Chapter VII: The Psychology of the Boer (3)

Ignorant persons may suppose, when they hear to-day of Americans who belong to what is probably, on the whole, the most enlightened and humane state on the globe, first mutilating and partially dismembering the Negro, and then applying the fire gradually to parts of his body that he may roast the more slowly, that the men performing such deed must of necessity be cut off from the rest of their race by a fiendish ferocity peculiar to themselves and an anti-social structure of mind. Such ignorant persons also undoubtedly picture to themselves the owners of the English slave-ships (who have perhaps inflicted a larger amount of suffering on the human race than any other body of men of equal number in the history of the race) as persons wholly devoid of human sympathies, who could not be trusted to deal justly or generously with their own wives or children, and possessed of no sense of social obligation. But we, who have obtained a sorrowful knowledge through personal experience of racial problems, we know that this is not so. We know well that a man may bristle with all the ordinary domestic and private virtues, may be a loyal husband, a devoted son, a thoughtful father, a citizen who abides within the law and would give his life for his nation, and may even be a man who would not easily inflict an uncalled-for wrong or wanton cruelty on any man of his own race and colour, though divided from him by national and lingual differences; and yet, when the limit of racial continuity is reached in this same man, there may be a sudden, complete and abysmal hiatus in the action of the moral sense and the socialized instincts. (Strangely enough, in our own personal experience, several cases of the most painful cruelty and injustice, on the part of white men towards black, have been cases in which the white men concerned were exceptionally good-hearted, generous and open-handed men. In one instance of particular cruelty, where two white men were concerned, upon seeing our manifest discomfort at their action, they were sincerely distressed. "If I had any idea you would take on like that about a miserable nigger, I would never have touched the wretched beggar!" remarked one. Persons ignorant of the racial problem may regard it as improbable, if not impossible, that men who could perform acts of ruffianly brutality towards an African should yet be so sensitive as to be deeply concerned that they had momentarily distressed a looker-on, whom they hardly knew and had no personal friendship for, but who was of their own race. Yet, persons who have practically no knowledge of inter-racial relations know that not merely is this psychologic attitude possible, but that it is a matter of universal occurrence.)

Social instinct has never in the past, and does not to-day, except in a few and exceptional instances, spontaneously tend to cross the limits of race.

The sooner this truth is recognized as axiomatic by all who attempt to deal with problems of race, the greater will be the possibility of dealing with them in a spirit of wisdom.

To blind our eyes to this fact, and then attempt to comprehend or deal rationally with race-problems, is to act as would a schoolboy who sets himself to solve an arithmetical puzzle in which he had failed to set down the leading term. The sooner it is recognized as axiomatic that the distinctions of race are not imaginary and artificial, but real and operative; that they form a barrier so potent that the social instincts and the consciousness of moral obligation continually fail to surmount them; that the men or the nations which may safely be trusted to act with justice and humanity within the limits of their own race are yet, in the majority of cases, wholly incapable of so acting beyond those limits; that only in the case of exceptional individuals gifted with those rare powers of sympathetic insight which enable them, beneath the multitudinous and real differences, mental and physical, which divide wholly distinct races, to see clearly those far more important elements of a common humanity which underlie and unite them, is the instinctive and unconscious extension of social feeling beyond the limits of race possible; that, for all others, wholly just and humane action beyond the limits of their own race, can be only attained as the result of a stern, conscious, unending, mental discipline; and that perhaps no individual man or woman is at the present day so highly developed as regards social instinct as to be certain that they can at all times depend on themselves to act with perfect equity where inter-racial relations are concerned; that no individual is so highly developed morally as to be able wholly to dispense with a most careful intellectual self-examination when dealings with persons of alien race and colour are entered on; and, finally, that the great moral and intellectual expansion which humanity has during the ensuing centuries to undergo, if harmonized human life on the globe is ever to be, is in the direction of extending the social instincts beyond those limits of the family, the nation, and the race, to the humanity beyond those limits:--the sooner we recognize as axiomatic these truths, the quicker will be our progress towards the comprehension and satisfactory solution of racial problems; and, failing to recognize these truths, it is perhaps wholly useless for anyone to attempt to deal with the moral and social aspects of inter-racial questions.

With perfect uniformity throughout the whole history of the human race in the past, we find strong anti-sociality appearing at the point where the light Aryan race comes into contact with darker races; and it appears to make little difference which nations are concerned.

