CHAPTER VIII

THE ENGLISHMAN

In south Africa he bursts forth in all his multifarious shapes. Now he is the little liquor seller, braving full rivers and prohibitive legislation, with a wagon full of bad brandy made by the Boers, to sell to the natives and return to the Colony with a pile. Then he is a female missionary, buried in a remote native village to instruct heathen girls and women, with the enthusiasm of a St. Catherine. Over the way he is running guns and selling powder and shot which will be taken from the natives as soon as we have made our full gain in selling them. Now he is a cultured, sympathetic, freedom-loving man, talking humanity and consideration for the weaker classes; and then he is a Hart, tying up and flogging to death his black brothers. To sum him up, to say what he is and is not, would be as futile as to sum up the Jew: "We are anything, so please your worship; but we are a deal of that."

Probably no country in the world to-day gives more scope for individual action; therefore our extremes and intensities show themselves on a large scale. We are not weighted by traditions and the growths of an old society. If we speculate, pray, preach, or farm, we do it in our own fashion; the assertion which holds of one does not of another. Nevertheless, broadly speaking, one or two things may be postulated of us as a whole.

One is, that we in South Africa represent the modern nineteenth-century element, with high material development and complex wealth of ideas, as compared with the primitive savage and hardly less simple seventeenth-century Boer. Whatever is evil in modern civilization is ours, and also whatever is good.

In the complex problem of South Africa--the welding together of its peoples--we have the leading part to play; we are at least the cement which must bind into a whole the separate stones. And the main question before us is--how is this to be done?

For the moment, the incomparably more important question, involving, as it does, the world's greatest problem of how the primitive and aboriginal peoples are to be wrought into our social system, is almost obscured by the smaller and comparatively simple problem of the union of the two European folks of the country. That it is desirable may or may not be certain, but that it is inevitable and will take place is certain; how and when are the only questions left open to us.

We have before shown how mixed and interblended already are the two races throughout South Africa. Our so-called English colonies are largely peopled, and in parts almost exclusively, by Boers or their descendants, and the so-called Boer Republics, daily and hourly becoming more densely peopled by English and the nineteenth-century folk who come under their flag and speak their language, till the leading cities of these states are more intensely and really English than the majority of towns in the English colonies. Further, every week and month, as the descendant of the Boer obtains nineteenth-century culture, he learns the English speech, he adopts English methods of dress, and above all he imbibes English ideas. So that to-day in a South African drawing-room you are already unable to tell whether the grandfather and mother of the well-dressed English-speaking man or woman beside you were living on a Yorkshire moor or a Lancashire fen, or trekking in their ox-wagon across South African plains. Already, so mingled are our peoples, that the Free State Boer is often born and reared in the Colony;[76] his parents or his wife's live there; his children are being educated there; while his eldest son is studying medicine in Edinburgh and his daughter married to an Englishman. An English Johannesburg merchant, often born in Europe, may have taken a wife from Natal, have his children at school in Cape Town, and his business connections with the farmers of the Free State. Ten or fifteen years ago, the Boer and the Englishman, though living side by side, kept almost distinct in breed; to-day, throughout the colonies, Free State, and Transvaal, there are few large families some of whose members have not married into families of the other race.

[76] That is, the Cape Colony.

This amalgamation is proceeding always with increasing frequency. In thirty years half the men in South Africa from the Transvaal to Cape Town would have to fight against their own parents in any war of race. And there is no prospect of this process of amalgamation being stayed; it must go on with always increasing velocity as education draws the races together.

In answer to the question, then, how are the Boer and English races to be amalgamated? we would reply: By one who in this case will work unfailingly and without fail--by Time! In fifty years, fight and struggle against it as we wish, there will be no Boer in South Africa speaking the Taal, save as a curiosity: only the great English-speaking South African people. This movement cannot be hindered, it cannot be stayed, it is inevitable.

But it may be said, "Of what use is this amalgamation which may take place only when we are in our grave? The average adult man cannot safely reckon on ten, much less on fifteen or twenty, years of life, and, if we wait for the natural process to complete its work, what chance is there for us to gain the kudos, fame and immortal honour which we desire to make out of the amalgamation of these peoples? Is it not a great chance thrown away? Must we not amalgamate them now--by force, by--well--diplomacy, by anything! You can't lose such a fine chance as this."

To which we would reply: "Yes, the life of the individual is short, but the life of the nation is long; and it is longer, and stronger, more vigorous and more knit, if it grow slowly and spontaneously than if formed by violence or fraud. The individual cannot afford to wait, but the nation can and must wait for true unity, which can only come as the result of internal growth and the union of its atoms, and in no other way whatsoever. For ages England has tried to fasten Ireland artificially on to herself, and after four hundred years it still hangs at her side a dislocated arm, almost as ready to drop off as when four hundred years ago Oliver Cromwell tried to plaster it on with blood and sword. A nation grows, but it cannot be manufactured. Were there no inherent mixture and tendency to sympathy in the different parts of our community, not only would it be impossible to unite them, but it would be undesirable. Were we divided into separate well-organized states without intermixture of peoples, and without that curious racial sympathy which _does_ unite Cape colonials of the old and new races when they are brought together, they would be better left separate; would grow into healthier, stronger and truly greater communities, because they were separate, because they were able to develop their individual genius and gifts untrammelled by alien influences. Mere increase in size never means necessarily increase in vitality and beauty, as little with a country as with an individual man who, as he grows in bulk, so it be only an accretion of superficial adipose tissue, diminishes in vigour and vitality. The world's great nations have never been large; England, Greece, Rome, Holland, Switzerland, have all been nations, minute in territory and small in comparative numbers, and the hour of external expansion is often the hour of internal death."

The reason why the conception of the union of South African peoples is forced on us is that no germs of separate organic national life exist among us (except among the native states). The composition of our states is common, and the little walls that divide us are nothing when compared with the identity of the substance of which we are all internally composed.

If it be suggested: "But if there is so much internal unity, why should we not just hasten on the consummation of the unity by a little external and artificial welding together of the states, so gaining great honour ourselves and helping on a good, at least an inevitable, end?" our reply is that all vital union must be spontaneous and natural, and by attempting to hasten it by a year you may defer it for a century or altogether.

The half-grown youth and maiden, who are slowly and coyly being drawn together, must be left severely alone and untouched if their undeveloped inclinations are to grow into the interknitted sympathy and interest which make the adamantine and indestructible basis of a union that is vital and life-long. Kind aunts and mothers may wish to hasten the matter; _they_ wish to have the pleasure of forming the match; they may even die without seeing the consummation they desire if they let it grow on along nature's delightful lingering ways; and they may succeed--either in rupturing the union altogether, and turning what was still a dream into the revolt of forced inclination--or they may succeed in what they wished, and may wed the still immature boy and girl, whose affections are not yet ripe and who physically are not yet strong enough for union; and the great, healthy fellowship of the ripe man and woman rejoicing in the fulness of freedom in a relation that was their own spontaneous choice, may be supplanted by the sickly fellowship of two souls who never forget that theirs was not a free choice and who, in place of a vital healthy offspring, bear the puny descendants of a premature mating.

When we are ripe and ready we will wed state with state, people with people; and not before. The attempt to wed us sooner by force or fraud will result in possible loss to the match-makers, and in certain loss to us.

Once already we have been interfered with, and the result has sent union back twenty years; and if to-morrow it were effected by external force, the blow at our internal and vital unity would be almost irrecoverable. If the external union comes without the internal, it will be to the irreparable loss of South Africa. If at any time in any of our states the people themselves change in their composition, and those who were in the minority should become the majority, let them do justice to themselves in their own state and demand their own independence; and not only will they succeed, but they will succeed backed by the conviction of even their opponents that they are in the right.

"_Wag 'n bietje, als zal reg kom_" ("Wait a bit, all will come right").

Time is on our side in this South African difficulty. What to-day might be effected with blood and tears will come with little trouble in five years' time, and be inevitable in ten. "_Wag 'n bietje, als zal wel reg kom._" Let us remember that the oak that grows the slowest outlives the most centuries; _and that peoples are not made but grow_.

We as English have above all least to lose by waiting. Every hour that passes, the descendants of a thousand Boers are learning the English speech, are adopting the English dress, are absorbing through literature and social intercourse our nineteenth-century ideals; every month that passes is landing on our shores scores or hundreds of Englishmen to inhabit the land and mingle their blood with the great South African people of the future. "Wait a little," and in this matter "everything will come right." When that time comes, when common ideals animate us, and common blood runs through us, we will be absolutely one folk, but not before; and time is labouring for it.

But it may be said: "If we cannot by force, or by that subtle series of deceptions which in public matters we call policy, bring about this external union, at least we are bound to labour vigorously for internal union between the races if that will help forward our designs. At all costs and at all prices we must keep the Boer pleased with us, that we may carry out our plans with his consent."

Now, to this we would reply: "Union is a very beautiful thing whether between races or persons--but the most ideal marriage that ever was conceived may be bought too dearly; there is a price too high even for union, the price of the integrity of the parties composing it. As in the world of individuals, the union between a man and woman otherwise most desirable, may become a crying evil and a living death when, to attain to it, it is necessary for either or both to sacrifice that which is of more value than any union--their own integrity. If union be not possible while each holds to what he or she believes to be best, if it be purchased at the price of whatever is highest in either character, then, however desirable such a union would on other terms have been, it becomes an unmixed evil, a prostitution and not a marriage. Only those souls united by what is greatest in each, not what is weakest and lowest, and reserving their integrity and independence, can form an enduring and noble union. Where this cannot be, it is better to wait, so by chance the day will come when both will see eye to eye; even if, as the lives of individuals are short and growth slow, the waiting for them should be eternal."

It is sometimes said: "We must pander to the Boer. We don't, of course, agree with his views on this and that matter, but union, you know, we are working for that! We don't believe that the quickest way to raise natives, and the best way, is to flog them; it's an antiquated idea; but the Boer likes it and we must vote for it for the sake of union. The Boer likes us so much if he thinks we share his little follies."

The native tribes have trusted us, have _given_ themselves up to us; we pass them over to the Boer, for the sake of union. And so we barter point after point on a matter infinitely more important to the ultimate destiny of the country, for the sake of settling the difficulties of the hour. We barter our birthright of free, open speech and the frank defence of the lines which we rightly or wrongly believe to be those of justice and mercy at the shrine of a political chimera.

It is not by watering down our civilization and robbing it of its most developed attributes, it is not by affecting to sink to his level in the matters in which he is behind us, that we shall draw him into a great and ennobling union or that we shall in the end win his trust and confidence.

It is by standing firmly and serenely by our own highest traditions of development, it is by wisely and generously seeking to understand him, and in the end by infecting him with all that is best and greatest in ourselves, not by selling our birthright for a mess of pottage, that the great and royal union of the two South African stems will be effected. It is not by the reckless bartering, on either side, of that which our convictions hold as best that any ennobling cementing between us can ever take place.

The seventeenth-century Boer has hardly less, perhaps much more, to teach us than we to teach him; let us each hold by our own till we have convinced and enlightened each other.

The one great lesson of a broad humanity, and the rights of man as man, which, amid fields of war, the European family has learnt in the last two hundred years, and which we, without any inherent virtue, have learnt from our fathers and imbibed from the life about us, we have to teach him. It is our contribution to the solution of the problem of our land; amid all the noise and hurry and fœtid decay which underlies much of our nineteenth-century civilization this knowledge is our great gain, and to betray ourselves on this matter is to rob our fellows of almost the only truly great and noble attribute we have to bring to our union, to which he brings much.

For the child of the seventeenth century, if he will but be true to his traditions and convictions, has much to bring to the union and to transmit to the people of the future. The seventeenth century, too, has its message for the nineteenth, a message which it needs not less than the seventeenth the nineteenth.

In the whirl and din of our material advancement, in the fierce struggle for external gains and progress, there is a side of life we have well nigh forgotten, and the Boer on his solitary South African plains has saved up a tradition we have forgotten and for need of which we may yet die. To a curious extent Boer and Englishman, if they will be faithful to their profoundest convictions, seem fitted to complete and complement each other's growth and make possible a people rarer than either might have produced alone.

While we bring to the Boer the doctrine of a higher humanity, the external literary culture which enlarges the power of the man, he has his own lessons for us. While we have set gold on a pedestal and dance till we are drunk around it like the Israelites about their calf, the Boer, nurtured in his primitive solitude, still knows there are things our god cannot give us, and that material luxury and wealth are not the beginning and end of life, that the man is not greater because his name can stir three millions in the bank, that the cut of a coat is an accident, and that a man sees God as nearly face to face from the front box of his wagon as from the steps of a queen's palace.

A broad, simple conception of human life and its relations, without varnish or finesse, is, if he remains true, his contribution. And if through what is still, in many houses, the impenetrable wall of the Taal, our cry could reach him, we would adjure him, "_Hou maar vas, Oom Piet; hou maar vas, Tant' Annie!_ We have one great lesson to teach you, but you have more to teach us! We will not pander to the one weak spot in your soul, where the trouble and conflict of ages and of tradition has made a gangrene; but, if we hold out firmly and teach you our lesson, teach us yours. Do not let yourself be blinded and misled. All is not gold that glitters. Our trains and our large houses and our grand French clothes, they are all very well; but the greatest men the world ever knew trod the sand with bare feet or rode upon an ass; and a train is better than an ox-wagon only when it carries better men; rapid movement is an advantage only when we move towards beauty and truth; all motion is not advance, all change is not development, and a train full of soldiers bent upon an inhuman attack is a more ghastly sight than a squad of Indians with their scalping knives and arrows on their prairie horses, in so far as the one mode of progression is more effective than the other. The size of our houses and the labour of a thousand weary hands upon our walls do not necessarily give us the happiness you would think. Believe us, the kiss of the man on the lips of the woman he loves, and the joy of the mother over her babe, can be as intense in the little house your own hands built as in a mansion raised and decorated by the hands of others. When a man accumulates too much about him he gets buried under it. Our French clothes are very well; but do you know that in forty years time your portly figure in its black skirt and white kappie, if painted as they are to-day, would seem to the men of that time more things of beauty than the misproportioned productions of the fashions of the day. Hold but fast, Tant' Annie! Under that capacious waist of yours lie sleeping the ancestors of heroes of a larger, freer mould than would ever have sprung from you if the iron band of fashion had compressed you to a point. Hou maar vas! We have need of your simplicity to save us from the disease of our artificiality, we have need of your faith in the value of things that cannot be bought and sold, to save us from the terrible scepticism that is creeping over us, that perhaps there is nothing worth living for but success, and that success means wealth. Hou maar vas, Tant' Annie! Hou maar vas, Oom Piet! And if we will faithfully teach you our lesson and you will teach us yours, the day will come when we will build up between us a people of whom the world will not be ashamed. We will try to heal you of the disease that exists in your condition; we look to you to save us from the disease that battens on ours."

The question of the relation of Englishman and Boer differs from the question of the relation between Caucasian and African races in this, that, while our problem of relation to the Boer tends to simplify and finally to dissolve itself as the mere result of the course of time, the question of the relation of African and European races does not so tend to dissolve and solve itself.

When any two peoples inhabiting one country are so physically related that they have a powerful sexual attraction for each other, and that individuals brought face to face are unconscious of racial difference, the problem of union can be one of great moment, but cannot be one of permanent difficulty. Wait, do nothing, and in time, literally and not figuratively, love finds out the way, smoothes away difficulties, and makes of the two races one. Where races are so far removed that they are more or less sexually repellant to one another, that not difference of speech and training divide them, but marked differences of physical and mental conformation, of colour and build, then, if these two races are obliged to inhabit the same territory, the difficulty of arranging for their happy and useful interaction becomes steadily greater as time passes, _and does not tend to solve itself_.

All thoughtful trainers of young children are aware that there are certain faults or defects extremely troublesome and unpleasant for the moment, but over which no wise elder ever seriously troubles themselves; they are aware that time will heal these things and of necessity do away with them; while there are faults, for the moment far less inconvenient, which every wise trainer regards as of infinite import because they are exactly those which tend to grow with years, and the teacher or parent who should devote all his energies to training down the boisterous noise and roughness of childhood which must naturally cure themselves with adolescence, and regarded with indifference the germs of selfishness or cruelty, which tend to ripen only with adult years, would be universally regarded as unfit for his labour.

Yet such often appears to be our action in South Africa. To render smooth our trivial and momentary difficulty with the Boer, which time will inevitably remove and smooth out, we are willing to complicate and make more difficult a problem which in thirty years' time Boer and Englishman's descendants will alike have to face in its huge proportions.

Every step in civilization, in education, in approach to the European, which the African makes, will render the problem more difficult, not necessarily more easy, of solution.

What we consider the attitude of the Englishman in South Africa should be to the alien, and especially the African, races beneath him, depends mainly on the view we take of his nature and his world-wide functions in the unfolding of human life on the globe generally.

