Impressions of South Africa Part 19

The third source of wealth lies in the minerals. It was the latest source to become known--indeed, till thirty-two years ago, n.o.body suspected it. Iron had been found in some places, copper in others; but neither had been largely worked, and the belief in the existence of the precious metals rested on nothing more than a Portuguese tradition. In 1867 the first diamond was picked up by a hunter out of a heap of s.h.i.+ning pebbles near the banks of the Orange River, above its confluence with the Vaal. In 1869-70 the stones began to be largely found near where the town of Kimberley now stands. This point has been henceforth the centre of the industry, though there are a few other mines elsewhere of smaller productive power. The value of the present annual output exceeds 4,000,000, but it is not likely to increase, being, in fact, now kept down in order not to depress the market by over-supply.

Altogether more than 100,000,000 worth of diamonds have been exported.

The discovery of diamonds, as was observed in an earlier chapter, opened a new period in South African history, drawing crowds of immigrants, developing trade through the seaports as well as industry at the mining centres, and producing a group of enterprising men who, when the various diamond-mining companies had been amalgamated, sought and found new ways of employing their capital. Fifteen years after the great diamond finds came the still greater gold finds at the Wit.w.a.tersrand. The working of these mines has now become the greatest industry in the country, and Johannesburg is the centre toward which the import trade converges.

I need not repeat the description given in a previous chapter (Chapter XVIII) of the Rand mining district. The reader will remember that it differs from all the other gold-fields of South Africa in one essential feature--that of the comparative certainty of its yield. Accordingly, in considering the future of South African gold, I will speak first of those other gold-fields and then separately of the Rand district.

Gold has been found in many places south of the Zambesi. It occurs here and there in small quant.i.ties in Cape Colony, in somewhat larger quant.i.ties in Natal, Zululand, and Swaziland, in the eastern and north-eastern districts of the Transvaal, at Tati in northern Bechua.n.a.land, and in many spots through Matabililand and Mashonaland. In all (or nearly all) these places it occurs in quartz reefs resembling those of North America and Australia. Some reefs, especially those of the northern region between the Limpopo and Zambesi, are promising, and great quant.i.ties of gold have in times long past been taken out of this region. As already explained (Chapter XVII), it seems probable, though not certain, that in many districts a mining industry will be developed which will give employment to thousands, perhaps many thousands, of natives, and to hundreds, perhaps many hundreds, of white engineers and foremen. Should this happen, markets will be created in these districts, land will be cultivated, railways will be made, and the local trades which a thriving population requires will spring up. But the life of these gold reefs will not be a long one. As the gold is found in quartz rock, and only to a small extent in gravel or other alluvial deposits, the mining requires capital, and will be carried on by companies. It will be carried on quickly, and so quickly with the aid of the enormously improved scientific appliances we now possess, as to exhaust at no distant period the mineral which the rocks contain. I saw in Transylvania in 1866 a gold mine which was worked in the days of the Romans, and was being worked still. But mining now is as different from the mining of the ancients or of the middle ages as a locomotive engine is from an ox-waggon, such are the resources which chemical and mechanical science place at our disposal. Accordingly, the payable parts of the quartz reefs will have been drained of their gold in a few years, or, at any rate, in a few decades, just as many of the silver lodes of Nevada have already been worked out and abandoned. There will then be no further cause for the existence of the mine-workers at those points, and the population will decline just as that of Nevada has declined. These South African districts will, however, be in one point far better off than Nevada: they possess land fit everywhere for ranching, and in many places for tillage also. Ranching will, therefore, support a certain, though not large, permanent population; while tillage, though the profitable market close by will have been largely reduced by the departure of the miners, will probably continue, because the land will have been furnished with farmhouses and fences, perhaps in places with irrigation works, and because the railways that will have been constructed will enable agricultural products to reach more distant markets, which by that time may possibly be less glutted with the cereals of North and South America. Accordingly, a.s.suming that a fair proportion of the quartz reef gold-fields turn out well, it may be predicted that population will increase in and round them during the next ten years, and that for some twenty years more this population will maintain itself, though of course not necessarily in the same spots, because, as the reefs first developed become exhausted, the miners will s.h.i.+ft to new places. After these thirty or possibly forty years, that is to say, before the middle of next century, the country, having parted with whatever gold it contains, will have to fall back on its pasture and its arable land; but having become settled and developed, it may count on retaining a reasonable measure of prosperity.

