geographical surroundings, but through a "divine discontent" which is kindled, we know not how, in the leaders of the world, regardless of time and place, as says the poet of one whom he hails as the deliverer of his country:

"A flaming coal Lit at the stars and sent To burn the sin of patience from her soul, The scandal of content."

It is this inward fire rather than any outward pressure that prompts the captive spirit to break loose from the fetters of the unmoving giant, custom, the greatest of all tyrants, who grows stronger as he grows older. The difficulty of reversing the ways and conditions that have been induced from birth is tremendous, and progress has never been possible without breaking away, always at great risk to the innovators, the stoned prophets of all ages, from the powerful grip of hoary and hallowed custom, which is the essence of conservatism. Initiative implies the breaking of the commandment which enjoins everyone to honour his father and mother that he may live long in the land, a sanction which entails continued adherence to the ancestral ways and ideas, and which, being rooted in instinctive fear of innovation, has power over us all.

Progress, then, has everywhere been the result, in the beginning, of individual initiative in men who were possessed of the power of personality, the "born" leaders of the world who, whether they figured as chiefs or kings, witchdoctors or priests, prophets or lawgivers, were all reformers in their various ways. We see how these restless spirits have appeared everywhere at irregular intervals, not only in localities favoured by nature, but often in the most unlikely places, and there is no reason for thinking that this sporadic cropping up of new leaders will ever cease.

But although we believe that progress has been started always and everywhere by the efforts of reformers that have occurred as spontaneous variations from the dead level of their fellows independent of time and circumstances, we need not deny the effect of environment, especially the effect of an inimical environment, upon a new movement after it has been started, and it may well be that the physical disadvantages of the great "dark" continent may have made difficult, if not impossible, in the past that meeting and friction of different cultures which seem to be essential to the birth of intellectual life, so that here the admitted isolation of the inhabitants during many centuries may have served to squelch initiative and foster stagnation. Nevertheless the influence of environment must not be over-rated for we see that general contentment with resulting inertia have existed for untold ages in places where now the sounds and shocks of daily progress reverberate in a thousand fields of civilised activity without any change being discernible either in the bodily or mental calibre of the people themselves, and this must surely teach us that it is not incapacity nor yet unfavourable physical environment, but that, more than anything else, it is the dead weight of human conservatism that holds down a nation or a race to its particular level; that it is the human element in the general milieu that determines human development, a lesson that has been well summed up in the Chinese aphorism "A man is more like the age he lives in than he is like his father and mother."

Some years ago a theory was advanced which assumed the presence from the beginning of an inherently superior race of blond Europeans who, it was supposed, left their lairs in the North from time to time to harass and conquer essentially inferior people in the South whom they innervated through intermarriage with their superior mentality, and thereby succeeded in rearing those mighty civilisations that waned and fell when the "blue" blood of the invaders became absorbed and lost in the old autochthonous streams. Apart from the lack of cogent evidence this theory, if it may be so called, is unsatisfactory in that it does not explain why these putative super-men failed to establish within their own stimulating environment any of those great cultures that were set up in places and under climatic conditions which are supposed to have been far less provocative to progress. To-day the theories of Gobineau and Houston Chamberlain who both held up the Teutons as being at all times the greatest and noblest of human kind, do not impress the non-Teuton part of the world, nor do the later apostles of the more recent "Nordic" race faith, like Madison Grant, and others of his school, succeed in persuading thinking men and women that the Scandinavians and the English are the only people that ever could initiate and sustain great civilisations. The fact that great civilisations have been built up and are now being developed by people who were and are neither blond nor Nordic makes it impossible to believe these pretensions to exclusive racial genius and merit. "All the talk," says Professor Flinders Petrie, "about Nordic supremacy is vanity when we look at the facts in Europe. Dark Iberians and Picts, Asiatics, Gaels and Celts, are the basis of our peoples. Further, it is in the time of stress and difficulty that the older stocks come again to the top. The majority of the men of power among the Allies have not been fair Nordics but dark men of the underlying races."[19]

Recent study has indeed dissipated that fascinating idyl about the old race of tall, blond Aryans as the originators of our present civilisation, for it has been shown that the so-called Aryan civilisation was inferior in many ways to the primitive culture of neolithic times, and it can now hardly be doubted that our classical civilisation is of Mediterranean origin though Aryanised in speech. It is now generally accepted that history points not to Scandinavia and Germany, but to the lands lying round the Mediterranean Sea as furnishing the matrix out of which civilisation has sprung. It is to the South rather than to the North, to the early people of Egypt, Palestine, Greece and Rome, and not to the primitive inhabitants of Scandinavia and Germany, that we must look for those great men whose intellect and character were strong enough to overcome the natural conservatism of their times. The mind of the early white men of the North never soared higher than a valhalla peopled with puerile deities and blood-stained warriors whereas the swarthy thinkers of the South discovered the unseen God, invented art and philosophy and developed law and government. And though the Church proclaims the highest of all born leaders, Christ himself, to be the very son of God, yet was he a native of Palestine and not a fair-haired, blue-eyed Teuton as represented by mediaeval painters of Germany and Holland.

It is no doubt true that the invaders and the immigrants have often achieved more in their new surroundings than in their homelands, as the Moors in Spain and the Irish in America, but it must not be forgotten that the civilisation which the new-comers have enriched by virtue of their new found freedom from home conservatism has not been of their making; they may have added thereto but they did not beget it; the spade-work, which is the hardest part, had been done before they arrived.

Looking, round the world to-day we see clearly that race is not the determining factor in contemporary progress. In Japan we see a people, admittedly not white, who until yesterday were stagnating under a system of childish feudalism, now developing at a great pace a culture similar with and not inferior to that of modern Europe, while in Western Ireland we see white people living in a state of sloth and squalor below that of many "raw" Bantu tribes in South Africa. These facts show that any race, white black, or yellow, may be kept down simply by the forces of conservatism, chief among which is priestcraft operating through prejudice and superstition in the name of religion. To say this is not to cavil at the priests of any particular time or creed. We must have priests as well as prophets. The prophet of a new faith begins his mission by breaking the images of the priests before him and is succeeded by his own priests who set up new images and dogmas wherewith to conserve the new-found creed until it in turn becomes too old when, in the never-ceasing course of evolution, the law of variation bids a new prophet arise. The priest must needs be to preserve the world from the anarchy of too many reformers, but his power, if long continued, tends to inhibit the divine spirit of discontent which makes for human advancement. It is the priest's duty to preserve the old and to hinder the new, and when he finds he can no longer ignore the new inventions that are made around him he will at most accept the new learning as a means only to preserve the old order whose servant he is. The founder of the Society of Jesus enjoined his followers: "Let us all think in the same way, let us all speak in the same manner, if possible," and it is reported of him that he said that were he to live five hundred years he would always repeat "no novelties in theology, in philosophy or logic, not even in grammar." In Africa priestcraft, in its primitive form of witchcraft, has continued for unnumbered ages to perpetuate the elementary creed of ancestor worship whose chief article is that the ways of the fathers must remain the ways of the children, and that to depart from the old and established order is sinful and wicked, and under this baneful authority progress has been impossible.