There are four views on this matter.

Firstly, that of the average Englishman who has no view in the matter at all, who eats, sleeps, begets children, and accumulates as little or as much wealth as he is able without ever reflecting that he forms part of a great people, or considering the future of the organism of which he is part. The views of these persons, by the _vis inertiæ_ that they impart to the whole body of which they form part, are not without their powerful practical influence on the actual condition and action of the race.

There is a second view, held with more or less clearness or mental confusion, but with a great deal of vivacity and sometimes emotion, by a large number of Englishmen.

It is difficult to represent with justice and exactitude ideas that are held somewhat vaguely and with varying degrees of intensity by the individuals holding them, but we believe we most accurately sum up the views of this party by stating that they more or less vaguely hold that the whole world was made for the Englishman, much as in our childhood we were taught that the sun and stars were created to give light to the earth, which probably came into existence a few trillion years after many of the youngest of these. This party has a very vague but vigorously held conviction that at some time or in some way, which they do not specify, the English inhabitants of the British Isles invented all that is known as modern civilization; we have never heard it directly asserted that literature, art, science, and religion took their rise on the globe eight or nine hundred years ago in Britain, but it is tacitly assumed that it was so, if any logical structure is to be placed on the assertions made; in right of this inherent superiority over all earth's people, the same party assumes, still with a certain vagueness but with intense warmth, that the English race is destined ultimately to possess the whole planet and people it. How this is to be done--whether all earth's multifarious peoples, compared with whom the Englishmen on this earth are to-day but a handful, are to be exterminated by means of fire, of sword, of poison, or simply by infection with the diseases of our civilization, with our liquor and kindred institutions--is not often, perhaps ever, clearly stated. The strength of this party lies not in clear and lucid thought, but rather in somewhat florid assertion which, questioned, leads quickly to irritation and warm blood.[77]

[77] One skinny Frenchman, Two Portugee, One jolly Englishman, He lick all three!

We remember in our childhood to have heard an improved version of this statement to the effect that one Boer might equal four niggers, but one Englishman would lick fifty Boers. We remember lying in our bed at night and pondering over this problem--why with such terrible partiality the God who loves all equally, should have confined all courage and fighting power to the inhabitants of Great Britain--and we had before us a vivid picture of the one solitary British soldier standing on a kopje waving his gun, while before him fled frantically fifty powerful Boers armed to the teeth but making no endeavour to secure him. The adventure of Majuba Hill came strangely to terminate this vision, nor have we ever been able to recall it save as an exploded nightmare.

He takes it as understood that the Englishman is to dominate and populate the entire globe, and the descension to the questions of how and when, and the grounds for the desirability of such an occurrence, he regards as unpatriotic and childish.

This theory, in its most developed form, may be described as the upas-tree theory, which regards the inhabitants of the British Isles as a kind of growth which is bound to kill out and destroy by its mere existence all the other infinitely complex interesting forms of human life on all earth's vast continents, and to exist alone monarch over a bared earth, like a colossal upas-tree under whose shadow or among whose branches, according to the old fable, it was impossible for plant to flower or beast or bird to breathe.

Impossible and repulsive as this conception would appear to many minds, there is no doubt that, held more or less constantly or vaguely, it does colour the actions and thought of large numbers of folk and is a force to be reckoned with.

Thirdly, there is the view which is, generally, that of all non-English nations and peoples; not only do they not share the upas-tree theory with regard to the mission, the future, of the British people, but it is difficult to make them conceive that it is held by any wholly sane persons. To these non-English nations and peoples, the English are an energetic folk, shrewd even beyond the Jew in business matters, and with a subtlety which in every civilized country has appended to their name the adjective "perfidious." To men, French, German, Russian, Dutch, who have grown up from childhood to adult years surrounded by the arts and civilization that are the common inheritance of the modern world from the ancient, and whose religion and history have never more than incidentally mentioned the name of Britain to them, there is something not merely astonishing but ludicrous in the conception that earth's vast millions, civilized and uncivilized, Asiatic and European, black and white, are to be swept away by this trading fragment of the race; nor is it possible to adduce logical grounds on which to convince them that it will be so. How the Englishman is going to crush out and annihilate the countless millions of China, India, Russia, Japan and Europe, and people the earth they now occupy with the descendants of his body, so that Englishmen may be all and in all on the earth, is inconceivable to those who consider that in the space of some hundreds of years the Briton has not been able to annihilate or gain racial possession of the little island at his side, that Ireland still contains as many Irishmen as it did a thousand years ago; that America, their earliest founded colony, is largely filled by Germans, Swedes, Jews and Irish; that India, though the wealth, wrung from its poverty, flows into English pockets, and affords a noble exercise ground for the sons of the upper English classes, still is as thickly inhabited by men of the darker races as it was before the Englishmen landed. Looking at these facts it is indeed difficult to maintain the position which implies, if it does not assert, that the earth of the future will be peopled by the fruit of British loins, and, when looking round and inquiring, "Where are the descendants of all the races of earth?"--the reply will be, "Gone!"

There is, however, yet a fourth view with regard to the functions and destiny of the English race in the future. It may be that those of us who hold it are, unknown to ourselves, still blinded by that mist of race prejudice which, hanging before our eyes from the first moment of our birth, is perhaps more difficult for even the greatest and strongest man to brush aside than the obscuring vapours of personal egoism; nevertheless, it seems to some of us, looking at the matter with what impartiality we are capable of, that it is a view which is capable of being defended by logical argument, and that the hope founded on it is not wholly chimerical; moreover that it is a view, did they but give themselves time to contemplate it, that would win the assent of many who now seem to hold untenable views of the Englishman's upas-like powers.

We who hold this view are perfectly willing to allow that there have been, are, and will be races as great as and greater than ourselves in many if not in all respects. We not only know, but hold in mind the fact, that not much more than a thousand years ago our fathers were barbarians scarcely higher than the Kaffirs of to-day in the stage of culture and civilization they had reached; that even religion and the art of letters and of material civilization were brought to us by the higher barbarians of the Continent, who had received it as a relic from super-nations of antiquity, who in turn had received it from those wise small Semitic and Egyptian folk to whom mankind owe almost all they are; we did not receive it much more lustily than the Kaffir of to-day. And Alfred, like some white-skinned Khama, led or strove to lead his savage children to accept and prize a civilization and a learning they would never have invented and could hardly grasp.

We are aware that we have not been the leading race of the world in arts and science; that as those ancient fellow folk of ours, who are lost in the dawn of history, invented the alphabet and the art of inscription, and reading, and astronomy, and reared mighty palaces and wove rare garments when our fore-elders were dancing in hyperborean forests, or on Asiatic mountain peaks; so later all that the cultured man of to-day prizes in plastic art, philosophy and literary art was brought to a perfection in Greece which no people since has ever surpassed; and in Rome the arts of war and civil life were perfected and the colossal buildings and paths which we have never even equalled were laid down while, naked barbarians, we still hunted and drank. We know that even in the last thousand years we cannot set our names higher than our fellows in the regions of art and learning. Beside the Euclids, the Copernicuses, the Galileos, Theophrastuses, of the old, and the Herschels and Keplers of the modern, world, we have indeed the superb name of Newton to set down, but it cannot out-glitter its compeers; nor can even our prince, Shakespeare, outweigh the names of Dante, Goethe, Voltaire; nor have we, till Charles Darwin of this century, ever possessed a man who in the world of thought has transformed it, as Luther or the French thinkers of the eighteenth century transformed it, great and beloved as to many of us of to-day are the names of our J. S. Mill and Spencer. In the lower world of military art we have produced none of those men of genius before whom the whole civilized world has trembled, Tamurlane, Alexander, Cæsar, Napoleon; even Alaric and Attila have had no counterpart among men of our blood. And perhaps no serene and impartial intellect can look at the history of the race and say we have ever produced a man who, in fame and extent of influence on the race, has equalled Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, Mohamet, Socrates and Plato, or even Paul. Even in the arts and mechanical inventions on which we so pride ourselves to-day, we start back with astonishment when we begin to examine how and when we came by them. While our fathers in skins or clotheless wandered in the wilds, the fertile brain of the Chinaman had not only invented the coarser or thicker woven fabrics, but had made from the thread of the silk-worm such silk as the most skilled looms in England can hardly yield to-day, and had formed porcelain of which our creations are a humble imitation; our savage forefathers, if they could have penetrated to the villas and cities of the Roman Empire, would have found them filled with articles of art and luxury, and of delicate manufacture, which he was slowly to be taught, and which to-day he often only imitates with difficulty. Our woollen manufactures were brought us from Flanders and Holland, our silk from France, our muslins from India, our carpets from Persia, and even to-day there is scarcely a manufactured article except in iron work which is not manufactured better in some other country than with us, in spite of the vast bulk of shoddy work we produce for sale. Even in dress to-day we are not only unable in many instances to equal the delicacy and finish of foreign fabrics and ornaments, but we are absolutely dependent on the brains and taste of a foreign people for the cut and manufacture of our clothing, and the direction which our manufacture of textiles and fabrics shall to a large extent assume. Hardly any free savage or civilized people in the world has not been able to invent and determine for itself what class or shape of clothing is suited to its needs, but the great English people hangs with a servility, which would excite our ridicule were it not a matter of national shame, on the breath of the Frenchman's lips and the throb of a French man or woman's brain to determine how it shall clothe itself and what materials its manufactories shall produce; and one French woman, she may be a prostitute, or a public dancer, or a woman of fashion, hitches her dress at one point or wears a protuberant sleeve, and five millions of English all over the earth, with patient zeal and much labour, cast aside their old skirt and sleeves and strive to do as she did; and a few throbs of the brain of a French man milliner will determine that hundreds of thousands of English hats and bonnets are to be thrown aside, while with abject servility five millions of English women seek to cover their heads with what he has invented.

Such abject dependence on the thought and guidance of another people in a matter of daily concern can only be ascribed to the profound conviction of the whole people of the Frenchman's superiority to himself in this direction, and the conviction of the English woman that she is not, in matters of taste, the equal of the French woman, a humble conviction which reduces the English folk to a species of buffoonery, when, in the simple wild suburbs of Cape Town or amid the dust storms and heat of Johannesburg or Kimberley, they persist in following the Frenchwoman and donning the garbs she with taste invented to harmonize with the artificial surroundings of a Paris home on the Champs Elysées!

Whether we allow it theoretically or only in practice, it is undoubtable that in the plastic arts we not only do not surpass, but cannot readily imitate other nations, ancient or modern. We have not only never produced a Phidias or a Praxiteles, but we have no Michaelangelo or Raphael or Tintoretto, like the Italian, no Albrecht Durer with the German, or even, if we except Turner, a man who can stand as a national representative beside Holbein and Rubens, and national painters of the Dutch and Flemish schools; and in the nineteenth century, great as has been our awakening in this respect, it is still to foreign schools that our artists go for instruction.

If we except our superb old abbeys and Gothic relics, which we share with the rest of Europe, our architecture is imitative, and, in the case of such buildings as St. Paul's, shows the grotesque folly of a people who, in an unsuitable climate and spot, will attempt in their search of the beautiful and harmonious to imitate the growths of other climates and conditions. The appalling hideousness of our cities when compared with those of any country in Europe, their grim indifference to harmony and beauty, and yet more appalling attempts to gain them, oppress the new arrival heavily.

In music we have produced no genius and no noble work; the Bachs, Mozarts, Beethovens, Mendelssohns, Wagners are Germans, and we have no men who can approach the lesser but great Italians, or even the Chopins and Meyerbeers. Our music, like the Elgin marbles and the divine gods in the British Museum, is all imported; and when we would raise a monument to our own glory, we rob Egypt of one of her obelisks which, as a ruin among desert sands, was divine, and plant it in damp ugliness on the oozing bank of our mercantile river to proclaim to all the world, "Here is a people with money to import anything; but not the skill to raise their own monuments!"

In the modern arts and manufactures, we have during the last century taken a place in the front beside other peoples in right of a discovery hardly, if at all, less important in its practical effects than the electrical discoveries which in their inception we owe to the Italians and others; and in the daily and hourly small inventions and improvements in manufacture and the domain of practical science, England, if she holds her equal place, does no more than hold it beside the laboratories and workshops of France, Germany and Italy.[78] In the world of art, in those arts in which _language_ is the medium, we are alone able to hold our heads proudly beside the best of modern peoples, not only because we possess a Shakespeare or a Chaucer, but because our literature as a whole is a noble accretion of the beautiful and great.

[78] It is remarkable that Edison, the great American, who has so perfected electrical invention, is, like Whitman and Bret Harte, largely Dutch in his origin, his forefathers having come from Holland a hundred years ago.

In that great and beneficent give and take which binds and has ever bound the children of men together, as the blood which flowing through the organs of the body blends and identifies it, we have received, like our fellows, all that humanity has thought or found, from the first and greatest discovery of fire by our prehistoric and perhaps Bushman-like ancestors, to the hardly less mighty invention of letters and arts, and we have also brought our quota to the common stock. But when we look at the matter impartially, the conviction must be forced upon every mind that, in arts and sciences, in manufacture and inventions, in spite of the contributions we have made, we are far more receivers from the common stock than contributors to it; that the world could still get on as far as religion, science, art, philosophy and material inventions are concerned without the Englishman, or were all he has contributed taken away; but the Englishman, if he lost all that in the last thousand years he has gained from Europe, and through it from all the earth, would be again a savage in aboriginal wildness.

And the question then suggests itself to us: Have we really so little to give to the common stock of our fellows? Are our assertions of our own greatness and importance brought down to the fact that, while the majority of other nations owing to their continental position have been obliged to employ the mass of their folk as soldiers, and suffer in all ages from the devastations of war upon their own soil, we, guarded by our island condition, have been able to employ the mass of our working class and to use our abundant coal and iron to produce a larger bulk of a less finished quality of saleable articles than any other civilized people, whom we are therefore able, at the price of the health and joy of our working classes, to undersell in the nineteenth century? Is this the fact, that the narrow and fixed limits of our island home did not admit of our retaining all our population within its limits, and has compelled us to send out swarms of folk to America and all vacant or savage-peopled parts of the earth? Are these accidents our only claim to greatness and to the respect of mankind? When we are called perfidious and money-wringing from our own poor and the weak of all the peoples, is our character summed up, and is our function no higher in the modern world, no higher than that of the Phœnicians in the old, to be the carriers and traders of the race while the world has need of us and then to pass away when our work is done, leaving hardly a trace?

We believe that it is not.

When our wild German forefathers, Saxon, Danish or Frisian, landed in Britain and mingled their blood with the remnant of wild Britons who inhabited the fastnesses of the land, there was one great treasure common to all the barbarian peoples of Europe and Central Asia which they carried with them, the tradition and fact of personal freedom. The Greeks and the Romans believed themselves free; it was the freedom of an enfranchized minority reigning despotically over a vast body of women and slaves, and Athens, in her noblest days, contained thirty thousand free adult males, while her population numbered hundreds of thousands.

In Eastern civilization the proportion of free men was generally smaller, and the absolutely free and independent individual in the nations was sometimes only the solitary despot who ruled. This is never the case with a nomadic people who, if they take captives, have no land for them to labour on, and no dungeons in which to confine them, and whose women and captives of war are therefore always more or less independent. Most of all was this so with our German ancestors, whose women were the most honoured part of the nation, supposed to possess a knowledge and insight which made their advice necessary on every great national question, who accompanied their husbands in peace and war, who gave them as wedding gifts no rose or lock of hair, but a sword and shield which were the man's most precious possessions throughout life, whose scorn and reproach were what the coward most dreaded, and who again and again led the tribes to conflict and victory, as when Velleda, the white-haired priestess, led the Germanic troops to Italy; and whose captives, when by rare chance they kept them alive, were in turn incorporated in the general body.

This absolute freedom and independence of almost a whole society was not peculiar to those northern races who conquered and peopled England, but to that profound consciousness of the necessity and importance of the preservation of individual freedom and the liberty of uncoerced personal action, so wholly distinct from that sometimes misnamed freedom in which the individual is bound to sink his individuality and personal inclination in that of the class or state to which he belongs and to submit abjectly to _its_ rule--this freedom was not originally peculiar to the English, nor has it alone been kept by them. The Swiss in their mountains have preserved the blood and the speech of personal freedom of the Germanic races more pure than anywhere else on the surface of the earth, and nowhere, where that free barbarian blood spread itself, has the instinct and aspiration towards freedom become absolutely extinct. It has lived on in our brothers, the Dutch and French, and turns up again in their descendant, the African Boer; but when the matter is looked fairly in the face, we cannot avoid the deliberate conviction that, among great and dominant civilized people, the English race has kept more unsullied and borne highest, though often half furled or drooping for a time, the flag of individual freedom, which our barbarian ancestors handed down to their European descendants. England has not been free from foreign conquest; she bent beneath the heel of the Conqueror nine centuries ago; but she forced on her conquerors her speech; she has not been without her serfs, but early they became freed men; she has not been without her tyrannies of kings and nobles, but always her people have risen up against it and in time asserted their liberty of action; the masses of her people may have seemed to be flat on their bellies under the feet of rulers as under the early Stuarts, but it was only to rise more resolute than ever under Cromwell, and to rebel against his form of tyranny, too, when his dictatorship promised no increase of freedom.