This forecast may seem to be of a highly conjectural nature. Conjectural it must be, if only for this reason: that the value of most of the quartz reefs referred to is still quite uncertain. But one cannot visit a new country without attempting to make a forecast of some kind; and the experience of other countries goes to show that, while deposits of the precious metals are, under our present conditions, no more an abiding source of wealth than is a guano island, they may immensely accelerate the development of a country, giving it a start in the world, and providing it with advantages, such as railway communication, which could not otherwise be looked for. This they are now doing for Matabililand and Mashonaland, countries in which it would not at present be worth while to construct railroads but for the hopes attaching to the mines. This they may do for Zululand and Swaziland also, should the reefs in those districts prove profitable.

So much for the quartz reefs. As has been observed, the gold mines of the Wit.w.a.tersrand differ in the much greater certainty of their yield and in the much greater quant.i.ty of auriferous rock which they have been ascertained to contain. It is probable that gold of the value of 700,000,000 remains to be extracted from them. Already a population of at least 150,000 white men has collected in what was in 1885 a barren wilderness; already about 15,000,000 of gold per annum is being extracted. It is practically certain that this production and population will go on increasing during the next few years, and that the mines will not be worked out before the middle of next century at earliest. For the next fifty years, therefore, the Rand district will be the economic and industrial centre of South Africa and the seat of the largest European community. What will it be after those fifty or perhaps sixty years, when the _banket_ beds have been drained of their gold to a depth of 5,000 feet, the greatest at which mining seems to be practicable? It is possible that the other industries which are rising as ancillary to mining may for a while and to a reduced extent hold their ground.

Probably, however, they will wither up and vanish. The land will remain, but the land of this highest part of the Transvaal, though fit for pasture, does not lend itself to tillage. The probabilities, therefore, are that the fate of Nevada will in time descend upon the Wit.w.a.tersrand--that the houses that are now springing up will be suffered to fall to ruin, that the mouths of the shafts will in time be covered by th.o.r.n.y shrublets, and that soon after A.D. 2000 has been reached this busy hive of industry and noisy market-place of speculation will have again become the stony solitude which it was in 1880. For all practical purposes, however, an event a hundred years away is too distant to be worth regarding. The world will in A.D. 2000 be so different from what it is now that the exhaustion of the Rand gold-field may have a different bearing from any which we can now foresee.

Johannesburgers themselves are not disquieted by thoughts of a future that is even half a century distant. The older sort will not live to see it, and the younger sort expect to have made their fortunes long before it arrives. Still it must be remembered that, so far as minerals go, South Africa is now living, not on her income, but on her capital, and that in twenty-five years half or more of the capital may be gone.

There are other metals in the country besides the precious ones. The presence of extensive coal-beds in the Transvaal and Natal has been a circ.u.mstance of the first importance for the profitable working of the Rand gold-beds, and may encourage the growth of some kinds of manufacture.[89] Iron is abundant both in the Transvaal and in Mashonaland, and has been found in many other districts, often in the neighbourhood of coal. It is not worked now, because all iron goods can be obtained more cheaply from Europe; but it may one day grow into an industry, as copper-mining already has in Little Namaqualand on the west coast.