But although the heavy conservatism enforced by this primitive cult has smothered initiative during many centuries it does not follow that the mind and character of the African people have been impaired thereby beyond the life of each generation. The mental sloth in which the Western world lay steeped during the dark ages before the Reformation did not become a heritable defect. But apart from the question of the possibility of the transmission of acquired characters we have the fact that within the scope of his daily life the conservative and uncivilised African has to face and solve as many difficult problems as the civilised European in his different surroundings. That these problems are made up of elements differing from those that constitute the problems of the civilised man in his daily avocation proves only a difference of content, not of difficulty. The mental strain involved in leading the so-called simple life of the so-called savage is, on the whole, no less intense than that suffered by the civilised man in maintaining his civilised existence. In the all-surrounding air of superstition and mutual suspicion in which the African moves and has his being he requires cunning to circumvent the cunning of his fellows,—and very deep cunning it sometimes is,—so deep, indeed, that the intellectual European has difficulty in following the dark and devious ways thereof. Vigilance and resourcefulness, careful observation, prudence, forethought, caution, judicious apprizement of character and intelligent calculation of probabilities are required for the planning of the primitive African's daily campaign against the forces of darkness with which he is surrounded, and to carry out these plans he must have courage, firmness of will and self-control in no less measure than the average European city-dweller. To avoid the ever-present chance of being found guilty of witchcraft, which in the past meant always death, the African has had to develop the faculty of lying to a high point of efficiency, and no one who knows him will contend that he is inferior to the European in this respect. The natural education of the Natives include the art of lying as the education of Spartan boys included the practice of larceny. Lying, we know, develops the memory, for a good memory is essential to successful lying. Some of the ruses and stratagems thought out by Natives fleeing from the king's wrath or the witch doctor's doom, of which I have heard from the Natives themselves, have seemed to me to be in subtilty of design and in daring of execution as admirable as any that may be found in contemporary detective fiction, while the fortitude with which defeat and death has been accepted by some of the unfortunate fugitives would evoke admiration in the least impressionable of men. I say therefore that those who deny to the Africans the capacity for sustained collective and purposive effort of mind and body because these qualities have so far not been shown by them in the building up of a civilisation of their own must consider the fact that the nations which to-day lead the world in all the ways of civilisation remained for thousands of years without leaders and without achievement while the people who now lag behind produced those mighty men that led and paved the way to the great civilisations of the past, and I think that we must recognise in that fact a lesson to teach us that present inferiority is no proof of permanent inability, wherefore it may well be that the Natives of Africa will some day rise and compete with their present overlords in the mastery of all the arts and crafts of a modern state.

"But," says the white South African, voicing the general opinion, "this is all very well; the Native may have the brains, but he does not, even now when he has the chance of proving himself, show the same capacity for strenuous and continued effort that the white man has shown. He cannot stand alone; if left to himself he will sink back rapidly into savagery."

That the South African Natives are still in a stage where they cannot stand alone, so that if left entirely to their own devices they would lapse back into barbarism, is not, I agree, open to doubt. But would not the same fate overtake any nation or community, regardless of race, if it were completely cut off from all outside help and influence. The civilised Romans who conquered Britain in the early Christian era, no doubt, looked upon the primitive Britons as a feeble folk when compared with themselves, but the erstwhile slaves have since demonstrated their capacity for developing a civilisation utterly beyond the imagination of their foreign masters. Rome was not built in a day. The rearing of Western civilisation required many centuries, and it can hardly be doubted that if the early builders of the great cultures had been left in isolation instead of being stimulated continually from without through foreign learning and influence neither Ancient Rome nor Modern Europe would have come into being. Isolation has always and everywhere been followed by stagnation and regression and there is no reason for expecting the Natives of South Africa to furnish an exception to the universal rule.

That the average Native is lazy no one who knows him will deny. He is certainly no less lazy than the average European work-man who must be compelled by economic pressure to do hard labour. The rough and menial work of the world has always been done through some sort of compulsion, either slavery or some kind of economic coaction, for it is not in human nature, white or black, to work hard at uncongenial tasks unless superior force in some shape or other supplies the driving power. The manual workers of Europe are forced by the economic conditions under which they live to do the heavy and rough work that has to be done—there are very few, even among white men, who like rough work for its own sake—and when we consider how small are the wants of the average South African Native we are often surprised that he works as hard as he does. The common expression "As lazy as a kaffir" is counterbalanced by the equally common saying used about a white man who works hard at anything "He works like a nigger," which suggests that there is not much difference between the two races in this respect.

Nevertheless the mental attitude of the average Native undoubtedly enables him to enjoy laziness more than the average European whose early habits have been formed by different influences. Primitive man is a lazy man whatever race he may belong to, and civilisation, which has often been helped on by direct slavery, is indeed itself a system of slavery, under which the toilers are driven to their tasks by the goad of necessity. The fact that many Native youths frequently leave their studies before completing the prescribed course, with the entry "Left school tired" against their names, is often cited as showing that the capacity of the Native for sustained mental effort is not as great as that of the average European, but here, again, it must be remembered that the general conditions and home influences under which the bulk of European boys grow up tend to keep them at their studies whereas the Native school boy is not fortified by similar support. The dread of becoming an "unemployable" through lack of education, which is a forcible spur to effort in both parents and children among the whites, is not felt by the Natives who can always find work to do at wages that will satisfy their ordinary wants, and, moreover, the Native's chance of gaining profit and preferment through being well educated are still few in South Africa, so that where there is neither penalty for failure nor reward for success we cannot expect more effort than we find. When education becomes as general in South Africa as it is among the people of Europe then it will be possible to institute fair comparisons. Education is the discoverer of ability and without the opportunity it gives genius will languish and die unknown, as said that acute observer of human nature, Machiavelli, in speaking about the leaders of antiquity, "Without opportunity their powers of mind would have been extinguished and without those powers the opportunity would have come in vain."[20]

Assuming that the capacity for acquiring Western education and civilisation is no greater in the American Negroes than in the Bantu we may note the opinion of a recent student of the race question in America, as being in point here. In his book "Children of the Slaves," Mr. Stephen Graham says "The fact is, Negrodom has to a great extent qualified to vote. Half the population is sunk in economic bondage and illiteracy, but the other half has more than average capacity for citizenship."[21]

The opinion so often expressed in South Africa that "Education is a kind of thing that doesn't agree with the Nigger" is born of the same feeling that animated the power-holding minorities against the illiterate majorities in Europe not many years ago, and, in justice to the minorities, it must be conceded that the effect of education upon the masses has always been disturbing and often disastrous.