To-day, when the strife is between wealth, which in skilful hands has usurped a power over men's lives and national destinies which was not contemplated when the laws of property were framed, the men of England will amend these laws as they before amended the laws with regard to kings, so that the power shall be broken and the individual be free; but if they are true to their tradition of the past they will stop when the power of a class to diminish freedom has been broken, and, as the rule of the king or baron was never allowed to become an absolute tyranny, so the yet more powerful rule of the many will not be allowed to become the slavish submission of the few, and the right of the individual to do as he pleases while his act does not hurt his fellow will be as of old the goal at which we shall aim.

The majority of Englishmen love freedom, but they love it in three different ways. The majority love it as a possession for themselves alone; they will not be interfered with, nor will they have their freedom of action barred by any one or any thing; they are not careful of the freedom of others, nor are they at all reluctant to sacrifice and annihilate it entirely if it increases their own; but to their own they cling with tenacity.

This love of freedom the Englishman shares with most savage and nomadic barbarous peoples; it is found in almost the highest perfection in the South African Boer. As a first step towards something higher it is invaluable; in its highest development its mere intensity makes it almost sublime, as is the attitude of the eagle when, having devoured all the lambs and rabbits it can find, it sails alone in the blue; it is an immensely higher quality than a mere servile submission in a people or an individual, and it is necessary as a foundation to the higher developing of the same feeling; but in itself it does not raise the nation or the person feeling it higher than the level of the noble savage.

There are a large number of us, though small compared to the first class, who love freedom for ourselves but also do not desire to grasp our liberty at the cost of others. We love liberty so dearly that we would not willingly inflict an injustice or a wrong on another, and we respect the freedom of others while we venerate our own. This love of freedom we share with all the great and noble souls that have ever existed, from the Persian prince, called the Lover of Justice or the Even-Handed, to the wise and just and far-seeing folk of every land to-day. It is a high and great, a noble, quality, but I do not think it makes us unique among the peoples of the world.

But there is yet a third way in which some of us love freedom. I do not know that any large and strong section of any people has ever loved it so before, though isolated individuals, Chinese, Indian, Jewish and Greek, have been irradiated by more or less of the glory of this passion; it is peculiar as a large racial and worldwide acting phenomenon to the English race and people. We love freedom not only for ourselves, but we desire with a burning passion to spread it broadcast over the earth; to see every human being safeguarded by it and raised to the level at which they may enjoy it; we desire freedom not only for ourselves but for humanity; and we labour to spread it. _This_ I hold is the one great gift which England and England alone possesses; this is the quality which makes us unique among the nations of the earth; this is the gift which we have to contribute to the great common offertory of humanity.

The Greek has art and philosophy, the Jew religion, the Roman high civil organization; each nation and people of the past throws in its offering to the collection of humanity's common possessions. Even the Bushman, if we will keep him a little longer, will creep up and drop in his mite, if it be only by the light with which when, well studied, he will illumine the past, and the hope he gives us of the future of the race when we see what it has already risen from--but the Englishman puts in, I think, the noblest gift of all.

It is a rash hand that dares to lift itself to set the crown on its own head, yet more on that of its own nation; but I believe that, in virtue of this one quality and lacking so much else, we stand to-day the first race on earth, and that we dare to thank the fate that we are Englishmen.

We are not unaware of the objection that may be raised. All Englishmen have not this love, nor does our past or present history always exemplify it. All Greeks were not philosophers; they poisoned Socrates. All Jews are not religious geniuses; they drove Moses half mad, hanged Jesus and excommunicated Spinoza. Yet the one is the most philosophic and the other the most religious people that ever existed. It is not by the attitude of the lower mass (lower in development, however high in wealth or authority) that a people can be measured or compared with others; the most developed and highest growths must be compared as, when we seek to classify plants, we compare their flowers, not their roots. We know that the mass of our people allow and have allowed that love of wealth and luxury, which is the national disease of our people, to sap all other considerations. We know that for years we, the great apostles of freedom, were the slave dealers and breeders of the world, that thousands of folk among us have to-day their wealth, power, culture and freedom from material cares, because their fathers' ships were loaded with men and women between the decks, one half to die there of heat and filth, the others sold at a lordly profit. We too have had our thumbscrews, our dungeons, our wars for lust of gain and power. We know that for years our sugar, cotton and coffee were wrung out of men's hands by the application of Englishmen's whips to their backs--but this too we know, that a time came when, as in times past, the leading section of the nation rose and did away with thumbscrews and dungeons and Star Chambers, so again it rose and declared the trade at an end; so too we know the world saw what it had never seen before (but what may be hoped will be seen many times again in different forms), part of a branch of the English speaking people, dominated by English ideas arise and pour out its blood like water, not for its own freedom, not for the freedom of its kind, but for a despised, scorned and feeble people. Some nations have set their slaves free, but only an English race speaking the English tongue and imbued with English ideals has shed its blood for them! This is a new thing under the sun. Many things have happened, but this never happened before. It is a new era. We know, none so well, how stained is our African record; we know with what envious eyes the government of English Ahabs eyes the patrimony of black Naboths and takes it, if necessary, after bearing false witness against Naboth; we know how Englishmen have crossed this continent and left behind them a trail of slime and gore such as few Arabic slave caravans leave; but we know that, with hearts full of soft concern for its inhabitants, and all the tenderness of strength and wisdom, Englishmen have trodden this continent and laboured among its lowest people; not Livingstone alone but a great corps of lesser unrecorded Livingstones whose names will be forgotten, but the fruits of whose lives will abide. And it was in South Africa that the English nation, when, in 1833, they voted twenty millions for the emancipation of slaves, expended over one million in buying freedom for the black man and Half-caste; and at the same time was promulgated in South Africa, by the will of the English people, the Magna Charta of the black man, which put, in the eye of the law, every free man, Hottentot or Kaffir, throughout the country, on the same level as the white.

In India our rule has been largely one of greed and self-seeking; we know that at Cawnpore, when an army of brave men, in making a last heroic stand for national freedom, killed a handful of white women and children, we, to be revenged on them, fell into inhuman and fiendish barbarities, which, if practised to-day by Boers or Kaffirs or by Frenchmen attacking Englishmen, would in our eyes brand them for ever as creatures beneath the human; we are silent about those horrors when with the fiendish savagery, not of Christians but of wild beasts, we made man after man, before we shot him, kneel down and lick up blood, so that to the horror of death might be added the horror of the fear of eternal damnation. I know no place in human history where barbarities more hellish are recorded, and when in drawing-rooms delicate-lipped women sing of Brave Havelock and his Highlanders, we see suddenly the sheen of the blood of a people fighting on their own soil for the freedom of their race, and we wish the delicate ladies could find something else to sing of.

All this we recognize, and we are willing to look the facts fully, if not unblushingly, in the face; but when all has been seen and said, this also must be allowed: that, though we have set our feet on the land over a hundred years, there are as many or more people of the aboriginal races in the land than when we came, and, if we should pass away from them to-morrow, all we shall have left them as our main legacy will be a certain knowledge of our language and laws, and they would not be a less free, rather a more free, people than when we found them. We have not been to them at least the upas-tree, killing out the race from beneath us, and if at times we have been conquerors and oppressors, and if more often we have made blunders, this one thing is certain, that perhaps not the majority of us, certainly not all of us, yet still a certain body of us, have meant well by them. We have meant to aid and raise them, to put them on an equality with ourselves, and the thought they were being crushed or murdered would be a blow to the most earnest sensibilities of our natures.

It may be replied: "Yes, that is your English cant; you alone of all people in the world have always a psalm in your mouth as you crunch the bones of your enemies, and, while you are putting the bread of the poor and needy in your own jaws, your eyes are turned upwards."

And this is to a certain extent true. Cant lies across our national character as a hideous deformity, peculiar to ourselves. As we have one virtue, so we also have this vice which is ours and ours alone; but is it not the shadow of that very virtue? The disease which is an indication of its opposite? There are times when our heart sickens that we are English, and the meanest and most brutal nation seems great when we compare its attitude with that greasy whine of affected sanctity and humanity with which, often as individuals and continuously as a people, we try to gloss over our acts of greed, injustice and self-seeking.

The Boer, if he wishes to annex a Native territory, says: "The damned Kaffir; I'll take his land from him and divide it among my children." The Frenchman says, if he wishes to possess a territory: "I shall take it for the glory of France and keep it for her honour." And this is noble, direct and manly, if perhaps cruel and unjust.

But the Englishman speaks not so. When he desires an adjoining Native territory, he sighs, and folds his hands; he says: "It's a very sad thing the way these Natives go on! They believe in witches and kill them. I really can't let this go on! It's my duty to interfere. I can't let these poor benighted people go on so!" He says nothing about the coal mines he wants to work in their country or the rich nature of their lands of which he has already got vast grants; so he turns on the Maxim guns, and he kills a few thousands to save the ten witches; and witchcraft is put an end to--but he has the lands and mines, and dishomed and beaten Natives work them for him. How much nobler is the Boer's attitude is obvious. When we want a territory on a larger scale we do not say we are stronger than those people, let us go and kill them and take command of the land for the glory of the Englishman and the benefit of his trade.[79] We first send some Englishmen there till the people, knowing our character and that where one locust comes there come others, grow a little restive and show some displeasure at our fore-runners; then we draw ourselves together and say: "It is our duty to defend innocent men and women trusting to us who have ventured into a strange land" (how and why they came there we don't inquire), and so we draw out our guns in the name of a wronged humanity--and so conquer a new land; or we encourage our citizens to buy shares in a commercial enterprise, lend money may be, and then say: "It is our duty to take the management of its finance, and eventually of its government, because it is our duty not to allow innocent speculators to suffer." Whether the folk in the land will suffer we leave out of view for the moment, but we dwell on that great duty--till the land is ours. In the history of the world there was never a people whose record of relations with other peoples showed so hideous a record of falsehood and self-deception; other peoples have lied to each other; but that immeasurably more hideous lie, the lie told to oneself, has not been common. And we carry this hideous attitude into the relations of private life; it is the distinctive mark of the lower type of Englishwoman (often one of culture and philanthropic and religious inclinations) that she cannot speak the truth to herself, much less to others, with regard to her motives and actions. When she envies another and seeks to win her friend or lover from her, she does not, with the frank wild truth of the Italian or French woman, say: "I will undermine their friendship. I hate her. She has done me no harm but I will triumph over her." She says to herself: "It is my _duty_ to show that man what that woman is," and so, in the performance of her duty, she saves her conscience and attains her end. We cannot look fairly or frankly at our people in their private or public capacity without allowing that that is our deformed feature, our hideous and unique characteristic.

[79] He does not add: And so did my fathers two hundred years ago, and all Europe and the Bible expresses faith in them; "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live, says God"; for this kind of Englishman is not of a discerning and analytical disposition. He never goes farther than the matter in hand; and the matter in his own hands seldom stretches farther than the length of his own nose.

But what does it mean when we come to analyse it? Is it not simply that deference which the less developed and more brutalized part of our nation, aye, and of the separate individual himself, pays to the higher? Is it not that the English nation and English individual, bent on an act of injustice at variance with the most deep-lying conviction of its nature, is obliged to gloss it over or it could not attain its end?

If the French or Chinese or Russian Government is not obliged to gloss over the fact to the mass of its people that in undertaking a certain war it is thinking nothing of justice or injustice, not the benefit of the conquered, but simply of itself; is it not because there is no large body of the people strong enough to hamper it and perhaps tie its hands altogether if it did not cozen and blind them?

What is the action of the English Government under such conditions, when Pitt drags in the words justice, right, mercy, to shield itself, but a covert assertion that such a feeling does exist, which would not stand by it if it did not believe that the freedom and emancipation of others would be aided by its action?

Nay, in the meanest souled Englishwoman, when she dare not say to herself openly: "I hate that woman and I will wrong her," but is obliged to bring in the blasphemed words duty, right, justice, to soothe her own soul--what is it but a testimony that, even in that poor specimen of the race, there lurks somewhere a feeling that right must be done, that for no gain to _yourself_ can you take an unfair advantage. It is the low, insincere element in the woman striving to justify itself before the profound English conception of the absolute necessity of justice and fair play between all men. She _dare_ not slander her fellow unless she has first silenced this.

An Englishman going to sit on the same jury with Boers to try a white man for killing a Kaffir dares not say frankly and openly to himself before he goes in or has heard the evidence, as the old Boer does frankly and truly: "That man is not guilty; no white man shall be punished for the death of a black"; but he says, when he hears the evidence: "After all, one can never be certain that evidence is true; why should I set myself up to condemn a fellow man, perhaps to lifelong imprisonment, when it may be unjust? And is it not my duty to avoid stirring up ill-feeling between Dutch and English by bringing in a Boer guilty?" And he votes with the rest. But what is this hideous fraud but the cringing of the man's lower nature before the higher element in himself? If he dare once, only once, admit frankly in his own heart: "That man committed murder, but I am going to bring him in not guilty because these Boers buy in my shop," he would not _dare_ to give the verdict, and, if he did, something even in that low groping nature would rise up and say: "You are not worthy to be an Englishman," and he would know the agony of remorse.

The Boer does not need to lie to himself because there is nothing in him that would rise up to reproach him if he did not. This hideous fraud in the nation and individual is evidence that there _does_ exist a part which follows after justice and freedom for all men and which has to be blinded and silenced before wrong can be done; it _does_ testify that. Even in the lowest English-speaking man or woman, somewhere, tucked away in the background of their being, is that awful and almost mysterious instinct of our people: "You can't wrong a fellow human being; a man is a man; and what is right for you is right for another. All men have a claim to fair play." And before this whisper the meanest man or woman of our race squirms when he tries to evade it, and, unable fully to understand it or explain it, it lives in the heart of our people, growing louder and stronger as the ages pass. We can no more tell you how and why we have it than the Greek can tell you why he had to make statues and love them; or the Roman laws and roads; or the German music. It seems it is inborn in us. We may try to annihilate it by argument; we may try to cozen it by lies; but in each one of us stands this instinct pointing with its upraised finger the path we have to walk in. It is the mysterious birthright of every English man and woman. We may call it the love of freedom, of justice, but neither of these quite defines it; it is something more; it is the deep conviction buried somewhere in our nature, not to be eradicated, that man as man is a great and important thing, that the right to himself and his existence is the incontestable property of all men; and above all the conviction that not only _we_ have a right and are bound to preserve it for ourselves, but that where we come into contact with others _we are bound to implant it or preserve it in them_. It is a profound faith, not in the equal talent, virtues, and abilities of men, but in the equal right of the poorest, most feeble, most ignorant, to his own freedom and to a perfect equality of treatment.

In all or almost all of us it is faintly present, and in the master minds which express our race it becomes a passion which in a thousand directions manifests itself, as the German instinct for music making now a Mozart and then a Beethoven, and the Greeks' artistic power making now a Phidias and then a Praxiteles. It is this which we believe and hold to be the peculiar attribute of the English people, our one gift which we have to contribute to the general sum of humanity's wealth--the desire not only to be free, but to make free--the consciousness of the importance of the individual as individual apart from any attributes of sex, nationality, talent or wealth. To us it has been given first among all peoples to perceive, though still dimly, the unity of all human creatures, and as a nation to endeavour to realize in our legislation and institutions and our relations with weak peoples our perception of the fact.[80]

[80] It is perhaps not only by good fortune that among us should have arisen Charles Darwin. Those who study his early work, the _Voyage of the Beagle_, when as yet he was only perceiving faintly the relation of things which he afterwards so clearly grasped, will see, curiously manifest in almost every page of that work, those great English qualities of love and freedom and human equality in freedom. Neither does it seem anything but fitting and natural that the man who first brought evidence to convince the world of the identity of all life, seen and vaguely indicated by the world's poets, from Lucretius to Goethe and Shelley, should have been an Englishman. It is not wonderful that the man who, in his youth, felt so keenly the pain of seeing the savage ill-treated or the coloured man slighted, should have been he to whom the mystery and meanings of the humblest forms of life should have been made clear and that, from the stripes on the wing of the bird and the life and motions of the worm, he should have read the open lessons that others had overlooked. Foreign peoples often wonder that he should have appeared among us, but he appeared in our own line of growth; he is an efflorescence that naturally and rightly belongs to us. He was our Englishman at his highest.