The mention of coal and iron brings us to another branch of the subject--the possibility of establis.h.i.+ng manufactures which may become a source of wealth and the support of an industrial population. At present the manufactures are insignificant. All the textile goods, for instance, nearly all the metal goods, and by far the larger part even of the beer and spirits (intended for the whites) and mineral waters consumed in the country come from Europe. The Boers in the two Republics and the Boer element at the Cape have neither taste nor talent for this kind of industry, and such capital as exists is naturally attracted to mining enterprises. Nevertheless, it may be thought that as capital acc.u.mulates things will change, and that the English part of the population in the two British Colonies will take to manufactures, as it has done in Australia. Let us see whether this is probable.

To enable South African manufacturers to compete on a large scale with the established manufacturing countries, such as those in north-western Europe or north-eastern America, three things are needed--a large market, cheap sources of mechanical power, cheap and efficient labour.

Of these the first is at present wanting, and even should the growth of the Rand mining district raise the white population of the two Colonies and two Republics from something over 700,000 to 1,200,000, that number of consumers will still be too small to encourage the expenditure of any large capital in endeavouring to produce articles which the immense manufacturing establishments of Europe, working for populous markets, can turn out more cheaply. As to mechanical forces, there are no rivers to give water-power; and though Natal, Zululand, and the Transvaal provide coal, the quality of the mineral is inferior to that obtainable in South Wales or Belgium or Pennsylvania. But the most important conditions for success are those connected with labour. In South Africa skilled labour is dear because scarce, and unskilled labour is dear because bad. As was explained in a preceding chapter, all rough, hard work is done by natives; not that white men could not, in the more temperate regions, perfectly well do it, but because white men think it beneath them and only fit for blacks. Now black labour is seldom effective labour. The mixed race called "Cape boys" are good drivers, and quite fit for many kinds of railway work. They are employed in the building trades and in sawmills, and to some extent in such trades as bootmaking. The Kafirs of the eastern province and of Natal are more raw than the "Cape boys." They make good platelayers on railways, and having plenty of physical strength, will do any sort of rough work they are set to. But they have no apt.i.tude for trades requiring skill, and it will take a generation or two to fit them for the finer kinds of carpentry or metal-work, or for the handling of delicate machinery. Besides, they are often changeable and unstable, apt to forsake their employment for some trifling cause. Their wages are certainly not high, ranging from ten to twenty s.h.i.+llings a month, besides food, for any kind of rough outdoor work. Miners are paid higher, and a Malay mason will get from thirty to forty s.h.i.+llings a week; but a white labourer at twice the price would, for most kinds of work, be cheaper. Nor is it easy to get the amount of native labour that may be needed, for the Kafir prefers to till his own patch of ground or turn out his cattle on the veldt. The scale for white workmen is, of course, far higher, ranging from 2 10_s._ to 8 a week, according to the nature of the work and the competence of the artisan.

Such wages are nearly double those paid in England, treble those paid in some manufacturing districts of Germany or Belgium, higher even than those paid in the United States. It is therefore evident that, what with the badness of the cheaper labour and the dearness of the better, a manufacturer would, in South Africa, be severely handicapped in competing with either Europe or the United States. Protectionists may think that a high tariff on foreign manufactured goods would foster industrial undertakings in these Colonies. Such a tariff would, however, need to be fixed very high to give the local factory a chance--so high, indeed, that it would excite serious opposition from the consumer. And, in point of fact, there has been hitherto no cry for a tariff to protect home manufactures, because so few people are at present interested in having it. Such protection as exists is directed to food-stuffs, in order to please the agricultural cla.s.ses, and induce a wider cultivation of the soil; and the tariff on other goods is almost solely for revenue.

The conditions I have described may, and probably will, change as the industrial training of the natives improves and their aversion to labour declines under the pressure of increasing numbers and a reduction of the quant.i.ty of land available for them. But a review of the present state of things points to the conclusion that no great development of manufactures, and of a white population occupied in manufactures, is to be expected, at least for some time to come.