Speaking now from my own experience I can say that I have found no ill-effects from education in Natives; on the contrary, I have found, as a rule, that the Native who has had an ordinary school education is generally more amenable to precept and admonition than the raw kaffir though less bovinely submissive and therefore more resentful of indignities offered to him. The fact that the educated kaffir comes more often in the way of committing theft and dishonesty than his illiterate brother is in itself sufficient to account for the not unduly large number of theftuous crimes with which he is credited as a class; but on the other hand, the propensity in the primitive male that leads to sexual assaults upon women is undoubtedly checked and lessened by education and school-discipline. Education will bring out and give scope to all that is good and all that is bad in the Native as it has done with the white man. If the Natives have not sunk to those depths of infamy which are disclosed daily in the criminal courts of Europe and America it is not because of want of the usual percentage of criminally disposed people among them but because of want of education and opportunity. Commercial immorality and developed swindling are impossible without a commerce, but the cupidity that begets these forms of vice is not lacking amongst the Natives and waits only for the opportunities which developed commerce affords. The potential capacity for criminality and immorality is indeed no less among the Natives than among Europeans. Theft, arson, murder and rape are the most common forms of crime committed by the Natives to-day because the opportunities for perpetrating systematic fraud are as yet few among them. Unnatural immorality is common enough in the kraals and in the "compounds," for the Natives have their "perverts" as well as the whites. At the Native "beer-drinks" crapulous lewdness is as common as it is in the bucolic orgies of European peasantry. There is no "Native" innocence nor is there any "Native" vice, the virtue and the vice, the capacity and the character of the Native are the human qualities and failings that are common to mankind.

The Native is no more able to withstand the enervating effects of isolation than the European, he is no more anxious to work hard for small wages, no more and no less capable of honesty and thrift, no more and no less endowed with human virtue, no more and no less cursed with the vices of the world, no more human and no less divine than is his master, the white man.

When Machiavelli asserts in general of men that "they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowards, covetous, and as long as you succeed they are yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life and children—when the need is far distant; but when it approaches they turn against you." He thought, no doubt, of white men only, but to me his appreciation of the baser side of human nature seems no less applicable to the black people of South Africa, and when, on the other hand, Shakespeare declaims:

"What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty!"

he also, we may be sure, thought of his own kind, but to me, again, the beautiful words, which usage cannot cheapen, express the wonder I have often felt at the wealth of imagery, the mental grasp, the wisdom and the natural dignity in very many untutored natives I have met with, and it is this experience which makes me believe that the present difference between the Europeans and the Native race is one of degree and not of kind, and that, in the fullness of time, achievement will follow the latent genius with which, as I hold, nature has endowed, in equal degree with ourselves, the great Bantu branch of the human family.

Yet I am no encomiast of the Natives, for I know them to be no better than other people, but search as I may, I cannot find that Native character which is alleged to be inherently different from the white man's character. Did not Mark Twain find, as the most conspicuous result of his travels, that "there is a good deal of human nature everywhere," and is it not true that human nature is everywhere the same?

We are far too apt to exaggerate both in our disparagement and in our praise of backward people. Many people still think, if they think at all, of the South African Native as a being of the kind imagined by Hobbes when he wrote: "Man in his natural state is towards man as a wolf," and, on the other hand, there are still many who regard him, after the fancy of Rousseau, as a sort of primitive man-child existing in a state of natural innocence from which he is being driven by the corrupting influence of the civilised invaders. But all this is wrong. The Native is not a savage. Even before the whites came to South Africa the Bantu lived in social order under a political system in which the principles of constitutionalism were clearly recognised. To-day the Bantu are simply a race of barbarians in various stages of transition from a crude civilisation to a highly developed civilisation, and we shall do well to remember that the process of transition which we are now witnessing is one in which individual mistakes and failures will be more conspicuous, though no more significant, than the general advance.

MISCEGENATION.

If it is true that the human nature of the Bantu is no whit different from the human nature of the Europeans then it is a fair question to ask why the two races should not be able to live together in liberty, equality and fraternity as people of one nation or body politic. It is because human nature is governed by laws which, unlike the laws of mathematics, cannot be laid down with certainty that we find ourselves unable to give a positive answer to this question. The human nature of the whites, like the human nature of all races that have been predominant before, is swayed by the feelings of pride and prejudice that arise through differences of complexion, physical appearance and bodily odour, as well as the difference in racial achievement, and these essentially human feelings, if they remain as strong as they now are in South Africa, will render impossible the fraternity that implies the liberty to intermarry, so that there arises for our consideration a second question, namely, whether without full fraternity and social equality the two races may yet live together in the land in political liberty and equality.

We observe from the earliest times a rhythmic play, as it were, of opposite forces that tends, alternately, to build up and to break down and mingle human races, but of the laws that underlie and govern these forces we know little or nothing. On the one hand we see how man has always and everywhere shown what the advocates of so-called racial purity have called "a perverse predisposition to mismate" which has made it exceedingly difficult to classify existing human varieties. On the other hand we see throughout nature how a pronounced disparity between varieties of the same species engenders an aversion from one another of the different varieties which seems to arise, in men and animals alike, through the instinct of sexual jealousy which is probably bound up with the primary instinct of self-preservation. Those people who profess belief in the inherent superiority of a particular race naturally look upon the tendency towards race-blending as a perverse proclivity, while those who think that all men are potentially equal regard it as a wholesome instinct provided by nature to counteract the feebleness and infertility which cause the dying-out of the race that becomes too pure.

Racial antipathy seems to depend in the degree of its strength upon the degree of physical disparity between given races. In the so-called Latin races of to-day, prejudice against black people is certainly weaker than in the blond races of Northern Europe. Is this aversion a matter of absolute instinct or is it an acquired social characteristic and as such liable to change? I think the answer must be that this racial repugnance is not naturally inherent in children, nor in women towards the men of a different kind, nor in men towards the women of another race, but that it arises naturally and spontaneously and, in this sense, instinctively, through the feeling of jealousy which is caused, in both men and women, by fear of losing their natural mates to rivals of both sexes from another and disparate race.

