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 whoever 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 in-、 justice 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 organised 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 accustomed 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

1

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 organisation, 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 minds among them. So much may certainly be said that the Gospel and the mission schools are at present the most truly civilising 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.

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 outwitted 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 farm-houses. 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;