Three other observations must at this stage be made. Till very recently, South Africans had what the Psalmist desired--neither poverty nor riches. There were hardly any white paupers, because the substratum of population was black; and as few black paupers, because a Kafir needs nothing but food. On the other hand, there were no rich whites. The farmers, both agriculturists and ranchmen, lived in a sort of rude plenty, with no luxuries and very little money. Everybody was tolerably well off, n.o.body was wealthy. There were large stock-farms, as in Australia, but the owners of these farms did not make the immense gains which many Australian squatters and some American cattle-men have made.

Accordingly, when capital was needed for the development of the mines it was obtained from home. A few successful residents did, no doubt, make out of the diamond fields large sums, which they presently applied to the development of the gold-fields. But by far the greater part of the money spent in opening up mines, both on the Wit.w.a.tersrand and elsewhere, has come from Europe, chiefly from England, but to a considerable extent also from France, Germany and Holland. Accordingly nineteen twentieths at least of the profits made by the miners are paid to shareholders in those countries, and not expended in South Africa.

Even among those who have made fortunes out of diamonds or gold by their personal enterprise on the spot, the majority return to Europe and spend their incomes there. The country, therefore, does not get the full benefit, in the way either of payments for labour (except, of course, labour at the mines) or of increased consumption of articles, out of its mineral products, but is rather in the position of Mexico or Peru in the seventeenth century, when the bulk of the precious metals won from the mines went to Spain as a sort of tribute. There are at this moment probably not more than a dozen rich men, as Europe counts riches, resident in the country, and all of these are to be found either at Johannesburg or at Cape Town. Most of them will after a time betake themselves to Europe. Nor is there any sign that the number of local fortunes will increase; for the motives which draw men away from Johannesburg to Europe are likely to continue as strong in the future as they are at present.

Secondly, as the whites are not--except at Johannesburg, where the lavishness of a mining population is conspicuous--large consumers of luxuries, so the blacks are poor consumers of all save the barest necessaries of life. It is not merely that they have no money. It is that they have no wants, save of food and of a few common articles of clothing. The taste for the articles which civilized man requires is growing, as the traders in Bechua.n.a.land have already begun to find, but it grows slowly, and is still in a rudimentary stage. The demand which South Africa is likely to offer either for home-made or for imported products must, therefore, be measured, not by the gross population, but by the white population, and, indeed, by the town-dwelling whites; for the Dutch farmer or ranchman, whether in the British Colonies or in the Dutch Republics, has very little cash in his pocket, and lives in a primitive way. It is only the development of the mines that makes South Africa a growing market for European goods.

Thirdly, there is not much European immigration, except of artizans; and these go chiefly to the gold mines of the Rand. Few agriculturists come out, because farms have seldom been offered by any of the Governments on the same easy terms as those which prevail in Canada or New Zealand, and because the climate and the existence of a black population deter the agricultural cla.s.ses of northern Europe. Although the Government of Cape Colony has little or no land obviously fit for tillage to dispose of, because all the untilled area not absolutely barren has been appropriated for stock-farms, still there are districts on the south coasts of Cape Colony, as well as in Natal and in the healthy uplands of Mashonaland, which Englishmen or Germans might cultivate with the a.s.sistance (in the hotter parts) of a little native labour, and which Italians or Portuguese might cultivate by their own labour, without native help. The Germans who were brought out in 1856 throve in body and estate on the farms which they tilled with their own hands near Grahamstown. Nevertheless, few agricultural immigrants enter, partly, no doubt, because so much of the land is held by a comparatively small number of persons, and reserved by them (as just observed) for pastoral purposes only. Neither do men go from Europe to start ranching, for the pastoral lands are taken up, except in those wilder regions where no one could thrive without some previous experience of the country. The settling of the newer parts of the country, such as those between the Zambesi and the tropic of Capricorn, is chiefly carried on by the Boers of the Transvaal, and, to a less extent, of the British Colonies; for the Boers retain their pa.s.sion for trekking out into the wilderness, while the English, with few exceptions, like to keep within reach of one another and of civilisation. Accordingly, the country receives comparatively few recruits from rural Europe, and its agricultural population grows only by natural increase. There are probably more natives of India to-day tilling the soil in Natal alone than the whole number of agriculturists who have come from Europe in the last thirty years. Legislation which should attract such agriculturists by the offer of tillage farms of moderate size would be a great benefit to the Colonies.