White children who grow up together with Native children certainly have no instinctive feeling against their black playfellows; they have to be taught to look down upon and keep away from the companions of their childhood, a fact which no candid observer will deny. It is also a truism of history that the fair-skinned women of a conquered country, as a rule, will yield themselves easily to the swarthy barbarians who have killed or overcome their husbands and brothers. The many women who in British seaports, and in the German towns that were recently occupied by French coloured troops, have lived and cohabited with African men have proved by so doing that they have had no instinctive racial sense of hostility against black men. It has been stated by independent and competent witnesses, who are corroborated by German newspapers of good standing, that the black troops have a very marked attraction for a large number of German women, and that the German men hate the black men because the German women do not.[22] The fact that white women in South Africa and in the Southern States of America never associate with black men does not, I think, prove that they are controlled by instinctive racial or sexual aversion but rather that women, as a whole, are, by reason of their physical inability to dispute with men the ultimate ratio of all order that lies in brute force, thoroughly amenable to the rule of social conventions imposed upon them by their jealous masters. I say this because we see that the aversion that has been inculcated from without tends to disappear wherever the man-established conventions lapse or cease to govern either through the comparatively small numbers of black men being insufficient in certain localities to cause fear in the white men living there, as in some seaport towns, or through the temporary break-down of the customary standards of society brought about by war and revolution, as in those parts of Germany that were recently garrisoned by coloured soldiers.

Nature having cast upon the male the duty of winning and holding the females of his species it is easy to see why the racial feelings of jealousy and ill-will are more positive and more active in the man than in the woman, and this explains, as far as these things can be explained, why white men will allow themselves to cohabit freely with black women to whom they feel naturally attracted but will "see red" and commit murder as soon as they find a black man attempting to gain the favour of a woman of their own colour. "Un adolescent aime toutes les femmes" say the French, and it is generally accepted that man is by nature more inclined to polygamy than woman is towards polyandry, still man and woman are both swayed and motived by the same elemental jealousy that is born of fear of losing something valued; the emotion which Descartes has so well defined as "une espece de crainte qui se rapport au desir qu'on a de se conserver la possession de quelque bien."

It is, no doubt, true that the thinking white woman, no less than the thinking white man, is led to feel dismay and even resentment against the Natives by apprehension of the possibility of danger to white civilisation through fusion of white and black, but this is a feeling caused by intelligent appreciation rather than by instinctive apprehension, and as such liable to be dispelled by argument tending to show that no real danger threatens. During a recent agitation against miscegenation in Rhodesia a number of letters written by white women appeared in the press from which it was easy to gather that the chief concern of the writers was not the possible degradation of the whites, though this was not overlooked, but rather the simple fact that some white men were cohabiting with black women to the prejudice of the matrimonial chances of eligible women of their own race.

But it is unwise to dogmatise in the realms of social and racial psychology; we have not yet discovered the means for analysing with precision the subtle elements of the human soul. I have used the word instinct here in the sense given to it by William James, who defines it as "the faculty of acting in such a way as to produce certain ends without foresight of the ends, and without previous education in the performance," but when we reflect upon the transitoriness of human instincts, as compared with those of animals, and recognise that the human instincts are, as James also says, implanted in us for the sake of giving rise to habits, and then to fade away, we see how difficult it is to draw a line between the instinctive and the acquired or habitual mood or feeling.

If we believe that racial antipathy is caused by the feeling of jealousy that arises instinctively, so to speak, from man's inner nature, then it is safe to say that it will last as long as the substance from which it springs, and as long as the racial difference which provokes it remains, but this belief is not firmly established in the general mind. The whites, as a whole, feel far from sure about the permanence of their cherished pride and prejudice of race; they are, more or less consciously afraid that the antipathy upon which they rely may become weakened and eventually dissipated by close contact of the two races in places where economic pressure has reduced both to the same level of life. We shall do well to remember the words of Renan when we try to estimate the truth of this matter, "La verite consiste dans les nuances," for both estimates may be true; the racial instinct may have to yield here and there to the superior force of economic pressure, and may yet in the main prove powerful enough to prevent the contact that tends to render it of no effect.

The racial feeling which we are considering is undoubtedly much stronger at present in the whites than in the Bantu, but there is reason to believe that the awakening desire for racial self-assertion which we call pride of race will grow and increase in the Bantu as it has done in the Negroes in the Southern States of America, and elsewhere. General education, so far from hindering the growth of nationalism and racialism seems in some sort to subserve and foster that growth; witness the strident self-assertion of the newly-constituted little nations in Europe, and the cult of "Nationalism" in South Africa to-day. It is natural for birds of feather to flock together and screech together, and in the same way throughout mankind particular groups of people tend naturally to keep together and to marry among themselves separately from the rest of the community by which they happen to be surrounded, and this ethnic instinct, if so it may be called, is seen to operate even where, as among the Italian immigrants in America, there is no great racial difference between them and the Native-born inhabitants, and, much more markedly, in the Southern States of America where, according to a recent observer, the present tendency is not towards but away from miscegenation, so that the ultimate blending of colour is not likely to take place there in the course of nature.[23]

The normal Native man does not hanker after white women, and the normal Native woman is not, as a rule, anxious to mate with a white man, but this normal disposition is apt to be disturbed by the familiarity which is bred by the close contact that occurs in towns and other centres. It is not, therefore, safe to deny the possibility that with advancing industrialism in congested areas there will be some white women ready to marry or cohabit with Native men who are either in positions of relative superiority or in possession of more money than their white fellow-workers or neighbours, making it possible for them to outbid these in the providing of comparative ease and luxury, which things have always appealed strongly to women of all races. Yet I think that those who prophesy the speedy merging of the two races in South Africa do not give sufficient weight to the fact of the collective consciousness of a racial entity which, being strongly established in the European section, is also being fostered and increased in the Natives by the civilisation which is now spreading among them, so that it seems reasonable to expect that the European aversion from racial blending will be reciprocated from the Native side more and more as time goes on, and that this reciprocal feeling will go far towards keeping the two races biologically intact. I think, therefore, that despite the conditions that conduce to miscegenation, the factor of the growing and reciprocal desire in both races to remain ethnically separate will gain the day.