We Anglo-Saxons have the unhappy priority of having caused to the natives of Africa, in our functions as slave-traders, slave-owners, and explorers, probably more than fifty times as much suffering as any other European nation. It appears, indeed, to have been our unhappy prerogative to have been born to be the perpetual scourge and torture of this vast, wonderful, attractive continent and its interesting children. Probably at least fifty Africans have perished under the lash, have borne the manacles, or been shot by the guns of Anglo-Saxons, for every one that has been lashed, manacled, or shot by a Frenchman, German, Spaniard, or European of any other variety; but this has arisen, not at all because other nations were more socially inclined towards the African, but because the love of material wealth being dominant in us and trade our speciality, the African, whom all white nations have regarded as mainly a means of producing or procuring wealth, has naturally fallen most into our hands. Where Spaniard has dealt with Indian, German, Frenchman or Dutchman with African or Asiatic, exactly the same lack of lofty social feeling, and the same mental attitude regarding them merely as means for production of increased benefits for themselves, and not as individuals who are ends within themselves, has prevailed.

Irrespective of nationality or time, the line at which light race meets dark is the line at which human sociality is found at the lowest ebb; and, wherever that line comes into existence, there are found the darkest shadows which we humans have cast by our injustice and egoism across life on earth.

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If then, when the statement is made that the South African Boer has not treated the South African native as it is desirable man should treat man, it be meant to imply that in his treatment of the dark races his conduct has been at one with that of all other European races, and that he has not entered on that loftier and more socialized course of action toward subject and dark races, to which it is our hope that the humanity of the future will attain, then the statement is wholly and unmitigatedly true. But if, on the other hand, it be intended by the assertion to imply that the South African Boer, in his treatment of the dark races with whom he has been thrown into contact, has been less governed by just and humane instincts than men of other races under like conditions, that the English slave-trader or speculator, the Portuguese adventurer, the Spanish conqueror, the Jamaica planter have treated the African native better, then the statement is wholly and unmitigatedly false.

As the student of racial problems has continually occasion to repeat, there has been no wide difference between the attitude of different white races when brought into contact with dark, whether in Asia, Africa, or America; but on the whole the relation of the African Boer with the African native, sorrowful as are all inter-racial relations, has yet probably tended to be rather slightly more and not less pacific than those of other races. This results in no way from the higher humanitarian standpoint of the Boer, but from his circumstances.

Firstly, from the fact that his numbers have always been small and insignificant as compared with those of the Bantus, the African people with which he has mainly had to deal, and that the Bantus, being one of the most virile and powerful of all dark races, it has not been possible for him to dominate them as he might have done a feebler people. (Were the natives of India of the same independent and resolute spirit as the Bantus of South Africa, England could never have subjected and held them down, as she has done at the point of the bayonet, for sixty years.)

Secondly, the African Boers are a peculiarly pacific and even-tempered people, not quickly roused to anger or any other emotion, though when roused yet difficult to appease; and, as acts of violence towards subject people are most often the results of sudden outburst of passion, the native has probably fared somewhat better at their hands than in those of a more quick-blooded race.

The strange, gentle, slow and somewhat dreamy element, which forms so important a charm in the character of the Boer, is by no means peculiar to the Dutch South African. It is a quality which is found almost quite as markedly in the grandsons of the British settlers of 1820 and other South African born men of English descent, and is especially marked in many of the young English farmers in the Eastern and Frontier districts, who form the flower of our English population, and who are often South Africans of the third generation. It is by this peculiar mental attitude more even than by their muscular build and prominent bony structure, that one tells almost invariably and without fail the South African born man of whatever descent from the foreigners and newcomers who fill our seaports and mining centres. It has in it something slightly reminiscent of the Italian _dolce far niente_, and partly finds expression in the Dutch motto of the Free State: "_Wacht een bietje: alles zal recht kom_" (Wait a little: all will come right); but it differs wholly from the Italian quality, in that this gentleness and slowness covers almost invariably a power of stern, persistent, concentrated emotion which we have not found equally common in the Italian. It takes on the average five times as long to rouse the African-born man into action and powerful emotion as the average foreigner of English or any other nationality; and it takes ten times as much to pacify him again!

Speaking once to a noted American traveller and military man, who had journeyed all over the world and noted keenly, we asked him, after spending two years in South Africa, what had most struck him in the country. He replied: "The strange gentleness of the African men. I hardly knew whether to be most surprised or touched by it when I first came. I have seen nothing like it in the world."

When we ourselves returned to South Africa after ten years' absence in Europe, and were therefore able to view our birth-fellows almost impartially, the true born South African man, whether Dutch or English, reminded us of nothing so much as those huge shaggy watch-dogs, which lie before their masters' houses placid and kindly, whom you may stumble over and kick, almost with impunity; but when once you have gone too far and he rises and shakes himself, you had best flee. There is little doubt that, in the great blended South African nation that is coming to its birth, this mental attitude will be a leading characteristic; exactly as quickness and alertness is a distinguishing mark of the Americans of the Northern and Western States. It appears probable that exactly as we shall be marked by our large, powerful bony structure and heavy muscular strength, we shall be marked by a certain gentle passivity, covering immense emotional intensity and dogged persistency; that the great men we shall produce will not be so often keen financiers and speculators as artists and thinkers; that our national existence will culminate, not in producing versatility and skill, but persistency and depth, in our most typical individuals. We shall probably always be a people more easily guided through our affections and sympathies than almost any other, and more impossible to subdue by force.