We may now endeavour to sum up the facts of the case, and state the conclusions to which they point.

South Africa is already, and will be to an increasing extent, a country of great mineral wealth. It is only in the diamond-fields, especially those of Kimberley, and in the gold-fields of the Wit.w.a.tersrand, that this wealth has yet been proved to exist, so far as regards precious stones and precious metals, but it may exist also in many other districts. It is not confined to precious stones and metals, and when these have been exhausted, copper, iron, and coal may continue to furnish good returns to mine-owners and plenty of employment to work-people. The duration of the gold-fields generally is uncertain, but those of the Wit.w.a.tersrand will last for at least half a century, and will maintain for all that period an industrial population and a market for commodities which, though small when measured by the standard of the northern hemisphere, will be quite unique in Africa south of the equator.

South Africa is, and will continue to be, a great grazing country; for nearly all of its vast area is fit for live stock, though in large regions the proportion of stock to the acre must remain small, owing to the scarcity of feed. It will therefore continue to export wool, goats'

hair, and hides in large quant.i.ties, and may also export meat, and possibly dairy products.

South Africa has been, is, and will probably continue to be for a good while to come, a country in which only a very small part of the land is tilled, and from which little agricultural produce, except fruit, sugar, and perhaps tobacco, will be exported. Only two things seem likely to increase its agricultural productiveness. One of these is the discovery of some preservative against malarial fever which might enable the lowlands of the east coast, from Durban northward, to be cultivated much more largely than they are now. The other is the introduction of irrigation on a large scale, an undertaking which at present would be profitable in a few places only. Whether in future it will be worth while to irrigate largely, and whether, if this be done, it will be done by companies buying and working large farms or by companies distributing water to small farmers, as the Government distributes water in Egypt and some parts of India, are questions which may turn out to have an important bearing on the development of the country, but which need not be discussed now.

South Africa has not been, and shows no sign of becoming, a manufacturing country. Water power is absent. Coal is not of the best quality. Labour is neither cheap nor good. Even the imposition of a pretty high protective tariff would not be likely to stimulate the establishment of iron-works or foundries on a large scale, nor of factories of textile goods, for the local market is too small to make compet.i.tion with Europe a profitable enterprise. In these respects, as in many others, the conditions, physical and economic, differ so much from those of the British North American or Australian Colonies that the course of industrial development is likely to be quite different from what it has been there.

From these conclusions another of great importance follows. The white population will remain scanty in proportion to the area of the country.

At present, it is, in the two British Colonies and the two Dutch Republics, only about one and a half persons to the square mile, while over the other territories it is incomparably smaller.