To those of us who hold this view of the past history of the English race, of its present position and of the characteristic which constitutes its peculiarity and strength among the peoples of earth, the upas-tree theory with regard to its future growth is not only inconceivable but, could we conceive it as possible, we should hold it undesirable. And there is nothing from our point of view either in its past history or present condition to support the theory. The Spaniard attempted the upas-tree form of colonization and empire, but he has not succeeded. No nation who has produced any approach to a permanent organization has followed that line and succeeded by following it. The Roman, the Great Mogul, attempted, where they conquered, to spread the benefits and rights of their own organization to the affiliated people; it was not the number of her slaughters that made the Roman Empire the greatest the world has yet seen or her rule the most enduring; the conquests of Rome, when she had attained her widest empire, had not cost so many lives as many a barbarian conquest which depopulated whole territories and passed like a smoke or a pestilence leaving no mark behind; the Roman Empire attained to that endurance and power it held because Rome was not a upas-tree to the races she came into contact with, but because, if in a partial and incomplete manner, yet more than others, where she planted her standard, she sought to raise and instruct, not to exterminate. No one can study the history of that great folk in imperial growth without feeling that behind all lay a dim perception of something higher than mere national expansion; and in those wise methods, which in the hour of her greatness she ordained, through which men of all nations and creeds might in time and by merit become Romans and by her medium spread everywhere the arts, the knowledge and the advantages peculiar to herself, we see the germ of the true idea of universal empire fitfully trying to incarnate itself. Rome fell because she herself became corrupted by wealth and the inequality of possession, but it took her three centuries to die, and it must never be forgotten that there were Gauls, Spaniards, Asiatics and Germans who fought as desperately in her cause at last as the children of the Seven Hills: so real a fact had been her empire, so true was her absorption of all peoples into herself. The Gaul, the Thracian, the Illyrian died generation after generation fighting for the Roman flag because it had conferred on them something that they valued, and rather than lose which they would die. It is not because she slaughtered but because she raised, not because she crushed but because she protected, that Rome reigned; and she is to some extent immortal and among us to-day still, not because of the men she slaughtered, which any savage or wild beast might have accomplished as well, but because she had something new and large to teach mankind, and she taught it to the race. There is not upon the earth to-day one pure blood Roman any more than there is one pure blood Greek, but Rome lives still in our institutions, in our learning, in our habits of thought; she has her part in every civilized individual; and, while the race continues on the planet and continues to grow, she will have her part in that growth, because, like Greece, she was one of the early forces which fed and shaped it; and her language, spoken by none, is still preserved because of the treasure imbedded in it; and in that large ultimate race of humanity she also will have her share because, while her blood will be fractionally represented in it, her thought will have played a large share in its creation.

Such empire and such immortality, only infinitely wider, deeper, and more indestructible, is that which we desire and hope for the English race, and language. We believe that we also have our contribution to make to the growth of humanity. We believe that our sense of the importance of individual liberty, irrespective of individual conditions, is a larger contribution to the wealth of the race on earth than any folk has yet made; and we believe that our desire to impart it is a more potent means of extending our true empire, and with it our speech over the surface of the globe, than any mere strength of arm or valour in slaughtering. We believe that it is not impossible that the day will come when from north to south, from east to west, over the globe, our English spirit will have spread; when, as the art of reading and writing which was once the discovery and possession of some prehistoric race but which is to-day becoming the property of the globe, so that in a hundred years' time no child on the globe will be without it, so our English freedom will spread and the day will come when in that large united people of the future every man will say: "In that I am free I am English," and the language, when even possible freedom has been preached all the world over, may form the foundation of the world's speech.

We look forward to no time when our brilliant little Japanese brother with his love of flowers and beauty and simplicity and his keen intellectual insight, when our Russian mate with his idealism and grim intensity of emotion, and even the Kaffir with his high sense of honour and justice and his almost abnormally developed sense of social unity and obligation, shall have passed away for ever from among the things of earth and when we shall reign in his stead. Our dream of the future of our race is of no John Bull seated astride of the earth, his huge belly distended with the people he has devoured and his teeth growing out yet more than ever with all the meat he has bitten and looking around on a depeopled earth and laughing till all his teeth show and the peoples' bones rattle in his belly: "Ha! I reign alone now. I have killed them all out!"

If such a consummation were within the remotest grasp of possibility, the best thing the peoples of earth could do would be to combine and kill the ogre while there was yet time. But no such consummation of his fate is conceivable. The North American has indeed died out before us as the Bushman almost died out before the Dutch and will utterly die out, unless with great care and at much expense we have the taste and the wisdom artificially to preserve him for future ages and to complete as far as possible the links in the chain of life; but we have not really killed them, they had not the power unless they were artificially preserved to grasp the conditions of a more complex existence. Negro, Indian, and even Irishman, they all tend to increase, not to die out, under our rule. Our dream of the future empire of our race is not of an empire over graves but in and through living nations. The future of our race is never prefigured in our minds by the upas but as a huge tree, among whose shelving roots and under whose protecting shadow, endless forms of life may spring up and flourish that might otherwise be destroyed, and in whose wide umbrageous branches every form of bird and creature shall find resting place and nourishment, a tree of life and not of death. We do not dream of our language that it shall forcibly destroy the world's speeches and all they contain, reigning in solitary grandeur, but, as gold in a ring binds into one circle rare gems of every kind and some of infinitely greater beauty than itself, so we dream that our speech being common may bind together and bring into one those treasures of thought and knowledge which the peoples of earth have produced, its highest function being that of making the treasures of all accessible to all.

We think of the great race of earth, which shall be in the future, not as composed of English blood with all the beauty and strength of other races and peoples excluded; but rather we figure it as a great temple reared up of material of every size and colour, from marble and alabaster to ebony and starred porphyry, but in which every stone and doorpost shall be cemented with the freedom that is the gift of our people. We look for the future growth of England not as the result of the merciless slaughter of mankind or the use of force, but because, as time passes and we become freer ourselves, we shall spread our freedom wherever our foot touches, and whoever is trampled, oppressed or feeble on earth will gather to us and grow up under our shelter to strength; we look for the spread of our language, not because it is of necessity the finest and most complex and expressive instrument of thought, though, after our instinct for freedom, it is the noblest outgrowth of our race, having perchance not the music of the Italian, the exact brilliance of the French, the ready power of expressing deep and powerful emotion of the German, or the multiple advantages of other forms of speech, yet, like some great and complex organ with understops and pipes which skilfully managed may produce almost any effect, being fitted to equal and perhaps surpass any language in its breadth of power,[81] but because in this tongue will be preached the most valuable lesson humanity has yet to learn; because, wherever a people has come into contact with it, it has meant for them freedom and advance.

[81] How far does the passion of a workman for the tool he works with speak in us here?

There is an old saying that a slave cannot breathe in the air of England because the moment his foot touches the shore he is freed. We look for an enlargement of this old parable in the future. We look for the time when it shall be said: "Slavery, injustice, the oppression of the weak by the strong, cannot exist in any land where an Englishman breathes; the moment his foot touches a shore, they pass away before him." And in this will lie the Englishman's power to dominate and his claim to immortality.

In the great nation that shall govern and cover the whole earth there may be found not one pure-blooded Englishman, any more than there is to-day one Greek or Roman on earth. He will as little be found in three hundred years' time in London or New York, as in Pekin or Yokohama. But what was great in him we believe will have encircled the globe; and English freedom will extend from Greenland to Borneo when the Englishman shall have melted into something larger.

We know that this consummation is not inevitable or certain; dreams as large as this have been dreamed by races before and come to nought. We are not unaware that to carry this conquest out the English race must first free itself before it can consciously or unconsciously accomplish its missionary enterprise. During the last years there seems a pause in the generous outflow of English inspiration, and, where we appear to be bent on suppressing a slave trade, it will be manifest to the least observant looker-on that our Government is merely making that project a shield for financial and national aggressions. The truth is that all English-speaking countries are in the throes of a great effort demanding not less of the vital energies of our people in England, America and the Colonies than the old internal struggles which resulted in the freedom of Barons as opposed to the Monarchy, the freedom of the men of the middle class as opposed to the hereditary powers. What the future of the English race will be depends on the result of that conflict. If it results as we who share in its struggles believe, it will show the world when the strife is over, for the first time, a perfectly free land in which the superficial differences of sex and class shall be sunk in the greater personality of the human creature, in which every creature from its birth shall stand free and untrammelled and the inequalities between men shall not be those of artificial construction but of inherent deficiencies or powers; in which a new aristocracy shall be formed out of the great labour of the head or hand and not of those of great possessions, of those who give much to their fellows and not those who receive; when the child will be told to take off his hat and bow to the labourer who for sixty years has worked in the field for the community, or has thought for it in his chamber, and not to the woman who lies back in her carriage, consuming and having consumed without return the labour of hundreds, or the man who, in the gambling of the roulette table, the stock exchange or the share market, has made his millions. It may be that the arrest in our outward efforts to extend our freedom and humanity's may be the result of this internal trouble and that when, before the race is exhibited for the first time in the history of the globe an absolutely free civilized people in which the individuality of the male and female, the powerful and the weak, are respected, we shall take up our work with renewed ardour, and, almost whether we will or no, the freedom we have attained for ourselves will infect all the race and constitute us its leaders. This may be; this is what there is some promise of ultimately being--but it may also not be. We may have become so much degraded by the ideal of existence which has been held before us, that the strife of our women and masses, which now seems an ennobling strife for more and nobler fields of labour, shall degenerate into a demoralizing strife after universal inaction and that our ideal as a race will be what is now merely the ideal of a class, existence on the labour of others without exertion--and then the English race will be degraded, as many have been before it, and the Russian, the Japanese and even the Kaffir must lead the world's people in their march; we cannot. We do not pretend there are not certain signs which suggest the possibility of ultimate failure, and make us fear for it. In a country like South Africa we see that, where the English and in truth any branch of the white race comes into contact with a more primitive dark, there is a hideous tendency at once to degenerate. We will not work. The most feeble and unrichly brained man or woman who could be worth their keep to humanity and perhaps as richly productive as a hand worker, but never as anything else, refuses the one order of labour he is fit for, and prefers a hideous dependency on society, which in Africa is ultimately a dependence on the dark races, rather than to undertake the one form of labour for which nature has fitted him. We see a hideous tendency to leave all the work of life to the dark races; for the moment this seems to leave us free for higher efforts, but as time passes surely it will enervate; like a rotten aristocracy we shall die out, and the hands which for generations have made our roads, planted and reaped our fields, built our houses and tended our children, will at last be united to the brains that make the laws and govern the land, and we shall fade away. That the day may be far distant does not make less clear and painful the first symptoms of the disease of which all great conquering nations of the past have ultimately died. Again our hope, that the English working man and the woman when freed will impart their gain to all the world and so rule over life, is belied at least by two symptoms--that the man who is trying to free himself from the tyranny of class still does in certain instances strive fiercely to maintain that of sex, and that, as he gains or thinks he is gaining his own freedom, he strives jealously to exclude men who are not of his blood from sharing it. These are perhaps the two ugliest symptoms in the modern movement; and if it means anything but the action of a man who, nearly drowned, wrings the hands of his fellow off him and throws him back into the water, only that he may be able to gain the shore and return with a rope for his fellow--it is the most hopeless symptom that has appeared in our social growth for many years. In South Africa, where our national English greed for speedy wealth without exertion has made us, not satisfied with the dark labour of the country, introduce yet more from Asia, then when they have served us and filled our pockets, we attempt to refuse them the rights of citizens and labourers, the English love of freedom and fair play does not seem growing. There are countless other symptoms which give us cause for consideration and most anxious doubt. We are going to spread freedom and justice over the earth, but in Africa at present our doom seems to be to drag its natural wealth from its bowels, and to expend it in intensifying the luxury of the old world. We prefer, as a great South African millionaire once said, "the land to the Natives," and for a time that part of us which seeks to rule over nations and permeate the peoples seems silenced by that part of us which desires to fill its hands with the fruits of the land and the labour of its people--and then desires nothing more.

All this we see and see clearly. That a tree is full of buds does not prove that there will ever be fruit; that a child moves beneath its mother's heart is no certain promise that there will ever be a man; and, seeing clearly many conditions which may check its progress and even symptoms of conditions which may ultimately terminate its existence, nevertheless, while the buds are on the tree, we do not fail to dig and water, and, while the child is in the womb, we do not cease to prepare for its coming because of the possibility of its abortion.

To those of us who take this view of conditions, functions, difficulties and possible future of the English race, it is not very difficult to determine what in the little South African world our relations and course of conduct towards the black man and the alien races should be. The man who holds to the upas-tree function of the English race and the possibility and desirability of our exterminating and using entirely for our own advantage all the peoples of earth is not more confident as to what his line of action should be than we. Nay, we believe we are a little more confident, because we believe there lies in every Englishman, behind his philistinism and jingoism, something that makes the upas-tree line of action a little difficult to him.

We are not unaware of the difficulties and complexities of our position in this country, but upon all matters small and large we know our course. We are asked sometimes: "Well, but what do you intend this country to be, a black man's country or a white?" We reply we intend nothing. If the black man cannot labour or bear the strain and stress of complex civilized life, he will pass away. We need not degrade and injure ourself by killing him; if _we_ cannot work here, then in time, wholly or in part, the white man will pass away; and the one best fitted to the land will likely survive--but this we are determined to do: we will make it a free man's country. Whether the ultimate race of this country be black, white or brown, we intend it to be a race permeated with the English doctrine of the equal right of each human to himself, and the duty of all to defend the freedom of it.

If it be suggested to us that the Natives of the land are ignorant, we have the reply to make that we are here to teach them all we know if they will learn--if they will not, they must fall.

If it be asked whether we think them our equals, we would reply: Certainly in love of happiness and their own lives--perhaps not in some other directions; but we are here to endeavour to raise them as far as it is possible; we are determined to make them a seed-ground in which to sow all that is greatest and best in ourselves.

If it be asked whether we are negrophiles, we reply: "No--we are trying to be but we are not yet. The white man in us yet loves the white as the black man loves the black. It would be a lie to say that we love the black man, if by that is meant that we love him as we love the white. But we are resolved to deal with justice and mercy towards him. _We will treat him as if we loved him_: and in time the love may come. When you pick up a lost child in the streets covered only with rags and black with dust, you have first to take it home and wash and dress it and then you want to kiss it. When we have dealt with the dark man for long years with justice and mercy and taught him all we know, we shall perhaps be able to look deep into each other's eyes and smile: as parent and child."

If it is said to us that our idea of the function of the English race is all very well, but in reality all that races seek is self-aggrandisement, we reply that we are fully aware of this tendency to the most blatant self aggrandisement in our people, but we know also other tendencies; and Washington, Lincoln, John Brown, Florence Nightingale, Josephine Butler, John Stuart Mill, Howe, Livingstone, Moffat, and the multitudes who harmonize with and follow them, are not less truly English. In every land where the English race is growing, in Australia, New Zealand, America, England and even South Africa, side by side with its less specialized elements we have this broad humanitarian element, as surely and unfailingly developed in every land, and on this we build our hope. This element, which we believe to be ultimately the dominant and vital element in our people, is animated entirely by one instinct and works to one end. We do not follow ultimately either the Union Jack or the Stars and Stripes. Over our heads waves always a larger and wider flag, inscribed with that one word, "Freedom," which being fully interpreted means justice and liberty for all, or, being yet more simplified: Do unto all men as you would they should do unto you. Under that standard we range ourselves to conquer. We regard it as the true flag of our race, beneath which we are willing to die, but which, British, American, Australian, New Zealander or even South African, we are never willing to see fall. It is this English standard which alone we would see planted in every country of the earth. It is this unseen flag, waving over our heads, which stimulates us to persevere in our course; it is this which we believe constitutes the ultimate glory of the English people.

If we are asked how we can expect any folk ever to dominate in the world as a power everywhere spreading freedom and imparting its benefits to all, when in all the history of the past such a thing is not recorded of any people, we reply that it is useless to talk to us in Africa of what has been, as though it of necessity limited what shall be in the world of human growth. Outside our doors, even as we write and think, sits cowering the little human ape Bushman, and, when we turn from him to the Kaffir working in our kitchen and the bust of Shakespeare on the mantleshelf, we do not only hope and believe but we see physically before our material eyes the infinite growth of humanity, the unmeasurable power of change and the arrival of entirely new traits which is possible in the human creature. You may as well try to stop a great people on its line of growth by telling it that no people has ever done before what they are attempting to do, as you could stop the creative mind of a genius in its labour by telling it that work had never been done before. "Exactly so," replies the artist, "I know man has never seen the face I see and am trying to paint or the fact I see and am trying to record; that is my joy, I am doing an entirely new thing and through me humanity grows a little in a new direction."

