are cool, and the dry air is invigorating. Had South Africa, like California or New South Wales, been colonised solely by white men, it would probably, like those countries, have to-day a white labouring population. But, unluckily, South Africa was colonised in the seventeenth century, when the importation of negro slaves was deemed the easiest means of securing cheap and abundant labour. From 1658 onward till, in 1834, slavery was abolished by the British Parliament, it was to slaves that the hardest and humblest kinds of work were allotted. The white people lost the habit of performing manual toil, and acquired the habit of despising it. No one would do for himself what he could get a black man to do for him. New settlers from Europe fell into the ways of the country, which suited their disinclination for physical exertion under a sun hotter than their own. Thus, when at last slavery was abolished, the custom of leaving menial or toilsome work to people of colour continued as strong as ever. It is as strong as ever to-day. The only considerable exception, that which was furnished by the German colonists who were planted in the eastern province after the Crimean War of 1854, has ceased to be an exception; for the children of those colonists have now, for the most part, sold or leased their allotments to Kafirs, who till the soil less efficiently than the sturdy old Germans did. The artisans who to-day come from Europe adopt the habits of the country in a few weeks or months. The English carpenter hires a native "boy" to

carry his bag of tools for him; the English bricklayer has a native hodman to hand the bricks to him, which he proceeds to set; the Cornish or Australian miner directs the excavation of the seam and fixes the fuse which explodes the dynamite, but the work with the pickaxe is done by the Kafir. The herdsmen who drive the cattle or tend the sheep are Kafirs, acting under the orders of a white. Thus the coloured man is indispensable to the white man, and is brought into constant relations with him. He is a necessary part of the economic machinery of the country, whether for mining or for manufacture, for tillage or for ranching.

But though the black people form the lowest stratum of society, they are not all in a position of personal dependence. A good many Kafirs, especially in the eastern province, own the small farms. which they till, and many others are tenants, rendering to their landlord, like the métayers of France, a half of the produce by way of rent. Some few natives, especially near Cape Town, are even rich, and among the Indians of Natal a good many have thriven as shopkeepers. There is no reason to think that their present exclusion from trades requiring skill will continue. In 1894 there were Kafirs earning from five shillings to seven shillings and sixpence a day as riveters on an iron bridge then in course of construction. I was informed by a high railway official that many of them were quite fit to be drivers or stokers of locomotives, though white sentiment (which tolerates them as navvies or

platelayers) made it inexpedient to place them in such positions. Many work as servants in stores, and are little more prone to petty thefts than are Europeans. They have dropped their old usages and adopted European habits, have substituted European clothes for the kaross of the wild or 'red" Kafir, have lost their tribal attachments, usually speak Dutch, or even perhaps English, and to a considerable extent, especially in the western province and in the towns, have become Christians. The Indians are, of course, Mohammedans or heathens, the Malays (of whom there are only about 13,000), Mohammedans. They travel a good deal by rail, and are, especially the Kafirs, eager for instruction, which is provided for them only in the mission schools. Some will come from great distances to get taught, and those who can write are very fond of corresponding with one another. Taken as a whole, they are a quiet and orderly people, not given to crimes of violence, and less given (so far as I could gather) to pilfering than are the negroes of the Southern States of America. The stealing of stock from farms has greatly diminished. Assaults upon women, such as are frequent in those States, and have recently caused a hideous epidemic of lynching, are extremely rare; indeed, I heard of none, save one or two in Natal, where the natives are comparatively wild and the whites scattered thinly among them. So few Kafirs have yet received a good education, or tried to enter occupations requiring superior intelligence, that it is hardly

possible to speak confidently of their capacity for the professions or the higher kinds of commerce; but judicious observers think they will in time show capacity, and tell you that their inferiority to white men lies less in mere intellectual ability than in power of will and steadiness of purpose. They are unstable, improvident, easily discouraged, easily led astray. When the morality of their old life, in which they were ruled by the will of their chief, the opinion of their fellows, and the traditional customs of the tribe, has been withdrawn from them, it may be long before any new set of principles can gain a like hold upon them.

That there should be little community of ideas, and by consequence little sympathy, between such a race and the whites is no more than any one would expect who elsewhere in the world has studied the phenomena which mark the contact of dissimilar | peoples. But the traveller in South Africa is astonished at the strong feeling of dislike and contempt-one might almost say of hostility-which the bulk of the whites show to their black neighbours. He asks what can be the cause of it. It is not due, as in the Southern States of America, to political resentment, for there has been no sudden gift to former slaves of power over former masters. Neither is it sufficiently explained by the long conflicts with the south-coast Kafirs; for the respect felt for their bravery has tended to efface the recollection of their cruelties. Neither is it caused (except as respects the petty Indian traders) by the

dislike of the poorer whites to the competition with them in industry of a class living in a much ruder way and willing to accept much lower wages. It seems to spring partly from the old feeling of contempt for the slaves, a feeling which has descended to a generation that has never seen slavery as an actual system; partly from physical aversion; partly from an incompatibility of character and temper, which makes the faults of the coloured man more offensive to the white than the (perhaps morally as grave) faults of members of his own white stock. Even between civilised peoples, such as Germans and Russians, or Spaniards and Frenchmen, there is a disposition to be unduly annoyed by traits and habits which are not so much culpable in themselves as distasteful to men constructed on different lines. This sense of annoyance is naturally more intense toward a race so widely removed from the modern European as the Kafirs are. Whoever has travelled among people of a race greatly weaker than his own must have sometimes been conscious of an impatience or irritation which arises when the native either fails to understand or neglects to obey the command given. The sense of his superior intelligence and energy of will produces in the European a sort of tyrannous spirit, which will not condescend to argue with the native, but overbears him by sheer force, and is prone to resort to physical coercion. Even just men, who have the deepest theoretical respect for human rights, are apt to be carried away by the consciousness of superior strength, and to become