The country will probably remain, so long as present agricultural conditions continue, a wilderness, with a few oases of population scattered at long distances from one another. The white inhabitants will, moreover, continue to be very unequally distributed. At present, of a total population in the last-mentioned four States of about 730,000, more than one-fourth lives in the mining district of the Rand; one-sixth is found in the five princ.i.p.al seaports on the southern and south-eastern coast; the remaining seven-twelfths are thinly dispersed over the rest of the country in solitary farms or villages, or in a very few small towns, the largest of which, Kimberley, has only 10,000 inhabitants. The only towns that are growing are those five seaports, and Johannesburg with its tributary mining villages. a.s.suming the present growth of the Rand to continue, it may have in ten years about 500,000 whites, which will be not much less than a half of the then white population of the whole country. Stimulated by the trade which the Rand will supply, the five seaports will probably also grow; while elsewhere population may remain almost stationary. Unless the gold reefs of the country beyond the Limpopo turn out well and create in that region miniature copies of the Rand district, there seems no reason to expect the total number of whites to reach 1,200,000 in less than twenty years. After that time growth will depend upon the future of agriculture, and the future of agriculture depends on so many causes independent of South Africa that it would be unsafe to make any predictions regarding it. I know some South Africans, able men, who think that the day will come when the blacks will begin to retire northward, and a large white population will till their own farms by their own labour, with the aid of irrigation. Of the advent of such a day there are no present signs, yet stranger changes have happened in our time than this change would be. Other South Africans believe that minerals not less valuable than those which the last twenty years have revealed are likely to be discovered in other places. This also may happen,--South Africa, it has been said, is a land of surprises,--and if it does happen there may be another inrush like that which has filled the Rand. All that one can venture to do now is to point out the probable result of the conditions which exist at this moment; and these, though they point to a continued increase of mineral production, do not point to any large or rapid increase of white inhabitants.

Twenty years hence the white population is likely to be composed in about equal proportions of urban and rural elements. The urban element will be mainly mining, gathered at one great centre on the Wit.w.a.tersrand, and possibly at some smaller centres in other districts.

The rural element, consisting of people who live in villages or solitary farmhouses, will remain comparatively backward, because little affected by the social forces which work swiftly and potently upon close-packed industrial communities, and it may find itself very different in tone, temper, and tendencies from its urban fellow-citizens. The contrast now so marked between the shopkeeper of Cape Town and the miner of Johannesburg on the one hand, and the farmer of the Karroo or the Northern Transvaal on the other, may be then hardly less marked between the two sections of the white population. But these sections will have one thing in common. Both will belong to an upper stratum of society; both will have beneath them a ma.s.s of labouring blacks, and they will therefore form an industrial aristocracy resting on Kafir labour.

[Footnote 88: It is still doubtful whether very large areas can be irrigated by means of artesian wells.]

[Footnote 89: The Transvaal coal-fields are said to extend over 56,000 square miles; there is also a coal-field in the eastern part of Cape Colony, near the borders of the Orange Free State.]

CHAPTER XXVII

REFLECTIONS AND FORECASTS

In preceding chapters I have endeavoured to present a picture of South Africa as it stands to-day, and to sketch the leading events that have made its political conditions what they are. Now, in bringing the book to a close, I desire to add a few reflections on the forces which have been at work, and to attempt the more hazardous task of conjecturing how those forces are likely to operate in the future.

The progress of the country, and the peculiar form which its problems have taken, are the resultant of three causes. One of these is the character which nature has impressed upon it. Of this I have already spoken (Chapter VI), pointing out how the high interior plateau, with its dry and healthy climate, determined the main line of European advance and secured the predominance, not of the race which first discovered the country, but of the race which approached it, far later in time, from its best side. It is also in this physical character that one must seek the explanation of the remarkably slow progress of the country in wealth and population. South Africa began to be occupied by white men earlier than any part of the American continent. The first Dutch settlement was but little posterior to those English settlements in North America which have grown into a nation of seventy-seven millions of people, and nearly a century and a half prior to the first English settlements in Australia. It is the unhealthiness of the east coast and the dryness of the rest of the country that are mainly accountable for this tardy growth--a growth which might have been still more tardy but for the political causes that drove the Boers into the far interior. And again, it is the physical configuration of the country that has made it, and is likely to keep it, one country. This is a point of cardinal importance. Though divided into two British Colonies, with several other pieces of British territory, and two Boer Republics, the habitable parts of South Africa form one community, all the parts of which must stand or fall together. The great plateau is crossed by no lines of physical demarcation all the way from the Zambesi to the Hex River (some fifty miles north-east of Cape Town), and the coast regions are closely bound by economic ties to the plateau, which through them touches the outer world. Popular speech which talks of South Africa as one whole is scientifically right.