It is exactly because we believe no nation on the earth has ever manifested just this desire, not only to be free, but to make free, that we are filled with an almost infinite hope as to our function and future. This is why we value it more highly than all the qualities we share with other peoples. It is our stroke of genius, our new contribution to human growth.

If we are asked how, looking round on the little world of South Africa to-day, we dare to entertain such lofty conceptions of the function and future of our race, we reply: "Yes, we dare." We are not blind to the self-seeking and injustice which surround us on every hand. We are not for a moment blind to the fact that sometimes, where we seem to be defending the Native, we are merely using him as a rod with which to strike our white brothers of another speech; we do not forget that English hands have in this country flogged men to death and that, because the man killed was of a dark race, we as an English community have not dared to do more than inflict a fine. We are aware how devoid of any consciousness of large racial function are a mass of our English-speaking folk and how completely devoid of any aim but that of self-betterment are numbers of our units; but, looking these facts directly in the face and allowing all they mean, we yet do not give up hope.

Is it absolutely nothing that in this country there are to be found men who, whether as judges or when serving on juries, are not only incorruptible before the forces of gold or personal interest but before the much more terrible corruption of racial prejudice and passion? Is it nothing that there are men among us in whose hands the most miserable feeble Bushman or Hottentot is as sure of rigid justice as though he were a royal prince or millionaire? Is it not something that there is throughout the length and breadth of the land hardly an Englishman who dares to use the power of a dominant people without making for himself a screen of lies, behind which to hide from his conscience when she comes to seek for him, that there is hardly a man or woman among us who dares to act to one of the subject races as they could not be acted to without first shielding themselves behind an excuse? Is it nothing that, poor as our rule is, at least while the people of England have still held rule in the land, the Native races have drawn to our standard, and at least, comparing us with others, have recognized that our flag meant justice and freedom for those who stood under it? Is it nothing that in the space of fifty years England has sent out to us at least once a man who in his capacity as ruler bent with an unfeigned solicitude over every element in our complex people and endeavoured to tighten the reins of sympathy between Englishman, Boer and Native, and to see, unblinded by that intense passion for their own people which all deep natures feel but which high natures control, the needs and the failings and the sufferings of each section and sought to remedy them? Is it nothing that, at least once, we have had an English ruler who possessed all passion for impartiality and humanity which characterizes a race fitted to rule over empires of varied peoples, and that among men more closely South African we have one who, though a Jew by name and descent, was an Englishman by language and education, through a long life consistently and without intermission sought to enforce practically the ideal of English rule as a great freeing impartial force? Is it nothing that, in addition to the names of such men as Sir George Grey and Saul Solomon upon our South African record, and with the story of such lives as Livingstone and Moffat mingled with that of our English occupancy of the country we have also the names of at least a few hundred individuals less known but following in their steps and animated by the same principle?

Have we not heard it said again and again by the Boer: "You Englishmen know no difference between one man and another; you treat a black man as if he was yourself"; and in that one saying have we not ground for hope?

But it may be asked us whether we do not see a possibility of our hopes for the English race and its future falling to the earth; we reply: "We do; we recognize that it is possible that we may not even kill out the black races of Africa but that, a seething and ignorant mass, they may live under us, at last infecting us and dragging us down to themselves; we know it is possible that our conception of the English race, as possessed of a vast fertilizing and liberating power which shall spread from it till it permeates the whole race, may be mistaken and the result of national egoism and mental refraction; we know that the twentieth century, instead of being, as we dream, the great blossoming time of the English race, as the fourth century before Jesus was of the Greek, may be the century of our decay; that the spread of the consciousness of the unity of all men and the importance of their individual freedom may be not for us to spread but for some other people; and that when we have shown the world how lucifer matches can be made for one penny the gross by girls who work for three shillings a week; and that, if you can make guns which discharge so many bullets a minute, you can bring down so many unarmed black men in a minute; and that, if a few men can gain a grant of the mineral wealth of half a continent, they can buy mistresses, palaces, titles, governments, and roll in gold as if it had been water--then our work will be done. We know that this is possible, and I suppose there are moments of horrible bitterness when to all of us it has seemed almost more than possible."

If it be asked us: Even if our view be true and the function and destiny of the English race be what we hope it, what after all is the use of our striving to bring it nearer; may we not in our individual action be mistaken, and, where we believe ourself to be helping a great race to walk in the path which shall serve all humanity, we are simply sacrificing ourselves to no purpose? we reply: "We know this. Under the sea millions of insects work, and, as the ages pass, they raise at last a bank that in time becomes an island on which great trees grow and the sun shines. The work of no one insect is necessary to the growth; the almost invisible speck of coral he makes may be broken off and crushed to powder, and the work yet grows; but by just such an infinite accretion of specks the island rises, and the wide instinct which compels all to contribute their part builds at last the island.

"So we work, only _not_ quite unconsciously. If our individual addition be worthless and be broken off--well--we are obeying the deepest necessity of our being; we are working on in the only direction we know of, and, unlike our fellow insects of the sea, we, where we work, have dreams of the future land, not that will be, but that _may_ be--and which we believe we are building."

A man far out at sea on a dark night, struggling with the waves in his small boat, sees far away a light he thinks to be the harbour light and strikes towards it; knowing he may be mistaken, and that long before daybreak man and boat may be engulfed, he still strikes towards it, labouring without certainty of ever reaching it but with unalterable will and determination, because it is the only light he sees.

So we, realizing the possibility that we are mistaken, and knowing the chances of failure, yet strike for what seems to us the largest possibility open to our race and to ourselves as part of that race.

* * * * *

In the South Africa of to-day the three varieties of Englishmen, those indifferent to the future of their race and those consciously labouring for it, with opposing ideals and conceptions of the ends to be sought, are working out, whether we will or no, the future of the land, and dealing with the vast twentieth-century problem of the mixture and government of mixed peoples; the verdict upon our solution of which cannot be pronounced by the men of this age, but only by the future.

NOTE A

THE SOUTH AFRICAN NATION (1900).

The events of the last nine, and especially the last seven, years have thrown a curious light upon two statements in Chapter I, written in 1892:

Firstly: the statement that the political division of South Africa into separate and self-governing states are divisions "_of immense importance and by all means to be preserved_."

Secondly: the statement that there does exist a subtle internal union between all African states, which causes them to be, in spite of their complex and mixed structure, in a profound sense, one, and makes it impossible to attack and injure any one state without injuring all.

South Africa forms naturally one national and distinct entity, widely dissevered from any other national entity, European or otherwise. It may be said that Australia, Canada, and New Zealand contain also the germs which will ultimately develop into distinct national entities; and this is undoubtedly true. As no sane man supposes that an infant will remain perpetually unweaned, or that a healthy sapling will not ultimately form its own bark, so it is inevitable that all healthy off-shoots from European peoples must ultimately form independent nations. But the position of these young countries is not analogous with that of South Africa; and as regards Australia, and especially New Zealand, it is in some respects fundamentally unlike our own.

This difference lies in the groundwork of our national structure, and must be manifest to anyone who has given a few years to the impartial study of the problems which beset European races planted in new lands.

One is probably not very far from the truth in stating that, roughly speaking, out of every thirty men and women born in Australia and New Zealand, from twenty-five to twenty-eight will be found to be of purely or almost purely English descent--using the word English as it is popularly, though misleadingly, used to include Keltic Irishmen and Scots.

In South Africa, from the Zambesi to the mouth of the Orange River, southward to the sea, there are roughly calculated to be about 8,000,000 (eight millions) of souls. Now, out of this population, about 800,000, roughly speaking, are whites, about 400,000 being Dutch-Huguenot, about 260,000 British, and about 100,000 of other European nationalities. As regards persons of unmixed English blood, this is probably an over calculation, as a large number of persons popularly passing as "English" in South Africa are of blended French, Dutch, German and other extractions. But, accepting the persons of Irish, Scottish and English descent even at 300,000, they comprise about one-and-one-eighth of an Englishman in each thirty of the population. Or, to put the matter in another and more obvious light: Were to-morrow the entire population of purely or mainly British descent to leave Australia and New Zealand, those lands would at once be almost wholly depopulated. A few Maoris and quickly dwindling Australian aborigines, with a handful of Frenchmen, Germans, Swedes or Italians, and a sprinkling of Chinamen and other Asiatics, would be all that would be left. Practically, the lands would have been transformed into almost primeval solitudes. The working man, who forms the bulk of all nations, would have disappeared, and with him the farmer, the merchant, the professional man and the speculator. There would be no Australia and no New Zealand in the social sense, were all men of British descent suddenly to leave those lands.

In South Africa, on the other hand, a condition entirely the reverse would be maintained. Were every man and woman of pure British descent to disappear to-morrow, no vital diminution in the entire bulk of our population would have taken place. The vast labouring classes who build our roads and bridges, cultivate our fields, tend our flocks, perform our domestic labour and work in our mines, would be left here almost entirely untouched in the persons of our dark citizens, who form an element in our population rapidly and always increasing, and of primary importance. From the Malay fisherman, cab driver, or washerwoman, to the Bantu herdsmen and mining hands and domestic servants, our labouring class, save in the person of a few skilled overseers and workmen, would still be here untouched. Our large white farming class would be but little reduced, while more than half our professional class, our doctors, lawyers, judges and civil servants would be left in numbers amply sufficient for the needs of the country; and while, in our seaport towns and mining centres, a large number of those engaged in commerce and speculation would be gone, at least 100,000 Jews and Europeans of all nationalities engaged in these occupations would still be left, in addition to a good number of Dutch-Huguenot descended inhabitants so employed.

An element of importance, indeed, would have been abstracted from our complex communities, an element containing much of that which is noblest and most valuable in our national life, and also much that is sordid and unhealthy--but the South African people, the seed-beds of the great South African nation of the future, would still remain, as far as mere numbers are concerned, practically undiminished and untouched. The removal of the Anglo-Saxon element would affect South Africa as the sudden abstraction of its Jewish inhabitants of Great Britain would affect that land. The nation would be left intact, though an important and powerful element had disappeared.

In eighty years' time, when New Zealand and Australia are powerful and independent nations, probably infinitely exceeding in health and virility the inhabitants of the little islands in the North Sea, from which the first white Australians and New Zealanders came, their inhabitants will differ profoundly from the inhabitants of Ireland, Scotland or England, in manners, in appearance, and in tastes, habits, and political and social institutions. They will certainly no more dream of having their policy of peace or war dictated to them nor their governors forced upon them by any of the electors of Great Britain, than a healthy and sane man of forty allows his great grandmother to dictate to him the hour of his retiring or the way in which he shall spend his pence (even now an Australian-born man may be distinguished almost at once from an Englishman born in Britain, and a spirit of independence and self-respect has grown not only in Canada, but in Australia and New Zealand); yet the population of these countries may quite possibly, even in eighty years' time, bear rather more resemblance to the inhabitants of the British Isles than to any other folk.

In South Africa, on the other hand, in eighty years' time there will also be a great and independent nation, but it will be unique. It will be wholly unlike any other in the world. It will not be French or Dutch, though a large proportion of the blood in the veins of its white inhabitants will descend from these races; it will not be Russian nor Jewish, though Russian Jews are plentiful here; it will not be German, though German merchants, missionaries, doctors and agriculturists are to be found in every corner of the country; it will not be Scotch nor Irish, and assuredly it will not be English, though the blood of all these nationalities, Keltic and Teutonic, will be blended in the veins of the white South African of the future--it will be simply SOUTH AFRICAN.

So also our vast dark South African race will not be wholly Negroid. The blood of the brave Bantu folk may predominate, but it will be a race largely blended of Asiatic and other peoples; there will be strains of Dutch and French blood through the slave, of English blood through the English soldiers, and the Malay, the Indian, and even the Hottentot will have place in it. It will be simply the great _South African Dark Race_, and assuredly _not_ English. These two great blended varieties, dark and light, will form the South African nation of the future, their two streams of life, keeping, it may be, racially distinct for ages, but always interacting side by side and forming our South African nation.

Our South African national structure in the future will not and cannot be identical with that of any other people, our national origin being so wholly unlike that of any other; our social polity must be developed by ourselves through the interaction of our parts with one another and in harmony with our complex needs. For good or evil, the South African nation will be an absolutely new thing under the sun, perhaps, owing to its mixture of races, possessing that strange vitality and originality which appears to rise so often from the mixture of human varieties: perhaps, in general human advance, ranking higher than other societies more simply constructed; perhaps lower--according as we shall shape it: but this, certainly--it will be a new social entity, with new problems, new gifts, new failings, new accomplishments.

To-day, the different white elements of the South African nation are already entering upon a stage of rapid combination; South Africans whose ancestors were of English, French, German, Irish or Dutch descent are so rapidly intermarrying that, not in eighty, but in sixty years' time, if a man should pass through South Africa calling out for Frenchmen, Englishmen, Dutchmen or Germans, he would hear hardly a voice answer him; the reply will then be,--"_We are all South Africans here_."

That we cannot be an English nation is certain; but in the past there has appeared no reason why we should not ultimately be a nation bound by ties of friendly feeling to England--as America might have been, had England left her internal concerns untouched a hundred years ago; as Australia and Canada may yet be, if she abstains from interfering with their internal affairs and does not shoot down the men born on their soil.

Personally, we have always desired that this should be so.

While it has always appeared that the first and most pressing care of the far-seeing and balanced South African statesman must lie in seeking to maintain the integrity and cultivate the individuality and strengthen the internal organization of each of the separate states, in order that each might have an individuality and an internal organization strong enough to make local self-government a sufficient counterpoise to the central power whenever federation was attempted; while, on the other hand, the hardly, if at all, secondary obligation upon the far-seeing South African statesman must lie in the direction of labouring to produce such co-operation and friendliness between the different South African states as might, at the end of another forty or sixty years, find them in a position naturally and spontaneously to federate upon equal terms: to federate, as in the case of the Swiss cantons, where the different divisions are not necessarily of one language or even race, but their geographical position and their interest make them, as regards the outer world, essentially one people.

The federation we desired to see would then have been of a nature not strong enough to produce the incalculable evils of an over-centralized and universal government extending over a vast and diverse territory and over large numbers of diverse peoples, while yet it would have been strong enough to have united the different South Africa states against external aggression, to preserve internal peace, and to have formed a powerful central court for arbitration on all interstatal differences: a national structure which would combine as largely as possible the advantages of large and small states.

All nations, all those organized bodies of men which have contributed greatly to the advance of humanity, have been organized in comparatively small numbers, and have occupied geographically small spaces. To this rule there appears to have been no exception in the past; and its cause is to be found deep in the psychologic structure of the human creature.

Greece, which has probably on the whole contributed more to the fund total of the human race on earth, intellectually and spiritually than any other individual folk, was, even were all its states taken together, not so large as a minute fragment of South Africa. And even Greece was only Greece and enabled to accomplish that which she did by the intensely individual and autonomous development of minute separate parts. Athens, which territorially and in numbers was hardly larger than the Cape Peninsula, and Sparta, no larger than a small English county, have yet left the whole world immortally richer for their individual existences, in a manner which would not have been possible had they been more merged under one rule or forced into a common form of organization. The Jews, while that religion and literature were developing which has transformed Europe and reacted on the whole world, were but a small closely inter-bred tribe inhabiting a few stony valleys and plains. Holland, when she took the lead for civil and intellectual freedom, and won it, crushing to earth the unwieldy bulk of the Spanish Empire, was a tiny folk buried among a handful of sand-dunes in a remote corner of Europe, her whole territory so minute it might be carved out of Russian or Chinese Empires to-day without sensibly abridging them. England herself, when in Queen Elizabeth's reign she had already produced that noble language which is one of her greatest productions, and was developing those representative institutions and that literature which are her pride, when she had produced Chaucer, Shakespeare and Bacon, _that_ England possessed neither an Ireland nor a Scotland nor any spot of earth beyond her own borders, and her entire population was no greater than that which to-day may be found diseased, ragged, and on the border of starvation, inhabiting the back slums of a few of her great Imperial cities.

What humanity has attained in culture, in virtue, in freedom, in knowledge, and in the fullest development of the individual, it has owed to small, close, natural and spontaneous organizations of men--small tribes, small states, and, oftenest, to mere cities organized on a natural basis, with but a few miles of territory beneath their walls, owning their sway. Great empires, which have always originally sprung from such an individual, strong and healthful, national organization, but which have finally begun extending themselves by force over alien territories and over peoples not organically and spontaneously or even geographically bound to themselves, have always spelt decay and disease, not merely to themselves as larger social organizations, but to the very individual human creatures comprised within their bulky, unwieldy and unnatural entities.