Whether the cause lie mainly in the nature of the Boer or the Bantu, this is certain, that the African native has not tended to melt away with anything of the rapidity with which the Indian was exterminated by the English American in the north, and by the Spaniard in the south of the American continent; nor in the two hundred years the Dutch have been in South Africa is any incident so painful recorded as that which is universally accepted, and has not, we believe, been authentically denied, with regard to the treatment of the natives of India, when men who, however brutally, had been fighting in defence of their native land, were, before being blown from the gun's mouth, compelled to lick up the blood of the persons they had killed, in order that the fear of eternal damnation might be added to the other horrors of death. No analogous incident, sinking civilized man so far below the level of the wild beast and the primitive savage, has we believe ever been recorded of the African Boer, even when his women and children have been killed and mutilated by scores.

The same equality in the treatment of the dark races, whichever may be the white race concerned, is illustrated when we consider the condition of the African native in the different States into which South Africa is divided.

In the Cape Colony, where the majority of the white inhabitants are Dutch, though at present a British Colony, the position of the native is more favourable than in most other states. Theoretically the aboriginal native has in the Cape Colony almost the same rights as a white man; he is allowed to vote at elections, and theoretically he is allowed to sit on juries; though practically were he to attempt to substantiate his right to try cases in which white and black men were concerned by sitting on a jury he would probably be lynched; and in no case has a native ever been returned for Parliament. Yet his position, in spite of past laws and recently introduced laws--that he may not walk on the pavement, etc.--is far more satisfactory than in any other state.

In Natal, another British Colony, where the majority of the white inhabitants are English, the position of the aboriginal native is far less satisfactory, and that of the Asiatic as intolerable as it well can be. Large numbers of Indians from India have been deliberately imported on the plantations; but they are both hated and feared, and vigorous endeavours are made to prevent their trading or acquiring property in a land into which they have been deliberately introduced.

In the two Republics of the Free State and the Transvaal, the native has not the same theoretic rights as in the Cape Colony. He has neither the theoretic right to sit on juries or become a member of Parliament, which in theory, though not in fact, he has in the Cape Colony, nor is he recognized by the law as the equal of the white man. Practically, in the Transvaal he increases and multiplies as fast as elsewhere, if not faster, but his condition is in many ways far less desirable than in the Cape Colony.

On the other hand, it is in the purely British possessions of Matabele and Mashonaland that his condition is worst. Probably a larger number of natives have been exterminated in these territories during the last eight years than throughout the whole of the rest of South Africa by Dutch and English together in any like period. And it is here that, during the last few years, a determined and practical attempt has been made to introduce a modified form of slavery under the name of compulsory labour. The unhappy condition of the natives in these territories rises, however, not at all from the fact that the men dominating them are English, nor at all from the fact that the few genuine white settlers in the country are of a lower stamp than those elsewhere in South Africa, for this is emphatically not the case; but to the form of government.

A body of speculators, mainly non-resident in the land, chartered for commercial purposes and given despotic rule over a vast country and its people, must always be the form of rule most productive of evil to the subject people, whether the speculators so incorporated be French, Jewish, English, Belgian, or German. The rule of such a speculative and commercial body must necessarily be devoid of those personal sympathies with the ruled which may soften even the government of an individual tyrant; the conscience of such a body, if in its collective capacity it may be said to have one, must of necessity exercise itself merely in a conscientious striving to extract the largest possible percentage of interest for the corporate shareholders from the land and labour of the subject people. Under no possible circumstances can it exhibit those virtues of consideration and self-abnegation for the subject peoples which even a purely military conqueror might exhibit; and the rule of such a body must always remain the most oppressive for the ruled and the most demoralizing for the ruling people. To blame, primarily, the men who are the mere instruments in carrying out such a form of government would be unjust in the highest degree; and even these speculators and adventurers who form the ruling chartered body can only be blamed in a secondary degree, having but obeyed the instincts of their kind, which compels individuals of a certain class to employ their lives on earth in seeking to attain the largest amount of profit with the smallest amount of outlay to themselves. The primary blame must rest with that people which at the end of the nineteenth century can allow so hoary an anachronism as a commercial chartered company to usurp its place in the government of primitive peoples, and, from under the ægis of its flag, to stretch forth in safety the long, grasping fingers and the grotesque, greedy face of a Financial Chartered Company, which should long since have been relegated to the past among the extinct evils of the human race.