Many people think that the coloured people in South Africa, who are most numerous in the vicinity of Cape Town, but are also scattered all over the country, will form, as it were, a bridge between the two sections of the population for their eventual coalescence. But when this conclusion is closely examined it is seen to rest on debatable premises, for it is admitted that by far the greater part of the miscegenation that is now going on is between white men and coloured or black women and not between coloured or black men and white women, from which it follows, as has been pointed out by Boas,[24] that, as the numbers of children born does not depend upon the numbers of men but upon the numbers of women, the result will be a bleaching of the black element, here and there, and not a darkening of the whites in South Africa.

Statistics have, indeed, been quoted which show that between the year 1904 and the year 1911 the coloured population increased in the Cape Province by fifteen per cent, while the total population increased by only six and a half per cent., but these figures do not show how much of the coloured increase is due to propagation among coloured people themselves and how much to unions between white men and coloured women. When it is noted that in the year 1911 the European increase over the year 1904 in the whole Union of South Africa was 14.28 per cent., and that of all non-European elements only 15.12 per cent., it will be seen that although the black increase is on a larger basis it hardly justifies alarm over an imagined flood of overwhelming coloured numbers.

If the coloured increase is due chiefly to propagation among the coloured people themselves then it forms a good argument against those who assert that the half-caste is relatively inclined to sterility, while if the increase is found to be due to cohabitation of white men with coloured women then it is a fair illation that the coloured section is in process of absorption by the whites. This assumed process of absorption will, no doubt, entail the presence of a certain, even a large, number of coloured people for many generations to come, but this number will grow smaller, and not greater, as time goes on because there is no reason to doubt that the white women of South Africa, as a whole, will refrain in the future as they have refrained in the past from cohabiting with black men, so that the observed tendency towards the diffusion of the coloured element back into the parent streams will be allowed to continue.

But let us for a moment look calmly, and as far as possible without prejudice, at the people who in South Africa are said to furnish the awful example of the alleged evil of the crossing of white and black. The fact that the denunciation of these people is based on opposite and contradictory arguments shows that it is not the result of clear thinking. On the one side it is vehemently asserted that the coloured man is a physiological misfit, a sort of hybrid unfit for the society of either white or black and an alleged relative sterility of his kind is advanced as proof of this assertion. On the other side it is said, with equal vehemence, that the coloured people are mongrels, unfit to mingle with the pure parental breeds, and that this is proved by their excessive fecundity. The coloured people are also accused of being inferior in physical constitution when compared with either of the parent races, and therefore undesirable.

My own observations, corroborated by the opinions of many other observers, leads me to believe that the fecundity of the coloured people is neither greater nor less than that of other people—white, black or yellow—whose birthrate is not artificially restricted, and that their general physical constitution, when not undermined by disease or stunted by underfeeding, is as strong as that of any other human variety. The great naturalist, Wallace, has insisted that some degree of difference favours fertility, but that a little more tends to infertility, and by applying this hypothesis to the facts as I have observed them I am led to believe that there is no biological difference between the Bantu and the European of a degree sufficient to produce any difference, one way or the other, in the fertility of the offspring of the two races, but proper statistics, continued over several generations, will, of course, be required to prove or disprove this conclusion.

The gravest, and, as I think, the most unjust of the many charges brought against these people by an unthinking public, is that the half-caste, wherever he is found, partakes of all the vices but of none of the virtues of his parents. When we remember that in the towns of South Africa the coloured people of necessity form the class that in the nature of things is peculiarly exposed to the temptations of prostitution and crime, then it becomes a matter for wonder that these people are as good and as law-abiding as indeed they are. People who know South Africa will admit that the coloured girl is from childhood exposed to the temptation of loose-living far more than either the Native girl in the kraal or the European girl in her home, and that the coloured boys and youths, by reason of the lack of the right kind of home-influence, which is the result of the unfavourable position in life of the bulk of their parents, naturally gravitate towards the levels where it becomes difficult to avoid crime. But despite all these adverse conditions that press so heavily against them the coloured people of South Africa, taken as a whole, stand justified of the calumnies uttered against them. The coloured people as a whole are not behind the whites in anything except in the lack of opportunity for education and self-improvement, a lack caused not by themselves, but by their inimical surroundings.

That many of the coloured people are immoral and shiftless need not be denied; the same may be said about the "poor whites," who as a class perplex well-meaning legislators, but neither of these proved accusations give reason for thinking that either of these classes is inherently inferior to their more favourably-placed fellow-beings. We must always remember the tremendous handicap of being reared in the depressing surroundings of sloth and squalor. I have seen hundreds of poor whites—as white as any blond German could wish to be—who seemed utterly unfit for the complexities of civilised life, but I have also seen many of the children of these people who, after being removed from their home surroundings, have risen to positions of usefulness and trust, in which they have earned reputations for integrity and capacity. The trenchant saying of a British working-man is in point, "Treat a man like a dog and he will behave like a dog," and the corollary is equally true, that if you treat a man as a man he will, as a rule, rise and quit himself like a man.

The familiar cry that once white blood is diluted with black it is "all up" with our civilisation is not convincing when we remember that the ground-work of this civilisation was built up by races that were not "pure white"; that the white civilisation during the dark ages sank to a very low level through no dilution of African blood, and that it was a mixed race, the Moors, who brought back into Europe the lost principles of Aristotelian science on which the crumbling structure of European culture was rebuilt. To believe that the people of Asia and of Africa may be capable of attaining to Western civilisation, but that the offspring produced by the crossing of these races with whites will not have the necessary capacity therefor is to me impossible. So far from being deterrent to mental growth it would seem that an infusion of African blood in the European serves rather to increase mental capacity; at any rate, those who know South Africa well will not deny that an unmistakable tincture of African blood in a white family is often associated with marked intellectual ability. Against this concession it has indeed been alleged that, while it must be admitted that a small admixture of black blood in a white race enriches it, a small admixture of white blood in a black race degrades it, but this fanciful notion has not been supported by scientific data. The truth of the matter is that as the blacks are the underdogs, the half-breed becomes a racial and social bastard, as indeed he is openly named in South Africa, a man condemned before he is tried, handicapped from birth in a way that would drag down and keep under most of those who shout loudest about their racial superiority. It is his condition and not his nature that keeps the coloured man underneath.