Rome, indeed, in the inflated and diseased days of her Imperial expansion, produced a Marcus Aurelius, as an unpruned and dying rose tree may produce one last gorgeous bloom; but, at the very time she held within her city walls the vastest hybrid population which had ever been gathered into one spot on earth, and her enervated limbs stretched across the world, it is doubtful whether she contained one-tenth as many individuals of civic virtue and intellectual and moral virility as were once to be found within her when her body social consisted of the small city on the seven hills and the plains and hills about it, which a man might walk across in a day.

An empire based on force and controlled from a centre may indeed best be likened to an individual, naturally healthy and virile, who at a certain stage in his existence absorbes more nutriment than he requires, and who lays on a vast mass of adipose tissue, more especially abdominally, thus weighting the centres of life, leading to disease in the extremities, and finally ending in the death of the whole organism through heart failure.

Mere size and weight, whether in the world of animal organization or social structure, is never necessarily indicative of vitality and longevity. The antediluvian creatures, whose bones alone are now left us in the earth's crust, infinitely exceeded in size any extant forms of life, but have had to give place to the more concentrated birds and beasts of our day, as the hippopotamus is to-day passing while the ant and the man remain. No madness more complete can possess a human brain than the conception that mere accretion in size and weight, whether in the individual or national organism, is necessarily an increase in strength or vitality, unless there be an increased interaction between all parts and an increase in the central vitality. One jelly-like tentacle of the deep sea octopus measures twelve feet, but the whole creature is lower in the scale of life, and probably expends less nervous force, than the bee or the humming bird. Increased size may, under certain conditions, spell increased strength; it may also spell death.

Had it been possible, for example, in the days of Charlemagne for one central power permanently to crush the diverse individual nationalities which Europe has tended to divide herself into; had England, France, Holland, Germany, Switzerland and Italy been dominated over and crushed by one central power, so that their individual course of evolution along diverse lines had been stayed, and had they been forcibly bound under one rule into one large organism; the loss to the human race on earth would probably have been incalculable.

Europe during the last thousand years would probably not have contributed much more to the sum total of human advance, in the direction of freedom and many-sided intellectual growth, than the vast Chinese Empire has contributed during the same period, or than the Roman Empire contributed during the last long centuries of its bloated existence.

The national organization, controlled from one point and comprising a too vast multitude of humans, must, from that mere fact of size alone and apart from any other defect, tend to become inert. Even supposing free representative institutions universally to prevail, as they never have in any empire, past or present--(for in the British Empire of to-day a few million voters control the entire central government of Great Britain, while in India alone there are over two hundred millions of British subjects who have no representative institutions whatever and who are dominated over by the central body of voters)--and supposing each individual within a vast empire to be endowed with a share in its government, the share of power and control would be exceedingly minute and infinitesimal as regards the central power, and the bulk of citizens would be, of necessity, so far removed from that centre that that intensity of civic life and consciousness of responsibility, which alone makes democratic government healthful, and which exists easily in a small state or a tribe, where the government is as it were under the eyes of all and where each individual tells sensibly on the body politic, _cannot exist_.

Yet further, the inertness caused by mere excess of numbers under a central rule is but one cause of the inefficacy and unhealthiness of all vast empires. A central government, extending its sway over widely severed and diverse parts of the earth's surface and therefore over bodies of humans in diverse social and physical conditions, is a yet more fertile source of social disease and of enervation and deterioration to the individuals comprised in the body. The very fact, that the government and institutions of a wide empire are exactly suited to the wants of the original central dominant body, makes it impossible that the same government and institutions should be equally suited to peoples geographically remote and under socially diverse conditions. Each shell-fish lives best and healthfully only in the shell it has itself secreted; the cuttle-fish glides through the sea better in its own coarse chalky shield than were it forced into the most elaborate and gorgeous mantle that was ever developed by a nautilus: and human institutions or governments are good or bad exactly as shells are, not abstractedly, but as they harmonize with the wants of the living creatures they are bound to. As even the hermit crab, who makes his home in the shells he has not secreted, can only live and develop on condition of his choosing his own shell; forced between the pearled valves of an oyster or a mussel he will die miserably; so even a noble and virile alien people, when compelled to adapt themselves to the institutions and government developed with regard to the needs of humans in other lands and under distinct conditions, is bound miserably to decay if not to become extinct.

The central government of a vast empire, if it spreads its control over diverse or unlike territories or peoples, spells death and disease to them, not necessarily because it is evil in itself, but because it has not been gradually and spontaneously evolved with regard to the needs of the diverse units themselves. The better the shell fits the form of the creature who secreted it, the more deadly it may be when forced artificially over another.

Freedom and health for a folk desiring a tribal head is the right to possess him and to live and die for him; for a people with republican instincts is the right to republican institutions; for folk with an inclination towards monarchy, a monarchical rule; national slavery is the compulsory participation in alien institutions. Were an empire based on force yet ruled entirely by a desire to govern for the benefit of the subject nations and not for the subject powers (as none up to the present has ever been), it would still be a disease-producing, freedom-limiting institution; but, based as all empires up to the present have been, on self interest, Imperialism spells the death of all healthful human readjustments and developments.

Even where the parts of a large body social are _not_ held together by merely external force, where a very great degree of real homogeneity _does_ exist between all its parts, the evils of a much centralized rule are always manifest. It may be questioned whether even France, which is essentially one entity in many respects, has not suffered during the last century, and does not owe many of her difficulties and political perturbations, to that system of over-centralized control and uniformity of local institutions introduced by Napoleon, which has not left sufficient autonomy and self control to the really, in many minor respects, distinct provinces of France; and it is more than open to question whether Germany, almost compelled as she has been in self defence to sacrifice the independence and individuality of her component states during the last twenty years, has not intellectually and morally lost almost as much as she would by foreign domination, by her more centralized government: while in England the attempt forcibly to incorporate Ireland with herself, and govern a closely allied yet differing people, though divided only by a narrow strip of sea, has resulted in centuries of social disease and suffering for Ireland and of moral disease and instability for England.

Imperialism is the euphonious title of a deadly disease which under certain conditions tends to afflict the human race on earth. It increases in virulency in proportion as it is extended over more distant spaces and more diverse multitudes, till it becomes at last the death shroud of the nations.

It is undoubtedly true that the existence of more rapid means of intercommunication have, during the last centuries, made possible the existence of larger health aggregates than were possible in earlier times, when the small tribe and the city with a few leagues of earth about it formed invariably the largest national organization which was compatible with full social health and the highest human development. To-day, New York and San Francisco are in fact almost as close to each other as Athens and Sparta were two thousand years ago; but even to-day no vast social organism, large both as to numbers and geographical extent, such as the United States of America, could possibly exist with even tolerable healthfulness, were it not for the fact of the complete internal autonomy, individual organization and strength of its separate component states; and, above all, for the important and controlling fact, _that the bond between the different states is not Imperial, is not the domination of one central state over others, but an equal confederacy of all_.

Had the United States of America been united on the Imperial basis of one state dominating and guiding others, not even the more or less homogeneous nature of its peoples, or the internal autonomy of its separate states, could have kept its vast masses in even that condition of social health and freedom in which we find them to-day.

And further, were the separate states of America not conterminous, but widely scattered over the earth, that powerful and vital confederacy as it now exists would be impossible. If New Hampshire were in America, Maine in India, and Virginia in Northern Russia, the band which to-day naturally and strongly unites them could not exist.

* * * * *

Few persons who have not given special study to the subject appear to grasp adequately the extent of variation which mere geographical division and the exposure to extremely unlike physical conditions produces in human individuals and in human societies, demanding a corresponding difference in government and institutions. Were two infants removed from each other at birth, the one to be brought up in Finland and the other in India, the mere climatic and physical differences would, at the end of forty years, have rendered them highly dissimilar both in physical constitutions and in many intellectual and material wants, while their descendants at the end of six generations would certainly represent distinct human varieties, for which distinct laws and institutions would be requisite. The effects of geographical severance, dissimilarities in climate and physical surroundings, can never for a moment be lost sight of, in dealing with national questions, without fatal results.

Even in the United States of America, in spite of its territorial continuity and the more or less homogeneous nature of its mixed population and the strongly autonomous structure of its separate states, it is still almost open to question (though this is a matter only to be dealt with by one who has long and closely studied the constitution of the United States from within) whether the political life of that vast mass of humanity might not be healthier, its vitality greater, and the individuality of the separate citizens more strengthened, if the whole were divided into two or even three federal bodies instead of one. This at least is certain, that if ever America be tempted to lay aside her great fundamental principle of Equal Federation and geographical continuity, and to adopt in her corporate capacity the principle of Imperial rule by dominating and subjecting distant lands and alien peoples whom she does not absorb into her body politic on equal terms, then she will have introduced into her national life an element which will first morally, and finally materially, disorganize her and in the end lead to the break-up of her great and at present virile body politic; and the world will have to look elsewhere for the most advanced type of social evolution.

Napoleon attempted to unite Europe by breaking down its states with iron and re-cementing them with blood under the centralized control of France. His attempt failed, as all Imperialistic attempts must ultimately fail which seek to accomplish by force a union which can only healthily come into being through internal necessity and the gradual co-adaptation of ages. And if across the years the dim outline of the Confederate States of Europe may already be seen looming by the attentive eye, it is certain that not the Imperial nightmare, but the noble dream of a free and equal union, will find its realization in that confederacy.

* * * * *

If one turns further from the consideration of the separate states and organizations as they exist to-day to the far wider inquiry, what is the desirable and possible ultimate form of organization for the entire human race? it has always appeared to us that there can be but one answer.

Probably no powerful and far-seeing mind entertains as possible, and still less regards as desirable were it possible, the existence in the future of a world in which all the interesting and many-sided varieties into which the human race has blossomed during its evolution on earth are cut down and supplanted by any one single variety, more particularly if that variety be not one to which the far-seeing and powerful mind belongs! A Frenchized, Germanized, Russianized, Englishized, Chineseized globe is a nightmare, perhaps only seriously conceived of as a possible reality in the mind of the ignorant man in the street of all nations, eaten up, as such minds are, by a stupendous national egoism, such as might be entertained by an ant who believed his noble ant heap would ultimately cover the whole globe. The ideal of a one-nation-dominated globe can as little satisfy a broad human intelligence as the ideal of a zoological garden populated solely by hippopotami would satisfy a broadly scientific one.

To ourselves it has always appeared inevitable that, if continued growth and development of the race are to be maintained, and humanity to blossom into its fairest and most harmonious development possible on earth, progress must always necessarily be along two lines. On the other hand, not only must the independence and freedom of the separate individuals advance, but the independence and individuality of each human variety must continue to increase; while, on the one hand, a certain broad sympathy, rising from an interchange of material and intellectual benefits and a perception of the profound unity which underlies all human diversity, must draw together the different human varieties and races; as to-day the recognized bonds of the family and the nation unite diverse individuals. As the loftiest form of individual relationship is not the forcible bond which binds the slave and the animal to its master, nor even the relation of individuals identical in blood or character, but the noble companionship of persons wholly distinct, equally free, equally independent, complementing by their diversity each other's existence; so the ideal of international and racial relationships is not one of subjection and dominance or of identity, but of complementary interaction.

The ultimate chant of the human race on earth is not to be conceived of as a monotone chanted on one note by one form of humanity alone, but rather a choral symphony chanted by all races and all nations in diverse tones on different notes in one grand complex harmony. The vision of the Hebrew prophet when he cried out that the lamb and the wolf should yet lie down together and the weaned child put its hand in the cockatrice's den is the negation of the desire that the lion, having consumed the lamb, should lie alone switching his tail on his sand heap, and the cockatrice, having stung the young child to death, should peer forth from the door of its den on a landscape he had rendered desolate. Not in the extermination of earth's varied races, or the dominance of any one over all, or the annihilation of those complexities and varieties in humanity which form its beauty, not in a universal Imperial rule, but in a free and equal federation of all, lies the ultimate goal of humanity, which, being reached, alone can its fairest proportion be attained.

It is difficult to believe that the first twenty-five years of the twentieth century will have passed away before that wave of exploitation and destruction, vomited forth by the nations of Europe, led by England in her drunken orgie of Imperialism, based on capitalism, and which now threatens to sweep across the earth, disrupting and destroying its peoples and their individuality, will have met with the command, "Hereto shalt thou come and no further!" and the drenched peoples of earth, after their blood bath, shall again lift up their heads.

Already, to-day, he who notes keenly may feel faintly and from afar the first suck-in which is ultimately to withdraw that wave and leave the deluged and devastated earth to pursue its own slow complex path of progress.

* * * * *

To anyone holding this view with regard to the ultimate development of humanity at large, one and only one attitude is possible in dealing with the problems and questions concerning our own smaller South African world. For one holding the view, it is impossible to regard with other than sympathy each of our South African states, or to desire anything but their strength and development, while at the same time he desires a growing bond of sympathy and fellowship between all.

For myself, I have never been able to regard other than with deep well-wishing the different political organisms into which South Africa has more or less spontaneously divided itself; and have been compelled to desire to see them each rather strengthened and individualized than dominated and crushed by, or even merged into, another. I have not only desired that the Free State and Transvaal might each grow into strong, highly organized social entities, but one is compelled to desire (though at present without much hope of realization) that such small native states as Basutoland or even Pondoland might be left for fifty or sixty years to pursue their own internal course of evolution, and so enabling some of our native folk to attain to a fuller and more natural development than is possible if they are all forced into the vortex of our so-called modern material civilization. I have regretted the annexation of Bechuanaland to the Cape Colony, and should deeply regret the amalgamation of Mashona and Matabeleland with any other African state, or the merging of Natal and the Cape Colony into one; believing all these territories are quite large enough ultimately to form healthy units: and I have been quite unable to go with the monopolists and speculators in the past, who have desired for their own reasons that English influence should be eliminated. I have no more desired its elimination than I have regretted the existence of the Germans in Damaraland or the Portuguese on the east coast, believing that by the complexity of our elements was produced a healthy friction, preventing that dominance of any one central, overbearing power, which is the death of true freedom. I have never desired for my birthland that all interstatal lines should be broken down and the whole welded into one uniform mass with only a shadow of self-government in its separate parts: an ideal so dear to the heart of the autocrat in all ages, whether capitalist or military despot, who recognizes in each strong interstatal line or conservative institution a kind of embankment resisting his central despotism. Rather, if the truth be told, I have nourished with regard to England's part in South Africa a very lofty ambition. I have desired that my motherland might play a very high part, such as perhaps some great people may in the future play in the world's history at large. I have dreamed that it was possible for the influence of England always to make itself felt as a freeing, co-ordinating element among our varying states and peoples, an element which made for the strengthening and protecting of all weaker and smaller states and peoples; I have dreamed that England, desiring nothing for herself, might be able to hold the balance between all our states and peoples; I have desired for her an Empire, an eternal Empire, not based on force but on the reverence and faith of all peoples struggling for freedom throughout the earth. I have dreamed that when, in forty or sixty years' time, South Africa, its states grown internally strong enough, healthfully and without sacrificing their different systems of internal self-government to federate, federated, took her place beside the world's other large national entities, though the majority of her inhabitants could never be English in descent, and South Africa would be a nation as independent and self-controlling as America or France, that yet a peculiarly close and tender bond might for ever bind her to England.

Among human relationships there is one which, though not common, perhaps few beings have been so fortunate as not once to have seen realized, and which constitutes one of the bravest and fairest in the whole domain of human fellowships. It is the bond which exists between a large and generous woman, who, through marriage having thrown into her hands children not her own by blood, yet through all their infancy and early childhood guards and labours for as her own, asking nothing for herself, giving all: desiring not to use her power for her own ends, not favouring those of her own blood unduly, but seeking to aid those in her power to attain most successfully to the freedom and independence of adult life.

Those who have been so fortunate as at least once to have seen a woman so nobly using her powers will also have seen her rewarded by a love and devotion from the children not her own yet greater than that which is often given to a mother by the children of the blood.

Such is the bond I have dreamed should permanently bind England to South Africa.

One has indeed desired that a bond of good fellowship should bind all nations to our own young nation at the South. We, here, guarded by the vast expanses of our southern seas on every hand, with our wild, tempestuous and rocky coasts and our few and easily guarded harbours, are indeed singularly well situated by nature, when once internally united, for living in peace and freedom, untouched by foreign strife. But I, at least, have deeply desired that, with the men and women in the little Island in the North, a peculiarly tender bond should unite us; rising from the memory of great benefits conferred, without self-seeking, when the people of Great Africa were small and young, and England old and strong.

Even ten years ago it seemed to me not wholly unreasonable to hope that this ambition might yet be realized.