The native is best off and happiest in South Africa where, as amid the mountains of Basutoland, he still maintains a semi-independence. Both Dutchmen and Englishmen have carried on bloody wars against this people, but neither the Boers nor the English have been able wholly as yet to break up their tribal organization; and, guarded by their mountains and their courage, they are slowly absorbing modern civilization, in a manner more healthful than would be possible under a sudden dislocation of their social and moral system. How long this interesting phenomenon in national African development will be allowed by circumstances to continue, it is difficult to say. Should gold or precious stones be found in their territory, it would then be worth while expending many millions in destroying the people and taking complete possession of the land.

Thus, viewing the South African states as a whole, we find that the question of the condition of the native does not depend on the nationality of the governing power, or of the majority of the white inhabitants, but on other and more intricate causes.

The question is frequently asked one when visiting in Europe: "Which treats the African native the best, the Dutchman or the Englishman?" It is a question which awakens a certain silent amusement. It is as though, after spending ten years in Europe in the study of labour problems, one had been asked on one's return to South Africa: "Who treats his employees best, a Scotchman or an Englishman?" The true answer is, that the relation of white man to black, as of employer to employed, depends on far deeper and more complex conditions than any racial variety of the white man or the employer will explain.

The individual equation always tells for much; but, roughly speaking (one can but deal roughly with the delicate, complex, organic intricacies of social life), there are in South Africa, as a whole, four attitudes among white men as regards the native, which attitudes have no causative relation with the matter of race.

Firstly:--There is the attitude of the farming population who, more especially in frontier districts and to the north and east, are, and have been for generations, thrown into close contact with the aboriginal native in his most crude and primitive form, and who are compelled by the conditions of their life to live in close relations with him, and to act upon and to be re-acted on by him. These men and women, whether Boer fore-trekkers and their descendants, or British settlers of 1820 and their children and grand-children, have borne, and to a certain extent still bear, the crude brunt of the first impact between light and dark races, with their widely opposing ideals, manners of life, and physical differences. These people and their ancestors, whether Dutch-Huguenots who landed in Africa two hundred years ago, or British settlers who came eighty years ago, have in almost all cases passed through a life-and-death struggle with the natives for the possession of the land, a struggle which, even in the case of the British settlers who were backed by the soldiers and the power of the British nation, was bitter enough; and this struggle has left behind it in many cases that intense, curious bitterness which is engendered by a race feud. Further, it is these folk who to-day are brought directly face to face with the difficulties which must arise at the point where the divergent ideals, social, ethical and racial of the Aryan and the African, are first brought into contact.

Generally speaking (and allowing for the many exceptions which will always occur where men are spoken of in large masses), there is, in this class of the population, a strong tendency, not so much towards scorn and indifference towards the native, as of keen, bitter resentment, which can sometimes not be described otherwise than as hatred: a feeling which is not generally found in any other large class of the community. Nor is this in any way to be wondered at, when we recall the century-long bitterness between folk so closely allied as are Highland Scots and Lowland English, and the deathless feuds of the border, and, above all, when we recall the fact that in modern times a whole civilized nation has howled frantically for the blood of a brother nation, to avenge defeat sustained by superior numbers of its own men, fighting against inferior numbers, inferiorly placed, of the fellow nation.

With the wild-beast cry of "Avenge Amajuba" still ringing in our ears, it appears rather wonderful than otherwise that so much of pacific human feeling should prevail between frontier farmer and fore-trekker and the aboriginal races as still does exist.

There are few old frontier families in Dutch or English in the Cape Colony, Transvaal, Free State, or Natal, who, if their past family history were written, would not have to record hair-breadth escapes of women and children who have fled for miles at night to avoid sudden attacks, of farm-houses destroyed, of men coming home to find the women and children killed and mutilated; this in addition to the record of countless open battles in which their ancestors or they themselves took part. And, on the native side, are even bitterer memories, and the consciousness, in many cases, that the land on which the white man now lives, and where he dominates, was once his father's. Alike among Dutch and English, these memories have left their bitter mark. We have never heard the natives so bitterly and fiercely denounced as by descendants of English settlers whose ancestors had suffered racially from them. "I almost hate you," has cried a friend belonging to one of the most cultured and intelligent of our English Cape families, "when you talk of raising and educating the natives. Hewers of wood and drawers of water they shall be to us to the end, in spite of you." "I feel a shudder of hatred go up my spine when I look at a Kaffir," said another refined and, in many respects, noble frontier English woman to us once; "I feel as if I could just put out my foot and crush them."