To the man who in face of the facts of history and of to-day believes that all we have of civilisation we owe to the Teutonic or to the Nordic type of man, and that nothing good can ever come out of coloured Nazareths, the possibility of the whites in South Africa becoming browned by the selective agency of tropical light or by an infusion of African blood, no doubt, seems an evil to be prevented at any cost, but those who, like myself, have seen coloured women working in their homes as thriftily and self-sacrificingly as the best of our own women, and coloured men labouring steadily against heavy odds to improve their condition, have become convinced that the coloured people of South Africa suffer under no inherent disabilities when compared with the whites, and for this reason we cannot join in the general wail over a predicted evil which we regard as exaggerated in itself and not, moreover, likely to happen. I would not, however, be taken to advocate the inter-breeding of white and black. Those who have witnessed the misery and suffering which the coloured people have to endure for being coloured will welcome any fair means of preventing miscegenation in South Africa. Proscriptive legislation has been advocated by both the detractors and the defenders of the half-breed, as a means of preventing what both schools, for their different reasons, regard as wrong and undesirable, but I cannot agree that it can ever be right or expedient to penalise and make criminal a natural act which under existing conditions is in many places unavoidable.

There can be no doubt that the evil of miscegenation in South Africa has been greatly exaggerated, both in respect of its nature and its extent, but, nevertheless, so long as the racial prejudice of the white man remains as strong as it is to-day—and there is nothing to show that it is likely to decrease in the future—so long will it be the duty of all good citizens to discourage by persuasion and precept the production of children for whom the ruling race has no love and little pity. Even those among the whites who, in a spirit of good will and tolerance urge that the coloured people should receive preferential treatment because of the white blood which is in them, cannot escape having their point of view warped by their racial prepossession, for, surely, it is not because of a man's class or colour that he is treated as a man to-day but because of his being a civilised member of a civilised community. Nevertheless, the day when civilisation shall be the sole qualification for full membership of the civilised community of South Africa is not yet.

I say, therefore, in answer to the question whether, without the full fraternity which seems impossible here, the white and the black races may not live together in South Africa in political liberty and equality, that the trend of events leads to the belief that the established pride of race of the whites, and the growing pride of race among the Natives will conduce to voluntary separation wherever this is possible, and that in this way the coming generations will contrive to live territorially separate under a common governance, founded upon political equality and liberty.

CONCLUSION.

The evidence before us leads inevitably to the conclusion that there is nothing in the mental constitution, or in the moral nature of the South African Native, to warrant his relegation to a place of inferiority in the land of his birth, but the same evidence also leads to the conclusion that the racial antipathy which prevails to-day will remain unaffected by this admission, seeing that this racial animosity is caused not by alleged mental disparity but by unalterable physical difference between the two races.

It is important that this distinction be grasped for it goes to the root of the matter. It is the marked physical dissimilarity of the black man that rouses the fear and jealousy of the white man, and not any inherent mental inferiority in him. And we must take human nature as we find it, inscrutable and immutable as it is; wherefore we must reckon with, and not hastily condemn, the imponderable purpose of a fundamental instinct which is older than speech and deeper than thought, so that, although we admit that this racial antipathy is not justified by logical reasoning, we may nevertheless recognise it as a feeling grounded in man's inner nature—in his heart, so to speak—hardening it against other men whom he feels he cannot receive and entreat as brothers; in other words, we may say that this feeling is not the result of ratiocination but of forces that are deeper and more elemental than reason; that it is a hardening of heart rather than a mental conviction, in which sense we may apply the words of Pascal "Le caeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait pas."

Now if I am right in thinking that this racial feeling is engendered instinctively by physical dissimilarity only then we may not expect it to be removed or even lessened by the increased and general advancement of the Natives, for although we may hope that the whites will gradually come to recognise the abstract justice of the civilised Natives' claim to full racial equality we must, at the same time, remember that the increasing competition of the black man in every walk of life is bound to bring into play and accentuate the natural race prejudice of the white man whereby the tolerance and good feeling that might otherwise result from a growing recognition of the civilised Natives' mental and moral worth will be more than negatived. The present state of affairs in the Southern States of America is a warning against easy optimism in this respect. We must expect clashing and growing ill-will rather than social serenity to be the outcome of a continued policy of drift.

To condemn the wrong of repression would to-day be like preaching to the converted. Most people now admit that the Africans are entitled, no less than the Europeans, to develop themselves as far and as fully as they can, but the question remains how they can be allowed to do so without intensifying present antipathy on both sides. Parallelism is a word that has been used a great deal of late to signify an attitude of mind, as I take it, rather than a definite policy or plan of action, through which it is hoped that separate scope for civilised activity and development may be given to the Natives on lines parallel to those along which the whites pursue their separate course, but without any forced territorial separation of the two people. Metaphor of this kind is undoubtedly useful to the political speaker in that it enables him to be apt without being exact, and thereby frees him from the possibility of being pinned down to a stated position, but in serious discussion exactness rather than aptness is desired, and to the thinking man the figure of speech, by which the notion of two lines running always parallel without meeting is applied to the course of development of two races living together in one country, is not convincing.

This idea of parallelism is based on the presumption that the ruling race can so rule itself that by the mere exercise of its collective will-power it can refuse always to mix socially with the growing numbers of civilised Natives living and working in the same localities, and thereby—in a manner not yet explained—avoid always the clashing and ill-will that seems inseparable from the close contact of two dissimilar races competing against one another in one country. The advice offered from afar is that the whites should allow the Natives equal opportunities with themselves in all the ways of civilised activity, but—should not invite them home to dinner. Being based on an unwarranted presumption parallelism here begs the question, for it is precisely the ability of the ruling race to follow this counsel of perfection that is in doubt. It is easy to urge that the Europeans must maintain their position in South Africa as "a benevolent aristocracy of ability," but we want to know how this can be done. A recent contributor to the general question of colour has stated that the true conception of the inter-relation of white and black races should be "complete uniformity in ideals, absolute equality in the paths of knowledge and culture, equal opportunity for those who strive, equal admiration for those who achieve; in matters social and racial a separate path, each pursuing his own inherited traditions, preserving his own race-purity and race-pride; equality in things spiritual; agreed divergence in the physical and material."[25] But, again, we want to know how this abstract conception is to be put into actual practice in this world of things as they are.

I have said that the Natives do not hanker after intimate social intimacy with the whites, but this does not mean that the civilised black man who has risen to the economic and educational level of the European remains indifferent whenever his claim to ordinary social recognition is denied or ignored. He would not, indeed, be human if he did not feel hurt whenever he is slighted and treated with contempt by people from whom he differs only in his physical appearance and colour. In one of his essays, dealing with Native matters, Professor Jabavu, a Native, describes how "high" feeling arose among the Native teachers and boys in a certain training institution in South Africa at which he had been invited to lecture because he was not allowed to see the inside of the European principal's house, despite the fact that he had ten years of English university life behind him.[26] Such feeling is only natural and must tend always to create ill-will, and, knowing how strong is the convention of the whites against social recognition of the educated Native, we must expect increased bitterness in the future, rather than growing good-will.