True, there had been in the past even then terrible and grievous mistakes on the part of England; the step-mother of the South African people was, one knew, a step-mother with a not quite certain temper; but when one remembered that England had in the past sent out to South Africa such men as Sir George Grey, that fresh from Ireland came Sir William Porter, and that in spite of astonishing occasional aberrations there had frequently been a tendency on the part of the ruling power in England to make for a course of rectitude in South Africa, I do not think that dream was wholly unjustifiable, or that one who dreamed it need necessarily have been deemed a madman. Even ten years ago it still seemed within the range of possibility that, when the time came for the official separation between England and South Africa (as it must come between all lands and the old peoples on the other side of the globe; as it will come to Australia and New Zealand and Canada), that when that time came, little as was England's share in the blood of South Africa, there might yet be a tough cable of affection stretching across the six thousand miles of sea, and binding the hearts of South Africans, Dutch, English, German, French or African in origin, to the hearts of the people in the little Isles of the North.

To-day, England has made the realization of that dream an impossibility.

The first deadly blow was struck at its attainment when, by the instalment of the Chartered Company and the lending of her flag and her sword to a handful of wealthy or aristocratic speculators, she, by condoning their actions towards the African native in Matabeleland and more especially in Mashonaland, made it clear to the intelligent native all over South Africa that from England, under the capitalist control, and under the flag of England, when held aloft by speculators there is nothing to be looked for: that tenderer were the mercies to be hoped for from the roughest Boer or African-English Colonist than from the foreign speculators who acted in England's name.

A little later, by countenancing the Raid made upon a European South African state by the same corporation, England, through condonation of their conduct by princelings and politicians, made it clear to the bulk of the white Africans also that, however true to nobler and older traditions might be the hearts of a large section of the English people, the Union Jack was now fallen into the hands of those who had made it dangerous to the peace of Africa; that the flag we had loved as the flag of freedom was become a "Commercial Asset" and waved over the heads of marauders.

I think this struck the death-blow to the noblest possibilities of the English Empire over the hearts of South Africans; but there was even then hope left.

To-day (writing in the last months of the year 1900), guided by the hands of the same men, England is attempting to crush the independence of our two Republican states. Whether for a time she will succeed or not is still a matter of doubt. But that she has committed suicide in South Africa is a matter for no doubt.

Should she succeed in carrying out the speculators' dream of breaking down all the interstatal lines which have stood out as so many small ramparts behind which freedom could hide and which broke into parts the wave of capitalist aggression as it swept on; should England by forcible means, succeed, violently and against their will, in combining to-day all South African states under one central foreign government and forcing them prematurely into a national union, she may indeed form the United States of South Africa forty years sooner than they would spontaneously have been formed--but it will not be for herself.

England should clearly understand: It is not for herself that she is to-day attempting violently and by force to push open the rose of the South Africa national existence before its time. She will never wear it.

We have not desired it should be forced thus. A flower pushed artificially open by coarse fingers always has something ragged in its appearance; its bloom is never so fair and harmonious as one that has opened spontaneously under the influence of sun and air. We regret the premature and violent opening of our South African rose. But, let England mark this well; it is not for herself that she has torn and forced it: it will never bloom on her bosom.

Among all the elements connected with our complex South African world, England has had most to gain by its division into separate states. She has had more influence in South Africa than in Australia or New Zealand or Canada, simply because of its strongly politically divided structure. Once break up these parts and cement them thoroughly with human blood, shed on the battlefield and the scaffold, into one solid whole, and South Africa can stand alone: it will have passed suddenly amid the heat and anguish of battle and martyrdom through adolescence on to manhood.

Should England succeed for a time in crushing the two Republics, and, by means of keeping a hundred thousand armed men always on the soil, and, through blood and fire, succeed in holding them down for a moment, or should she not succeed--she has equally brought half a century nearer the time when she will have in South Africa not the hoof of one war horse, not the foot of one of her soldiers shall she be able to land on South Africa's shores. Fate has allowed England to make her choice between forming a fostering and sheltering element to our national germ, to remain for ever bound by ties of affection and gratitude to the great nation which in the future must rise from our blended peoples, or being the dominator and oppressor of an hour: then to depart for ever.

The lower element in the English nation has chosen, and by that choice she and we must now abide.

Out of the whitened bones of the English soldiers who have fallen bravely fighting in South Africa fate is rearing up a great cairn, beneath which lie buried for ever the noblest possibilities of the English people.

The regeneration of nations, as of individuals, is possible, and for the English people there may still be a great and noble future, a future which shall produce in the little Island of the North men worthy to be successors to the noblest of her sons of the past. She may still walk in the path of freedom and humanity, though she can no more lead; but it can only be when, after mighty and agonizing social upheavals, she has reorganized her own social structure.

What ails the race to-day in the little Island of the North is that there has been an irruption of the lower and more sordid elements in her body politic over its entire surface, where they have formed as it were an upper crust: as over some green land there might be a physical eruption of scoriæ and sulphurous lava forming a crust over what had been once green fields and fruitful plains. Never, till the healthier strata within the nation have arisen and cracked up and thrown off the plutocratic crust which has caked over its national existence, will vigour and health be restored to it.

The future may have a great task in store for that little Island of the North we once loved so and towards which our hearts still call; she may yet lead the world by showing how a community may so reorganize and reshape itself that it may pass from death to life. But she will now have to move along her own path; we on ours--till, it may be, across the ages, we meet again, in the free confederacy of all the world's peoples.

A terrible and irrevocable "Might have been" has been written by fate over the possibilities of England in South Africa.

The little vessel of the North Sea may still be sound, but, while her sails are manned and her rudder guided as they are to-day, she drifts towards the rocks. It may be that after the shock she will recover herself and re-man her vessel: for

Her timbers yet are sound, And she may float again!

It may be that her flag washed from its stain will be no more a "Commercial Asset," and that it may yet float free in the air, the banner of freedom, peace and justice of our dreams--

Our glorious Semper Eadem, The banner of our pride!

--but while it remains in the hand of those who hold it to-day she can but follow the march of humanity, from its rear.

While England is given over to the hands of a plutocracy, she cannot lead or guide other nations on the path towards freedom.

We are trying to save ourselves: let her try to save herself.

NOTE B

THE VALUE OF HUMAN VARIETIES (1901)

When chapter III was first published several years ago as an article in an English review, slight and perfunctory as is its manner of dealing with the vast question of the intermingling of distinct human breeds, I was surprised at the number of letters I received from every part of the world, written by persons themselves of mixed varieties. It was as though the passing reference to a subject seldom dealt with had removed a valve, allowing free utterance to much pent-up feeling. Had these letters not been confidential, and therefore unpublishable, they would have formed an invaluable commentary on the article.

"Why," writes in effect a cultured and intellectual man of mingled race, the son of an English planter and a pure Negro woman in the West Indies, but who had received a university training in Europe, "Why should I have anything to do with that dark race which I hate and loathe and despise, and not cling wholly to that white race which I love and admire?" And yet he adds later, "There are moments of bitterness when I feel I could break wholly with my father's people and throw my lot in with my mother's, and live for them and with them. They would not despise me. And yet the shrinking from them is too intense."

The first of these sentences throws a strong light on the mental attitude from which arise the mingled sorrows and wrongs of the man of dark and light blood at the present day, and which rises, as we have said, not so much from the manner in which other men regard him as from the attitude he assumes towards one part of himself; while the last sentence indicates perhaps the only manner in which the inter-breeding of widely distinct varieties might, even at the present day, become a matter of great gain to humanity, were those of mingled blood large and strong enough to expend themselves rather in aiding and leading the weaker than in seeking to identify themselves with the, for the moment, stronger of their two parent races.

Without exception the writers, from whatever part of the world, understood from how profoundly sympathetic a standpoint their condition had been considered. It was therefore the more surprising when one Englishman in South Africa stated that the paper was intended as an attack on the men of mingled colour.

So far from this being the case, it has always appeared to me that no element in our complex South African community is under so deep an obligation to any other as is the white man racially to the Half-caste. The obligation to cultivate and aid him to overcome the difficulties of his position appears to me morally imperative, and, if possible, more so than in the case of the pure-bred natives. From my earliest childhood a curious and almost painful sympathy has attracted me toward this sad son of man, from the time when, hardly more than an infant, I first heard pure-blooded Bantu servants laugh scornfully at their half-coloured fellows; and yet more when I noted men and women of refinement and culture insulted and made to shrink within themselves by those immeasurably their intellectual inferiors, but who had no trace of the blood of the African race.

To-day the question of the mixture of totally distinct human breeds is one which practically touches South Africa as but a few other countries. In the century which is coming it will be the world's question. Already to-day the swift means of inter-communication and the exploitation of Asia and Africa by European speculators and politicians are breaking down all those walls which for ages have kept man of distinct breeds more or less geographically distinct, and which through the æons of the past have made possible that slow differentiation of the different branches of humanity into stable and fixed varieties. Before the twentieth century is half over, the Mongolian, the Aryan, and the African will be found everywhere inhabiting the same laps of earth and forming parts of the same bodies politic. The Chinaman will be found in every land, the European will have interfiltrated throughout Africa, and the question, which to-day is a practical question for South Africa and a few other countries, will be the master question of the race.

Is it possible, and, if possible, desirable, that the different distinct human breeds, whom it has taken nature countless ages to elaborate in her workshop and turn out in stable form, should, when living side by side as parts of the same social organism, remain distinct?

Is the race of man on earth, in the future, as in the present, to consist of distinct types, or is the whole body of humanity to become racially one fused uniform mass?

To these questions of so weighty an import to humanity, only the ages that are coming can yield an adequate answer; but they are undoubtedly questions of master import to the race.

This one thing at least is certain--that the conviction that it is undesirable that any two distinct human breeds should mingle does not necessarily imply superiority or inferiority in either.

In my kennels I may have greyhounds and mastiffs, poodles and lap-dogs, bulldogs, St. Bernards. Because I desire to keep them distinct I do not therefore hold one breed as superior to the other. My greyhound may not be more interesting and valuable than my puppy lap-dog, or the poodle than the bull. Each may have his own charm and purpose, and if I refuse to mingle them recklessly, it is not because I value any so little, but all so much. It may indeed be said that by mingling my greyhounds with my bulldogs I might at last hit upon a new creature having virtues possessed by neither parent form. This also is true. But shall I move carelessly where my varieties are each so fair and desirable in my eyes in their own way?

It may be that the ideal human creature, for whom the centuries wait, may yet be found a human, half Chinaman, half Aryan, or African-Aryan and Mongolian blend: but the more valuable and rare each human breed is, the more does one shrink from destroying it where all is so dark.

Vandals may in a few hours wreck the Gothic cathedral which it was the work of countless generations to raise; and the rare and multiform human varieties, which it has taken nature countless millenniums to elaborate and fix in her workshop, and which add so greatly to the variety and charm of earth, may in a few generations be destroyed for ever. It is ill destroying the artistic work of man or nature till we know that from its destruction we are able to rear up something more worthy.

The lap-dog who lies upon my knee, the mastiff who guards my house, are both so wholly desirable that I desire to see neither of them extinguished. Shall we value our human varieties less than my dogs?

Yet probably, and I should say more than probably, where nature herself obliterates the distinction of race, and allows a mighty and permanent affection between man and woman to cross its limits of race, then I should be inclined to say nature herself gives a sanction which may set the lesser utilities at defiance and consecrates the union of distinct breeds; but without so mighty a permit it is perhaps well that we who are but children in this matter, and cannot see farther than our hands can reach, should pause and move with caution. For the future of the race on earth is bound up in this matter.

NOTE C

THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF THE BOER (1899)

I have been asked to write an account on the domestic life of the South African Boer. If the term "Boer" be used to signify, as it sometimes is, the entire population of South Africa which is descended from the early Dutch settlers of two or three hundred years ago, and of the French Huguenots, who, driven from their native land in the seventeenth century, landed in South Africa and mingled their blood with that of the earlier settlers, the task would not be an easier one than to write a description of the domestic life of the whole American people. For the Africanders, as the Dutch-French-Huguenots descendants now call themselves, are not at the present day less complex and many-graded than the Americans themselves. In our cities and towns they form a large proportion of our most cultured and brilliant citizens, whose domestic life differs not at all from that of other cultured South Africans, English, French, or Germans in descent. Many of our most brilliant lawyers and able politicians and professional men are of this race: and year by year the names both of men and women of this race increasingly fill our lists of successful university students.

If, however, the term "Boer" be taken, as it should be, to signify only that portion of the race who have remained farmers (the word "Boer" literally means a farmer), and who in the outlying districts of the Cape Colony, the Orange Free State, Natal, and the Transvaal, have preserved unchanged the language, manners and ideas of their forefathers of the seventeenth century, then the task is far more easy. For this wonderful and virile folk--driven into the wilds of Africa a couple of centuries ago--are not merely dominated in their domestic and in their public life by old ideals and methods, but a strange uniformity exists everywhere.

Whether we find the primitive Boer on the wide grass plains of the Transvaal and the Free State, the Karoo plains of central and western Cape Colony, or the bush lands nearer the coast, in appearance, ideas, and, above all, in habits and the arrangement of his domestic life, a complete and unique conformity exists.

The typical South African Boer lives on his own land, a farm, covering a stretch of country; it may be six, twelve, eighteen or more miles in length. On the spot where his homestead now stands, it may be that a few generations ago his grandfather or great-grandfather, on his first journey into the wilds in search of a new home, drew up his great ox-wagon beside some slowly oozing fountain, or on the banks of some stream with inexhaustible pools, which had never yet been visited by the foot of white man, and determined here to fix his home. He called the place perhaps "Jakals' Fontein," from the number of jackals which came down to drink or watch for prey the first night; "Wilde Kats Draai," from the wild cat they killed next day; or "Ti'er Kloof," from the huge tiger-leopard killed in the ravine beyond the fountain; and there, after a longer or shorter struggle with wild beasts or poisoned-arrow-shooting Bushmen, he built his house and kraals, and settled himself and his descendants.

Here, as the years passed, and leopard, lion, and wild dog became exterminated, and the wild bucks on whose flesh in early days he lived became more rare, he raised his little square or oblong house of rough stones or unburnt bricks; behind his house, surrounded by walls of rough stone or high-piled branches of the mimosa thorn, he built his kraals (or enclosures for the stock to sleep in at night), which were always placed very close to the house, that they might be more easily protected from wild beasts or savages.

By-and-by he generally built a dam, larger or smaller, as the case might be, for catching the rain-water, which in rainy seasons floods the plains, or which might be fed by his fountain if strong enough. Here his stock came to drink at evening; and if the supply of water were large enough, he often enclosed a small patch of land below the dam with a stone wall, planted a few fig and peach trees, and made a small garden.

Behind the house was built a large brick oven, often whitewashed on the outside, where the good wife (who in earlier days had had to content herself with a hollowed-out antheap as an oven) might bake her bread. Behind the house was raised a large wagon-house, open on the side from which least rain came, where the great ox-wagon and cart, if there were one, might stand sheltered from sun and rain; and then the typical Boer homestead, as we know it, and as it exists to the present day, was complete.

As sons and daughters grew up and married, additional rooms were often built on for them, to the old farm-house, or small houses were built near, or at a few miles' distance on the same farm, where at some other fountain the stock was watered. But in each case the new homestead repeated the features of the old.

If one travel across some great African plain to-day, the hoofs of one's horse sinking step by step into the red sand, or crunching the gravel on some rocky ridge, far off across the plain one may mark some distant flat-topped table mountains rising up against the sky on the horizon; but for the rest, a vast, silent, undulating plain, broken, it may be, by small hillocks, or "kopjes," of iron-stones, stretches about one everywhere. After travelling five or six miles further, one may discern, at the foot of some distant kopje, a small white or dark speck; as one approaches nearer the practised eye perceives it is a homestead.

As one approaches yet nearer along the sandy wagon-track, slowly all the details of the place become clear--the house, the dam, almost or quite dry, if it be the end of a long, thirsty season, the little patch of dark green contrasting with the miles of red-brown veld about it, the wagon-house, and the great dark square patches, which are the kraals. And yet, so clear is the air, making objects distinctly visible at a long distance, one may ride on for an hour before the road, which has led straight as an arrow across the plain, takes a little turn, and the farmhouse is reached.

If it be the middle of a hot summer's afternoon a great stillness will reign about the place; not a soul will be seen stirring; the doors and the wooden shutters of the windows will be closed; a few hens may be scratching about in the red sand on the shady side of the house, and a couple of large Boer dogs will rise slowly from the shadow of the wagon house, and come toward you silently, with their heads down. If a coloured servant should appear from the back of the house, or a little face peep from behind the oven, it will be well to call to them to call off the dogs, for the African Boer dog is a peculiar species of mastiff, with a touch of the bull-dog, celebrated for his silent savageness.

After the dogs have been called off, the servant or child will go into the house to rouse the master of the house, who, with the rest of the family, is still taking his afternoon siesta, made necessary to all by the intense heat of summer and by the early rising, which is the invariable rule on an African farm. Presently the upper half of the door opens, and then the lower, and the master of the house appears, his eyes a little blinded by the glare of the afternoon sun after the cool darkness of the house.