On the other hand, it would be very easy to exaggerate the universality and intensity of this antipathy. We have known, not isolated instances, but scores of cases, where both English and Dutch farmers have entertained the kindliest feelings towards natives generally, and their own servants in particular. We have known intimately an unlettered Boer, so innately gifted with the power of ruling wisely that for fifteen years, during which time he had always from fifteen to thirty natives on his farm, he had never found it necessary to punish, or even to threaten, one, and who was so beloved by his servants that, during a long illness, when he was obliged to leave his farm for months in the care of his Kaffir servants, he found on his return not one head of stock missing, and the farm managed as though he had been there himself. We have known both English and Dutch farmers who have kept their servants twenty years, cared for them in old age, and aided them in illness. We have known a Boer woman, herself an invalid, who would go evening by evening to the hut of her sick servant to comfort and help her; we have seen a whole Boer family gathered weeping round the grave of a black Bantu; we have known both English and Dutch farmers who have treated their native servants with far more consideration and kindness than the average English landowner shows towards the labourers on his estates; and, on the other hand, we have known both English and Dutch farmers with whom no native would willingly remain in service; who were as cordially hated as they hated; and whose whole relation with the native was a series of petty oppressions, with occasional acts of gross injustice or cruelty. But we believe that every one who has attentively and impartially studied this matter on the spot will allow that it is a question into which the Dutch or English extraction of the farmer does not materially enter.

In the notorious Hart case of a few years back when, in the Cape Colony, an English farmer of that name flogged a Bantu to death in cold blood, they were English and not Dutch farmers who offered to subscribe to pay the small fine inflicted on him, and who resented his being punished at all. The most hopeful sign with regard to this feeling of "race feud" is that, on the whole, it is a decaying feeling. To find it in its full intensity among Dutch or English one must always go to the older men and women of forty, fifty, seventy, or older, who in their youth went through bitter experiences of conflict with the native, or remember the experiences of their parents. It is far less intense among the younger men and women of from twenty-five and under, now growing up, and in another generation it will probably be all but extinct in the form of a true race feud.

We would not, however, for a moment have it understood that an anti-social attitude towards the native is peculiar to the African-born farmer. So far is this from being the case, that, where men newly arrived from Europe are thrown into the same close contact and come into conflict with aboriginal natives, their attitude is generally far less human, _and has in it an element of complete callousness and cold contempt_, seldom or never found among men born in South Africa, who have grown up among the native races. This may appear strange, but an analogous phenomenon has often been noted in America, where it has been observed that the slave-owners in the Southern States, in spite of their dominance over the slaves and occasional acts of brutality and oppression, really regarded them more as fellow humans and were emotionally nearer to them, than were, in many cases, the Northerners who came to live in the South, and who, on first meeting them, were often filled with shrinking and disgust.

The African-born farmer, Dutch or English, who has grown up among the natives, has been nursed by them in childhood, often speaks their language, and knows something of their manners and ideas, may hate them; but always, in his heart of hearts, he recognizes them as men; and his very hatred and bitterness is a kind of tribute to the common humanity that he feels binds them. Man only hates man.

To the newcomer from Europe, on the other hand, who becomes a farmer, or is otherwise thrown into contact with the aboriginal native, he is often an object, not merely of hatred, but of contempt and sport; there is no mere assumption of cynicism when he speaks of the native merely as an object of the chase; he has often no other view with regard to him. We have heard a brilliant young English officer, who had only been a few years in the country, but had been employed in what is called a "Native War," dwell with manifest and almost boyish delight on the pleasures of Bantu-hunting. He described the curious delight you feel in finding the mark of a naked foot and tracing it down. "It is," he said, "like the pleasure of the hunting field--with something added!" We have also known a skilful English doctor, a man of singular tenderness and generosity towards persons of his own nationality, who had been only eight years in the country, but had served in two native campaigns, remark that the only two purposes for which natives were of any use were to serve as targets for rifle-shooting and as good subjects for vivisection; while his inhumanity towards wounded and other natives was a matter of common remark among the South African burghers. And a fine young English trooper who had been two years in the country, after hearing our view on the native question, remarked thoughtfully: "Well, you know, all this is quite new to me; I have never regarded the nigger as anything but something to shoot." To the South African-born man this light-hearted, callous, sporting attitude is quite foreign. He may take the life of a native, but he takes it sternly, bitterly; it is something much more than hunting down the indigenous black game of the country; he knows in his heart of hearts that the thing he hunts is a _man_, and a strong man; and in his hatred of him there is even an element of fear as well as revenge. This attitude forms a far more promising field for the growth of possible socialized feeling, than any attitude of callous contempt can even do. Hate is nearer to love than scorn can ever be; and, paradoxical as it may seem, we hold strongly that if, in South Africa to-day, sincere personal affections and sympathies are to be found crossing the line of race, they will be found most often between the African-born farming population, Dutch and English, and their domestic servants. The warmest expressions of affection towards individual natives which we have ever heard have been expressed by English and Dutch farmers towards their old servants.