The thinking white man, who would fain be just to every one, is perplexed by two conflicting emotions. He feels that the clean-living, law-abiding, educated Native is a man not inferior to himself whom he therefore ought to recognise as a fellow-citizen, but whenever he sees this fellow-citizen aspiring or laying claim to the social recognition that involves contact with white women he is filled instantly with wrath which he cannot justify to himself and yet cannot suppress. It is easy to see that where instead of common courtesy and mutual recognition from one another of two sections of a community, constant irritation and ill-will result, there the existence of the whole is threatened with disaster. Under such conditions we must expect, not parallel progress, but strife and enmity; not peace, but a sword.

The Jews may be cited to show how a separate and peculiar people may be able to live together with other races without either clashing with or being assimilated by these but we must remember that the ethnic difference between the Jews and Europeans are too slight to sustain serious and lasting race-antipathy. Parallelism, when applied to the Native problem of South Africa, is clearly nothing more than the old, plan-less drift continued in the pious hope that human nature will sooner or later change into something better than what it is to-day. But human nature will not change. We must never leave passion out of account. If we recognise love we must recognise hate also as a moving force of mankind. Neither must we overlook vanity and arrogance. The white man, being human, will not cease to be vain and ambitious, he will not cease to feel the hatred that comes from the fear of losing possession of his mates, and possession is the natural man's definition of love. Where there is a sense of possession there will also be jealousy and hate, and it will only be by securing the white man in his sense of racial integrity that peace and good-will can be made to last.

Territorial separation of the home-life of the two races is the only way by which parallel development can take place. Some of the Native leaders who have opposed this policy have done so in the belief that their people might eventually be able to prove and enforce their claim to full racial equality, but they have not realised that this claim will be denied always on physical grounds, and not on considerations of moral worth. These leaders mean well but they do not see well. Smarting under the pain of their treatment they do not perceive that the real issue is one of unalterable physical disparity.

The hardships and disabilities under which the educated Native suffers in the Northern Provinces of the Union and in Rhodesia are patent and serious. It is hard that a civilised man may not travel in his own country without a "certificate"; it is hard that he must do only rough or menial, but always ill-paid, work when he is capable of doing skilled and well-paid labour; it is hard that when he is allowed to do skilled labour he cannot claim the wages of a skilled labourer; it is hard to be denied always the privileges of a civilised existence for which he has proved himself fit and worthy; it is hard to be treated always as an inferior and an alien in the land of his fathers; all this is hard, but—'tis the law, written and unwritten, made and enforced by the dominant race, and there is no reason to think it will be made less hard as the pressure of black competition increases.

But if good and ample land can be set aside in the various territories of spacious South Africa in which the Natives can live and move without let or hindrance; in which they can do what work they like for themselves and for their own people; in which they can engage, according to their individual desires, in all kinds of trades and commerce without the prohibition of the white man's colour-bar; in which they can earn the wages that are governed by the laws of supply and demand only; in which they can build up after their own fashion courts of law and political councils for themselves; in which, in fine they can live and work out their own salvation, unhurried and unworried by strange and impatient masters, then, surely, the Natives of South Africa will have gained a great gain, far greater than any they can ever hope to win by pitting their undeveloped strength against the organised resistance of the whites.

The policy of territorial separation, which is now part of the law of the Union of South Africa,[27] is the only policy that will make possible a home existence for the Natives in their own homeland, for we know that, however educated and however worthy the civilised Native may become, he cannot hope to find a home, or to feel at home, among the whites. Rightly or wrongly, the whites have banged, bolted and barred their doors against the blacks, and neither moral worth nor educational qualifications will serve to open them. But in their own areas the Natives will have their own homes and their own home-life, without which human existence is indeed miserable. Those among them who long for the privilege of private ownership will be able to acquire land in freehold in localities set aside therefor, while those who cling to the old ways will be allowed to continue as before under their old system of communal land tenure.

With freedom of movement and action under a minimum of European supervision and control the Natives will, in their own areas, have full opportunity and scope for the development of a home-civilisation of their own along lines similar to, if not identical with, those by which the Europeans follow their separate ways. It is a heroic plan, and it will demand great sacrifice from both peoples, but who can doubt that the end will be worth the effort? The Natives may in some places have to leave the land where their ancestors are buried, and the whites will, in many places, have to accept the price of expropriation for land and houses hallowed and made precious by effort and memories, but the great general gain at the end will undoubtedly be worth all that must be surrendered now. This policy is the only one that holds out hope of peace and happiness for both races. If the fears and objections that are being raised by a few Natives and by individual Europeans here and there are allowed to frustrate this, the only practical plan so far devised, the future generations of both white and black in South Africa will assuredly curse the day their fathers wavered and failed to make the only just and fair provision that could be made.

To those, who for religious reasons feel doubtful about the righteousness of a plan that denies to the Natives the privilege of social equality which is implied in the ideal of the brotherhood of man, I would quote the words of Paul who, when speaking at Athens of the separation of the sons of Adam, said that God "hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitations,"[28] for, whether we take this statement to be the inspired utterance of a holy apostle, or simply the reasoned opinion of an acute observer, we must admit that the words convey the experience of the ages that races which are physically dissimilar tend naturally, and therefore, rightly, to dwell apart within their respective racial boundaries.

Some people have professed to be afraid that the territorial separation of the two races will tend to consolidate the Natives, and thereby foster animosity towards the whites which may eventually lead to open war, but this fear seems to have no ground in reason, because it is not proposed, nor, indeed, would it be physically possible, to segregate the Natives by themselves in one great area. On the contrary, it is proposed to dispose of the Natives, as far as possible, according to present geographical and tribal conditions, in several and separate territories, so that race-consolidation of a kind inimical to the whites will naturally be less likely to occur where the Natives live as separate tribes, speaking their different languages, than where, as in the Southern States of America, the Negroes have English as a common medium for the expression of a common race-interest.

Other people, again, are in doubt as to whether the Natives, as a whole, approve of this policy by which their future existence is to be shaped and determined. The answer is contained in the words of Sir William Beaumont, in his report of the findings of the Native Lands Commission, which gathered evidence from all concerned in 1916, where he says "The great mass of the Native population in all parts of the Union are looking to the Act (the Act providing for territorial separation) to relieve them in two particulars—the first is to give them more land for their stock, and the second is to secure to them fixity of tenure."[29] Regarding the Natives of Rhodesia I am able to say that all the elderly Native men with whom I have spoken about this subject—and I have conversed with a large number—agree that the policy, as outlined in the Native Lands Act and the Native Affairs Act of 1920, as I have explained it to them, is good and sound.