He will step down from the low, raised stone platform before the door, and come to meet you--a tall, powerful man of over six feet in height, large-boned and massive, with large hands and feet, a long brown beard, and keen, steady, somewhat deep-set eyes. He will extend his hand to you with the greatest courtesy, inquire your name, and whether you do not wish to off-saddle, and will call a servant to take your horse.

When you have entered the house with him, you will find yourself in a square room, large as compared with the whole size of the house. The floor is generally earth--soil forming the huge antheaps which cover the plains being generally taken for this purpose, which, damped with water, and well pounded down, forms an exceedingly hard floor. In the centre of the room is a bare square table, neatly finished off, but often of home construction, having been made by the father or grandfather of the present owner. Round the sides of the room are arranged some chairs and a long wooden sofa of the same make, the seats of which are formed, not of cane, but of thin thongs of leather interlaced.

At one side of the room against the wall stands a small square table. On it stands the great coffee-urn, and the work of the house-mother. Beside it, in her elbow-chair, in which she has hastily seated herself to welcome the stranger, she herself sits, dressed in black, often with a little black shawl across her shoulders, and a white handkerchief round her throat.

At her feet is a little square wooden stove, with a hollow inside, in which may be put a small brazier of live coals in cold weather, the heat arising through small ornamental holes cut in the wood of the top. Exactly such wooden stoves may be seen in the paintings of Flemish interiors by the old Dutch artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The good wife politely extends her hand to you, asks you to be seated, and you take your place on the wooden sofa. Except the tables and chairs, the room contains little or nothing. On the wall may be a rough gun-rack, containing half a dozen guns, from the old clumsy flint-lock gun of a century ago--which may have brought down many an elephant and lion in the old days and defended the lives of wives and children--to the most elegant modern Mauser or Martini-Henry. But the guns are more often kept in the bedroom, on the wall near the head of the bed.

One thing, however, is never missing. Either in a little closed window with a crochet cloth thrown over it, on the housemother's little table, on the centre table, or in a little cupboard in the wall, is always to be found the great family Bible. It holds a place altogether unique in the economy of the Boer life. It is not alone that on its front pages are to be found solemnly inscribed the names of the ancestors, the births, deaths, or marriages of his children, and often a brief record of the date of the most momentous events in his own or his family's history; it is not alone that for generations this book has represented the sole tie between his solitary and often nomadic family and the intellectual life of culture of mankind; it is not alone that any culture or knowledge he possesses, other than that gained from the material world about him, has been all spelled out of its pages, but the visible external volume forms the Lares and Penates of his household, the sacred central point.

It is treated with respect; no other book is ever laid upon it; it is opened reverentially; it is carried wherever he wanders; it is consulted not merely as a moral, but also a material guide. The pages are solemnly opened and the finger brought down upon a passage, which is spelled out, and recovery or death of a child, and even such matters as the whereabouts of lost cattle, are believed to be indicated by its contents; as Enoch Arden's wife believed, when she brought her finger down on the passage about the palm-tree, that it indicated Enoch's death.

After we have been seated for a few moments the other members of the family will troop in, one by one, and shake hands, and seat themselves on the chairs round the room; nine or ten children between the ages of eighteen and two years, and perhaps a married son and daughter-in-law, and an old grandmother, who has her own elbow-chair near the window. For the Boer ideal of family life is patriarchal, and two or three generations are often housed under one roof. Presently the eldest daughter makes coffee in the urn, a little Kaffir maid bringing in a small, brazier of live coals to place under it. Then coffee is poured out in cups, or basins, and handed round to each person.

By the time the coffee has been drunk, the afternoon is beginning to grow old; the heat is rapidly lessening, and the soft evening breeze beginning to stir the air. The farmer lights his pipe, and invites you to fill yours from his large tobacco-bag, made of cony's skin or little kid's. Then he invites you to accompany him to the kraals, towards which from different points on the plain the flocks may already be seen tending. Then comes the busy and delightful hour--sunset on an African farm. Everywhere there is bustle and stir; in the cow-kraals the calves are bleating and putting their noses through the gate to get through to their mothers as they are being milked; and one by one, the sheep and the goats are being counted in at the gates of the great kraals.

The Kaffir maids are busy preparing the churn for the fresh milk, and lighting the kitchen fire for supper. The children are romping outside, inspired by the cool evening wind; even the old grandmother seats herself on the back doorstep to watch the stir, and to see the pink sunset slowly deepen into grey as the night comes down. The dark gathers quickly, and soon the whole family are again gathered in the great front room.

On really old-fashioned farms a little Kaffir maid then comes in with a small tub of hot water and a cloth, and washes the feet of old and young, after which the family sit down to the evening meal, generally composed of boiled mutton, bread, and coffee. After supper, it is not long before the whole family retire for the night into the small bedrooms opening to the right and left of the sitting-room, and by eight o'clock often the whole household is in bed and asleep, the old Boer dog, stealing softly round the house, being the only creature moving, and the occasional bleating of sheep and goats being the only sounds that break the stillness.

At half-past three or four the next morning, however, you will be early aroused by the sound of bustling and movement. Every one is getting up. The Kaffir maid has already made the fire, and by the time you enter the sitting-room the eldest daughter is already pouring out coffee at the little table, by the light of a candle, although the grey dawn-light is already creeping in at the door.

As soon as he has had his coffee, the Boer with his sons goes out to the kraals to let out the stock. Long before the sun rises the flocks are already wending their way across the plain to their different pastures, with their Kaffir herdsmen behind them.

Then if you be the typical African traveller, anxious to get on his way before the heat of the day rises, you will have another cup of coffee, and bidding good-bye to your hosts, by the time the sun rises you will be already on your way across the plain, and the farm-house with its kraals and dam be already but a small speck behind you.

NOTE D

OUR WASTE LAND IN MASHONALAND (1891)

At the present day it is by no means uncommon for men to spend the greater part of their lives and large stores of wealth in a sometimes futile search for the scattered fragments of antiquity. A few broken Greek marbles, or Nineveh mud tablets, or battered leaves of Egyptian papyrus, are considered an ample return for half a lifetime of labour and the expenditure of thousands. We are apt to regard with a scorn not unmixed with malevolence the men of a bygone age who allowed treasure of so priceless a value to humanity to be wantonly destroyed.

Yet, at the present day in South Africa, a destruction of materials far more priceless and irrevocable goes on in our midst in the full light of our nineteenth-century humanitarian culture. It is possible that in the course of time a new Phidias may arise in our midst, and produce statues comparable to, if not identical with, those of the old world, and the learning and lore of the old Egyptians and Chaldeans lost in their destroyed mud tablets or papyrus leaves may yet be re-evolved from the human brain; but there is a reckless and callous destruction now going on in our midst of that which can by no conceivable possibility be restored to humanity when once it is destroyed from the surface of the globe. Future generations will probably regard as intelligent and wise benefactors of their race the men who burnt the Library in Alexandria, and destroyed the Parthenon at Athens, when they are compared, in certain aspects, with the inhabitants of Southern Africa and the modern world.

For the moment we are so entirely bent on advancing the claims of a material civilization, which we are inclined to regard as the all-in-all of life, that more subtle, if equally practical, and important considerations are apt to be forgotten.

This view is forced on us when we consider the reckless and entirely wanton destruction of the one form of production for which the African continent, and more especially its southern portions, stands pre-eminent among the world's divisions--our astonishing fauna.

From gorilla and grey parrot on the east coast, and chimpanzee on the west, to the endless varieties of antelope and pachydermatous quadrupeds which at one time overran the south, no part in the globe has been within the memory of man, and even still is, so rich in beautiful and rare forms of sub-human life; no other presents the same vast field for scientific research.

How quickly this condition of things is passing away the most rapid glance at the present condition of South Africa will show. Hardly a year passes away without some rare and interesting form of life becoming extinct. The hippopotami, elephants, and antelopes which once grazed on the shores of Table Bay have for a century not been seen there, and the vast herds which covered our up-country plains in the memory of those living have absolutely been extinguished, leaving nothing behind but a few horns and skins, the few last wandering individuals, who in the natural course of things will be exterminated within the next few years. Before the middle of the twentieth century is reached (probably much sooner) the rifle, the railway train and the plough will so entirely have modified the conditions of existence that not only all forms of life indigenous to Southern, but to Central and Tropical Africa will have passed away.

From a sentimental and emotional standpoint this is to be regretted, but there are deeper interests than the merely emotional and poetical at stake. In an age when the study of a single small, deep-sea creature of a form intermediate between the vertebrate and invertebrate orders has thrown a flood of light on our biological knowledge, and when the discovery of a few fossilized hoofs has helped to revolutionize our view of vital phenomena; when even the man in the street, perceiving the practical advantages which science has conferred on him, has ceased to jeer, and regards it with a certain vague, if unreasoning, respect, it is not necessary to dwell at length on the fact that the loss of these multitudinous forms of life, by crippling and limiting the field of scientific study, must inflict a direct and serious loss on human knowledge and progress. But perhaps it is only the man more or less interested in the results of scientific research who can fully appreciate the importance of preserving for the future all forms of natural life, from the lion and crocodile to the humblest wood-dove and fly.

Some years back, finding it necessary to gain what information was obtainable with regard to the domestic and social habits of the higher apes, we found that all the information to be obtained from the latest works on the subject amounted to little more than _nil_; and that for a personal inspection of these creatures in their natural state three distinct journeys into separate and most inaccessible parts of the globe would be necessary.

We then proceeded to study the few isolated specimens to be found in the Zoological Gardens of Europe. We found a few crestfallen looking animals, transported at an immense cost from tropical Africa or elsewhere, necessarily confined in small, comparatively dark cells, kept alive by a continual expenditure of coal and artificial heat, and then rarely saved from consumption, and requiring the constant care and attention of an able-bodied man; they resembled as little, seated on their heaps of straw and coughing, the creature in its natural and active social condition amidst the sunshine of a tropical forest, as a mummy represents an ancient Egyptian. After a vast expenditure of money, less was to be learnt from them than might be gained with regard to a troop of South African baboons when watched for a few hours from behind the stones of a kopje.

Considering these things, the conclusion inevitably forces itself upon us that our position with regard to the study of animal life is yet far from an ideal one. With one-third the expenditure of energy and money which goes to form our half-dozen small zoological collections in Europe, a vast preserve for wild animals immeasurably superior to anything which exists for scientific ends might be formed and maintained in any tropical or sub-tropical country. Our small existing collections may serve to bring curious specimens under the eyes of scientific men, and subserve certain useful purposes; but for many forms of study they are absolutely futile, and as a means of keeping in existence specimens which would otherwise become extinct, they have no claim to consideration. The ideal zoological garden would be a vast tract of country in some tropical or subtropical region, where all creatures but those habituated to extreme cold would freely exist in a state of nature, limited only by mutual struggle; it should be a tract diversified, if possible, by swamp, forest, and hills, and divided as far as might be by natural features from the surrounding country; and where no such barriers existed it should be as far as possible artificially cut off. It should contain not merely the creatures indigenous to the country, but should serve as a receptacle for those which could not elsewhere be preserved from extinction. It should form, so to speak, a vast natural preserve, existing not primarily for the purposes of the sportsman, but of science, and in which the rifle should be almost unknown. In connection with this might in time spring up large zoological gardens in the narrower sense of the term, where isolated specimens might be immured for the purposes of certain studies; but for many years its far more important function would be simply the keeping in existence a large number of forms of animal life which would else become annihilated. Wildly Utopian as this scheme appears at first sight, consideration will show it is not beyond the range of feasibility, though beset with difficulty. The first, and for many years the most insuperable, difficulty has lain in the fact that no such tract as was necessary was obtainable anywhere. The existence of a strong, civilized government would be necessary to guarantee its retention for the desired purpose, and where a civilized government exists, there, as a rule, is a more or less dense population. The individual, as a rule, precedes the government, and apart from the fact that land then becomes too precious to be appropriated for such a purpose, both the land and the fauna have, as a rule, become so much modified and destroyed that it would take half a century to reproduce natural conditions. Such considerations have made in the past the whole scheme appear purely Utopian.

At the present moment, however, there exists in South Africa, by a rare and exceptional combination of circumstances, a condition which removes it from the realm of the purely ideal to that of the remotely practical. The sudden and unprecedented movement of the north-east of Southern Africa, where a powerful and well-organized form of civilized government is rapidly establishing itself in a vast territory, sparsely inhabited by natives, and as yet little, or at all, by Europeans, and where certain low-lying tracts are not at the present moment fitted for immediate occupation or for ordinary cultivation, and will certainly not be so used till the immense tracts of salubrious and valuable land about them have been fully utilized, yields a possibility of the realization of this plan, which has not occurred before and will probably not occur again. Were a large tract of this country granted or bought at a nominal price, and freedom from intrusion guaranteed, and were the interests of scientific Europe and America aroused and directed to this matter, and a body of scientific men and practical travellers formed for the direction and management of the scheme, it might pass into the region of the practical and obtainable. Innumerable as the smaller difficulties of detail would be, they would probably not be insurmountable. Such a subsidiary difficulty, for instance, would rise from the fact that such a preserve should not border anywhere upon a densely populated tract of country, and that it would be necessary to leave a belt of country some miles in width around it, to be inhabited on exceptional conditions. Were the interest of scientific Europe and America fully aroused, and the feasibility of the scheme proved, money would not be the thing wanting for its completion.

The sum now expended in warming the cell of one anthropoid ape in Europe would build a stone wall a mile long in Mashonaland, and did the contributions take the form of donations giving the donors a permanent interest in the scheme and its management they might be largely increased. Apart entirely from the noblest scientific aspect, the undertaking might in the end prove itself successful in the purely commercial sense. Not only would the existence of such a preserve serve in time, as the creatures became extinct elsewhere, to attract scientific visitors to the land; but (curious as such an idea now appears, in a country, where for years our struggle has been to obtain an initial control over the animal and vegetable productions of Nature, and where all artificial productions are naturally valued at something above their real worth) it is possible that the mere animals themselves might, in the course of sixty or eighty years, prove as lucrative a source of wealth to the scientific body to which they belonged as if the original capital had been invested in gold mines or corn fields. It is difficult at the present moment to realize that in a generation and a half, when streams of immigration have swept east and west, north and south, across the continent, the tusks of an elephant, the skin of an antelope, or the body of a giraffe, or a live lion, may possess a purely commercial value, which would cause them to equal in worth a handful of Kimberley diamonds or a claim at Johannesburg. Apart from the always increasing interest which would attach scientifically to such a preserve of primitive forms, the vulgar curiosity which to-day runs after the lion-van and stands gaping at the Zoological Gardens on a Saturday afternoon, would find its gratification in the products of the tract; and it is not impossible that in a future generation, if the crude thirst for destruction remains unslaked in human nature, Nimrods may be found who would gladly expend much of their superfluous wealth in paying for attaining to the blissful consciousness of having destroyed the life of a creature of whose kind only a few score exist in the world. It may be objected that were such a scheme workable, and however remotely a possible success, it would long since in a commercial age have been grasped and carried out. But a scheme whose monetary success cannot be looked for during the limits of a lifetime is not one which presents seductive allurements to the purely commercial investor. It is a scheme peculiarly fitted to be worked out in the interests of science, which are practically indestructible and in the presence of which a thousand years are but as one day.

In Central and Southern Africa to-day primitive nature is making its last stand on the surface of the globe. It is here or nowhere that a minute relic of it must be retained for the civilized world of the future. If it be possible for any plan to be matured and carried out for the preserving of our fauna, it will undoubtedly be regarded by men of the future as action along that obvious, practical, and rational line which it was impossible for us to avoid seeing, and much as we should regard the action of men who had saved for us the treasures of antiquity in sealed chest and buried chambers. If no such plan is maturable and workable during the next fifty years, science will permanently have lost great possibilities, and South Africa that which constitutes its greatest attraction. It is certainly not by persistently following in the steps of other divisions of the globe, but by resolutely grasping our own opportunities and striking out her own paths, that Africa can ever attain to her rightful position among the world's divisions.

At the present moment in the low-lying districts of Mashonaland, which till all the vast salubrious and productive tracts about them have been fully peopled and cultivated, will lie waste, we have one of the last, and probably the best, opportunities which will ever occur of finding a field in which we may preserve our rare and wonderful fauna. But to be successfully carried out the scheme should be worked on a colossal scale, and by the international interaction of all interested in science; our preserve should be the World's Zoological Garden.

_Printed in Great Britain by_

UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE GRESHAM PRESS

LONDON AND WOKING

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Transcriber's note:

Inconsistencies in hyphenation and punctuation have not been corrected.

TRANSCRIBER'S CORRECTIONS

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