Secondly:--There is the attitude of the townsman, Dutch, South-African-English, or Newcomer, who most often never comes into any contact with the aboriginal natives at all, and whose employees or domestics are all more or less civilized natives or half-castes. Here, as a rule, the element of intense racial bitterness is wholly lacking. The townsman treats his civilized servant very much, in the main, as men of all European nationalities treat their domestics and dependants. As far as wages, food, and the amount of labour expected is concerned, the civilized domestic servant and town labourer is rather better off than in most European countries. On the other hand, there is always a hard-and-fast line, dividing the white man from the dark, which is never overstepped. The only real drawback to the condition of the civilized native in towns lies in the fact that, the moment he attempts to transcend the limits of domestic servitude, he is met by a stern barrier, socially obstructing him; _a barrier raised quite as much by the instinct of the descendant of the Anglo-Saxon as the Dutch-Huguenot_. At present this matters little, as the attempt is seldom made; but in fifty years' time this harmonizing of black and white men in the higher walks of life will probably form a great part of the South African problem. It is not, however, a problem which the question of the descent of the white South African from Dutch or English ancestors will in any way affect. Every one who has any knowledge of South African life will allow that at the present day it makes not the slightest difference in the condition of the civilized servant in towns whether the doctor, lawyer, or merchant who employs him be of Dutch or English descent. We have, indeed, sometimes been inclined to fancy that there was a tendency, as between women, for a slightly more friendly and harmonious condition to be common between the mistress of Dutch descent in towns and her domestic, than between the English woman and hers. The Dutch descended woman is often more easy going and has less of that curious reserve which marks the attitude of the Anglo-Saxon towards his dependants, and even his equals, but there is probably no material difference along racial lines in the treatment of civilized domestics and employees in town and their employers.

Thirdly:--There is what, for want of a better name, we may define as the financial and speculative attitude towards the native. This is the attitude of the great labour employers. These in South Africa are practically never individuals but great syndicates, companies, and chartered bodies, the individual members of which are seldom or never brought into any personal contact with the natives whose lives they control. In the majority of cases they are non-resident in South Africa, wholly or for the larger part of their lives. For them the native is not a person hated or beloved, but a commercial asset. To these persons the native question sums itself in two words "cheap labour." Their view of the native question is as clear-cut and simple as the outline of a gallows. There is no intricacy or sentiment about it. The native is the machine through the action of which companies and speculators have to extract the wealth of the South African continent; and the more the machinery costs to keep at work, the smaller the percentage of South African wealth which reaches the hands of the speculator.

For them the native problem is in a nutshell: "In how far, and by what means, can the rate of native wages be diminished, so raising profits?"

It must be remembered that the natives form almost the entire body of the true wage-earning labouring class of South Africa. The European, working in mines or elsewhere, becomes almost at once in the majority of cases simply the overseer or guider of the native labourer; and in mining and other fields of labour natives are rapidly fitting themselves for even the more skilled forms of manual labour.

The question of the relation between the great foreign syndicates and companies and the native races of this country is thus the great labour-question of Europe and America, but complicated enormously by two facts.

Firstly, by the fact that the mass of speculators, company-controllers, and their shareholders are Jews, Englishmen, Americans, or Continentals, wholly non-resident in South Africa, or residing here merely while they make sufficient wealth to ensure their retirement to a life of ease and luxury in Europe, or, in the case of ambitious Englishmen, till they are enabled, by means of their wealth, to enter the English Parliament or obtain titles. From this fact it follows that a decrease in the wages of our native labouring-class and an increase in dividends, while it makes larger the number of yachts on the Mediterranean, the palaces of Jewish and other parvenus in London and on the Continent, and while it increases the gains of the tables at Monte Carlo and of the racing grounds of England, and replenishes the purse of debilitated and degenerate English aristocrats, yet not only adds _nothing_ to the material wealth of South Africa, but positively diminishes those very small returns which, under existing legislation, is all she receives from her mines. European skilled miners and overseers, as a rule, take their extensive earnings back to Europe with them; and, with the exception of what the Government railways may earn, it is mainly through the wages of the native labourer, expended in buying the necessaries of life, and to no inconsiderable extent in supporting his schools and churches, that the legitimate commerce of the country and its general population are benefited by its mineral wealth. Thus, on this all-important point, our native problem, which is also our labour problem, differs materially and most essentially from the labour problem of Europe, in that it is not merely a question of dividing the wealth of the country between one class or another (as is generally the case in Europe and America), but of retaining the products of the land in the land of all.

It has been said by a leading speculator and millionaire in South Africa that, if the States of South Africa could be broken down and crushed into one, a united and uniform labour system might then be adopted, and the wages of natives brought down; and he has held up as an ideal for imitation the condition in India where natives are supposed to labour for twopence a day, living therefore so closely upon the border of starvation that the slightest rise in the price of foodstuffs renders them liable to widespread famine and destruction, and therefore also eager to accept the smallest amount of remuneration which will maintain life.