It is true that certain prominent Natives of the educated class have protested strongly against this policy, but it is not true that these men have spoken on behalf of the Natives as a whole; indeed, it is safe to say that the vast bulk of the Natives of South Africa have even now no clear knowledge of the legislation that has been made recently in the pursuance of this policy. The protests that have been made from the Native side, moreover, have been directed against the hardship caused through harshness in carrying out the Act in certain places, and against the relative smallness of the areas proposed for Native occupation, and not against the principle itself, and there can be no doubt that the statement quoted from the Report of the Native Lands Commission conveys the true feeling of the large majority of the Natives.

These are some of the objections that have been raised to the policy of territorial separation, but the gravest danger to the successful working of that policy remains to be mentioned. It is the possibility that the cupidity of the whites may lead them to remove their black neighbour's landmarks in the event of the discovery of new fields of gold or other valuable minerals within the Native areas. The danger of such a lapse from the righteousness that exalteth a nation can only be averted by the constant exercise of the public conscience of the whites themselves.

No reasonable person will expect that this policy will do away entirely with all the little troubles that arise from the clashing of opposite racial interests. In the white areas the Native, who can come there only as a labourer or visitor, not as a settler, will remain subordinate to the whites, but his unavoidable competition in trade and industry may nevertheless lead to friction now and then, and the continuance of the present pin-prick policy of enforcing humiliating pass-laws and similar racial restrictions will certainly lead to trouble. But if tolerance and honesty prevail in our councils we shall be able to adjust and settle the many questions that are bound to arise from time to time through the juxtaposition in the industrial field of the two immiscible elements.

But I must come to an end. I have tried to show that there is good reason for accepting the Bantu as the equals of Europeans in every respect save past achievement, but that because of unalterable physical disparity, and not because of any mental inequality, the whites and the blacks cannot live in peace and good-will together in one place, wherefore it follows, as a necessary conclusion, that territorial separation is the only way to lasting peace and happiness in South Africa. I say, therefore, that the black man's place in his own country must be assigned not below, nor above, but apart from that of the white man, for that which nature has made separate man may not join together. I have endeavoured also to show that there is good reason for believing the Bantu to be no less capable of adopting and adapting Western civilisation than other races which in the past have risen from rude barbarism to high culture, but here I admit that the full proof of my belief must be given by the Natives themselves.

The difficulties in the way are many and serious, but if we of the power-holding race remain true to the great principles of justice and fairness which have guided our forefathers in their upward path we shall not go astray. So long as we remember the lesson of history voiced in the saying of the Romans "As many slaves so many enemies" we shall refrain from the means of repression which have always reacted adversely on the repressors; we shall realise that we cannot set artificial barriers in the way of the civilised Native if he proves that he has the capacity for going higher and the will to try, and we shall learn to treat him, not as a slave, nor as a child, nor yet as a brother in the house, but as a man. The Natives can in fairness demand no more, the whites can in fairness yield no less.



Printed by CAPE TIMES, LTD., Cape Town.—S6420.

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FOOTNOTES

[1] Article on Anthropology in Nelson's Encyclopaedia. The "gnathic index" is said to show that Europeans and Bushmen are orthognathous.

[2] "Man and Woman" by Havelock Ellis.

[3] "The Mind of Primitive Man" by Franz Boas.

[4] "Children of the Slaves" by Stephen Graham.

[5] "Anthropological Notes on Bantu Natives from Portuguese East Africa" by C.D. Maynard, F.R.C.S.E., Statistician and Clinician to the South African Institute for Medical Research, and G.A. Turner, M.B., B.Ch., Aberdeen D.P.H., Medical Officer to the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association.

[6] "The Growth of the Brain" by H.H. Donaldson, Professor of Neurology in the University of Chicago.

[7] "The Mind of Primitive Man" by Franz Boas.

[8] "The Antiquity of Man" by Arthur Keith, M.D., LL.D., F.R.C.S., F.R.S.

[9] "Ancient Hunters" by W.J. Sollas, D.De., LL.D., Professor of Geology and Palaeontology in the University of Oxford.

[10] "Anthropology" by R.R. Marett.

[11] "The Antiquity of Man" by Arthur Keith, M.D.

[12] "Initiative in Evolution" by Walter Kidd, M.D., F.R.S.E.

[13] "The Antiquity of Man" by Arthur Keith, M.D.

[14] "The Growth of the Brain" by H.H. Donaldson.

[15] "Social Environment and Moral Progress" by Alfred Russell Wallace, O.M., D.C.L., Oxon.

[16] "The Varieties of Human Speech" by Edward Sapier, in Smithsonian Institute Report for 1912.

[17] "730 Sechuana Proverbs" by Solomon T. Plaatje.

[18] "Throwing the Bones" is the usual form of divination practised by the Natives in Rhodesia.

[19] "What is Civilisation." Article by Professor W.M. Flinders Petrie, in the Contemporary Review for January, 1921.

[20] "The Prince" by Niccolo Machiavelli.

[21] "Children of the Slaves" by Stephen Graham.

[22] Der Christliche Pilger of 9th May, 1920, and Volklinger Nachrichten of 14th June, 1920.

[23] "Children of the Slaves" by Stephen Graham.

[24] "The Mind of Primitive Man" by Franz Boas.

[25] "The Colour Problem" by Sir F.D. Lugard, in Edinburgh Review for April, 1921.

[26] "The Black Problem" by Professor D.D.G. Jabaou.

[27] When General Smuts introduced his Native Affairs Bill in the Union Parliament in May, 1920, he said, inter alia, that he hoped that under a policy of territorial separation, which was now the law of the land, it would be possible to carry out the idea of parallel institutions for the Natives by means of which they could deal with their own concerns. In the course of his speech General Smuts also said "the Pass laws do the Whites no good and are intolerable to the Natives." The Native Affairs Act of 1920 provides for the establishment of a permanent Native Affairs Commission, and for the Creation of local Native Councils or conferences of Native Chiefs and other representatives for the discussion of all questions affecting the interests of the Natives. In explaining the nature and scope of this Act the Prime Minister said that more study and investigation, and more consultation with the Natives were required before it could be said that the areas suggested by the Beaumont Commission were fair and proper.

[28] Acts 17—26.

[29] Native Lands Commission. Minute by Sir W.H. Beaumont.

THE END