To this end the Speculator and Capitalist, among others, have sought to enter political life in South Africa, and in order that, by the passing of laws dispossessing the native by indirect means of his hold on the land, and breaking up his tribal tenure, and by the making of direct wars upon him, the native, at last being absolutely landless, may be unable to resist any attempt to lower wages, and may then sink into the purely proletariat condition of a working class always on the border of starvation, and therefore always glad to sell his toil for the lowest sum that will maintain life.

Were this plan entirely successful, South Africa as a whole would lose all the native now gains, the increased profit going to enlarge the wealth of the foreign Speculator and often aristocratic shareholder; and South Africa would then be saddled with a proletariat class of the very lowest type. For, the only hope of the African native's rising, and becoming a valuable and intelligent labouring class, lies in his receiving such remuneration for his labour as shall enable him to grasp at least some of the subordinate advantages of civilization, along with those of its evils which are necessarily forced on him. If the South African native is not in the position to obtain primary education and in some measure to grasp such advantages and privileges as there are in our modern civilization, then, as his old tribal ideals and institutions are destroyed, he must inevitably sink into a condition lower and more terrible than that of the lowest proletariat in Europe; and, as he forms (and must do for generations, in a land where white men refuse to perform the bulk of physical labours) the major part of the population, South Africa will permanently be weighted and degraded by the degradation and degeneracy of the great bulk of the inhabitants.

To the Company Director, Capitalist, or Speculator who never visits South Africa, or remains here only while financial reasons make it desirable, it can matter nothing what becomes in the present or in future generations, morally or intellectually, of the native. But to those of us, to whom South Africa is a home, to whom not only the present but the future of this land is our most intense human concern, and who with our descendants have got to sail with the African native permanently in the same ship across the sea of time, it matters everything.

The second, and even more important point, which differentiates our labour problem from that common in Europe, is that our labouring class is divided sharply from the employing class by the line of colour. Even in European countries, where employers and employed are of one race and physically identical, divided merely as being for the moment the haves and have-nots, the adjustment of the labour problem presents sufficient difficulty. But in South Africa, where racial and physical differences divide employer from employed, the difficulties are immeasurably and almost inconceivably increased. Any attempt on the part of our labouring class to better its position or resist oppressive exactions, being undertaken mainly by men of one colour against men of another, will always immediately awaken, over and above financial opposition, racial prejudice; so that even those white men, whose economic interests are identical with those of the black labourer, may be driven by race antagonism to act with the exactors.

The complete failure to grasp this aspect of our South African problem leads to much of the inability in other lands to comprehend the South African situation as a whole.

Thus, it is often said, "Why should the speculator, monopolist, and millionaire loom so large in South African life? Why should he be so much more of a bugbear and threaten all free political and social institutions in South Africa in so much greater a degree than in other lands where he also exists?"

Our answer is, that, wherever in Europe or America the great millionaire and monopolist, Jewish or Christian, is found, with the pluto-aristocratic speculators and shareholders who draw their wealth through him, there also is found a great equipoise to their powers of exaction or aggression in the great more or less organized masses of the working classes. The limits are very sharply set, beyond which the greatest Jew or Christian speculators backed by the most powerful princes or plutocracy cannot go. We have no such counterpoise in South Africa. Owing to the difference of colour and race, our great labouring class dare not organize itself and use its strength; and we dare not organize and use it, for fear of awakening the baneful flames of racial antagonism. South Africa is the heaven of the Speculator, the Capitalist and Monopolist. Here, alone, the opposing forces which meet him in every European and civilized country do not exist.

The labour of resisting his endeavours to gain possession of the whole mineral and landed wealth of the country and its public works, and with them the exclusive control of the political machinery, lies with the necessarily small middle class section of the community, mainly farmers and small landed proprietors with a handful of skilled workmen. These have not only to act for themselves, but for the entire labouring class, which, on account of its difference in race and colour from the rest of the community, cannot act for itself.

Any one who has given thought to the study of modern social phenomena will understand at once how enormously our labour and racial problem, being interlaced in this way, complicates our whole social condition, and how almost helpless it throws South Africa into the hands of the Jew or Christian foreign speculator. Let us give a concrete example. In a town called Kimberley there is the richest diamond mine in the earth, once the property of South Africans and belonging to multitudes of them, but now fallen into the hands of a powerful syndicate of Jews, Englishmen, and others, who, with the exception of a couple of South Africans, all reside wholly or mainly out of South Africa, and whose power is so enormous that they are able, by a mere expression of their will, to return eight or ten men to the Cape Parliament, irrespective of the wishes of the community. The action of this powerful syndicate has long formed a source of disease and corruption in South African public and social life, and the question is often asked, why the working men and other inhabitants of Kimberley and such places as the company dominates submit to this dictation? It is not so, as is sometimes supposed, because the skilled workmen and overseers in the great company are inferior to their compatriots in Europe in their love of freedom or independence; for they are, on the whole, picked men, and many of them are strongly democratic and freedom-loving; it is certainly not because the inhabitants of Kimberley are more indifferent to their manhood, or more willing to deliver up their right to exercise the franchise into the hands of a small knot of Jews and Speculators than other men; but because the forces opposed to them are so overpowering compared to their own that they feel crushed.

Were the thousands of working men labouring in the mines white and not black, and could they freely combine with the skilled European overseers and the townsmen, the monopoly of the power would be snapped in twenty-four hours. They would refuse to go into compounds, they would demand higher wages and the right to spend them where they pleased, and to vote for their own representatives, and the power for evil of the great company would be broken.

But the bulk of the workmen being black, and any attempt to organize or combine them being at once met with the cry "Black-men combining," the handful of skilled English workmen and townsmen are powerless.

Our situation is very grave, and differs radically for the worse from that of all other lands where kindred problems have to be faced. We have nothing to fall back upon but the fierce and indomitable love of freedom in a certain section of our farming population.

If it should be possible for the international Speculator and Capitalist to carry out his dream, to break down the autonomy of the different African States, each one of which is a kind of redoubt behind which our African freedom is ensconsed, and, crushing us into one structureless whole, to introduce "a uniform native policy," dispossessing the natives wholly everywhere of their lands by means of labour, taxes and other devices, and bringing them down to the lowest wages on which life can be sustained; then, when we shall have inured the Bantu to the evils of our civilization, its drinking bars and its brothels, but have left him no means of attaining to the higher forms of knowledge or the fields of skilled labour, then we shall be left with a great, blind, stupefied Sampson in our midst who will assuredly some day stretch out his mighty much-wronged arms, and bring down upon our descendants the social structure which we are to-day with so much labour attempting to rear. Our gold and diamond mines may by that time be exhausted, and Jew and Speculator, and foreign Shareholder will long have carried off their gains and be here no more to feel the shock. Upon us whose portion of earth to inhabit this land is, and upon our descendants, will fall the blow.

This question of the relation between the foreign Speculator, Capitalist, and Shareholding class, and the black labouring class, is the very core within the core, and the kernel within the kernel, of the South African problem.

The old race-feud attitude of the farming population, whether Dutch or English, toward the native, embittered by the memory and tradition of old wars and early struggles, will tend to die out, and even now is softened by personal relations; the attitude of the employer towards his civilized native domestic has in it little that is detrimental to either, and suggests in itself no great coming evil. But the financial attitude is one which will increase in its importance and in the virulence of its evil effects with every year that passes. The small cloud upon the horizon, to-day no bigger than a man's hand, will in forty years have overspread the whole of our African sky, unless some great and at present unforeseen revolution should occur. It is upon the skill with which white man and black man combine to avert the threatened evil, that the fate of Africa in the middle of next century will depend. It may be easy to break down and demoralize our great, and at present noble, Bantu races; but it may be very hard ever to build them up again.

For the moment the men holding the purely financial attitude towards the native happen mainly to be English or Jewish foreigners; but there is really nothing racial in this attitude. Were the Hollander or the Italian head of a great gold-mining, railway-building, or diamond syndicate, there is not the very slightest reason to suppose that he would regard the native South African less purely as a "commercial asset" than his brother, the English financier, does.

The more profoundly one studies the question of the relations of the white man to the black in South Africa, the more clear it becomes that the determining factor in that relation is something far other and deeper than the mere fact that the white man belongs to this or that European variety.

Fourthly, and finally:--There is the attitude of a body of persons, small in number, of no invariable occupation, sex, nationality or creed, but gathered from every part of the white community. So small in number is this body of persons holding this attitude, that again and again have men and women belonging to it felt inclined to draw aside, and in bitterness of spirit to cry with the ancient Hebrew at the door of his cave: "I, only I, am left." Yet this body has never been wholly extinct in South Africa, and, we believe, never will be. As we hope later to deal exhaustively with the aims and attitude of this section, it is not now necessary to do more than passingly to glance at them.

This attitude cannot be better summed up than by saying that it is the extreme antithesis to the financial attitude. The man compelled by his mental organization to take this view is of necessity obliged to regard the native not merely as a means to an end, but as an end in himself. Consistently with his whole view of life, he cannot regard the native merely as a "commercial asset"; he is compelled to apply to him the categorical imperative: "Deal with thy fellow man as, wert thou in his place, thou wouldst have him deal with thee." He does not write up as the motto which is to govern all the relations of black men with white: "Cheap labour," but rather: "Noblesse oblige." He is compelled always to see before him the moral fact that, if the native be his equal in mental power and moral vigour, his place is beside him; but, if the African native be _not_ his equal in mental power and moral vigour, then there rests upon him the mighty obligation of all strength towards weakness, of all wisdom towards ignorance, of the God towards the man: "Rank confers obligation."