The two other causes that have ruled the fortunes and guided the development of the country have been the qualities and relations of the races that inhabit it, and the character of the Government which has sought from afar to control the relations of those races. These deserve to be more fully considered.

English statesmen have for more than fifty years been accustomed to say that of all the Colonies of Great Britain none has given to the mother country so much disquiet and anxiety as South Africa has done. This is another way of expressing the fact which strikes the traveller--that no other British Colony has compressed so much exciting history into the last sixty or seventy years. The reason is undoubtedly to be found in the circ.u.mstance that South Africa has had two sets of race questions to deal with: questions between the whites and the aborigines, questions between the Dutch and the English. It is this latter set of questions that have been the main thread of South African annals. Why have they proved so troublesome? Why are they so troublesome to-day, when we ought to be able to look at them with a vision enlarged and a temper mellowed by wide experience? Partly from an element inherent in all race questions. They are not questions that can be settled on pure business lines, by an adjustment of the material interests of the parties concerned. They involve sentiment, and thus, like questions of religion, touch the deeper springs of emotion. And they spring from, or are involved with, incompatibilities of character which prevent the men of either stock from fully understanding, and therefore fully trusting, the men of the other. Suspicion, if not positive aversion, makes it difficult for two races to work together, even where the political arrangements that govern their relations are just and reasonable. But something may also be ascribed to certain malign accidents which blasted the prospect, once fair, of a friendly fusion between the Dutch and the English peoples that seemed eminently fit to be fused. The British annexation of Cape Colony occurred at an unfortunate time. Had it happened thirty years earlier no difficulties would have arisen over the natives and slavery, because at that time the new philanthropy had not begun to influence English opinion or the British Government. Had it happened in later days, when steam had given quicker and more frequent ocean communication, Britain and the Colony would each have better known what the other thought and wished, and the errors that alienated the Boers might never have been committed. The period which followed the annexation was precisely the period in which the differences between English feeling and colonial feeling were most marked and most likely to lead to misunderstanding and conflict.

For there has been in the antagonism of the Boers and the English far more than the jealousy of two races. There has been a collision of two types of civilisation, one belonging to the nineteenth century, the other to the seventeenth. His isolation, not only in a distant corner of the southern hemisphere, but in the great, wide, bare veldt over which his flocks and herds roam, has kept the Boer fast bound in the ideas and habits of a past age, and he shrinks from the contact of the keen restless modern man, with new arts of gain and new forms of pleasure, just as a Puritan farmer of Cromwell's day might shrink were he brought to life and forced to plunge into the current of modern London. Had the Boers been of English stock, but subjected to the same conditions as those which kept the seventeenth century alive in the country behind the Cape, they too would have resisted the new ways of the new rulers; but their ident.i.ty of race and speech with those rulers would have abridged the struggle. It is the fact that the old Cape settlers had a language of their own, and a sense of blood-kins.h.i.+p to hold them together that has enabled the Dutch element to remain cohesive, and given them an Afrikander patriotism of their own--a patriotism which is not Dutch, for they care nothing for the traditions of Holland, but purely Africander.

Their local position as half-nomadic inhabitants of a wide interior gave a peculiar character to that struggle between the mother country and her colonists which has arisen more than once in British history. They were so few and so poor, as compared with the people of the thirteen Colonies of the North American coast in 1776, that it was useless for them to rebel and fight for independence, as those Colonies had done. On the other hand, they were not, like the French of lower Canada, rooted in the soil as agriculturists. Hence a middle course between rebellion and submission offered itself. That course was secession. They renounced not only their political allegiance, but even the very lands where they dwelt, seeking the protection of the desert as other emigrants before them had sought that of the ocean. Thus again, and more completely, isolated since 1836, the emigrant Boers, and especially those of the Transvaal, have been able to retain their old ways for sixty years longer, and have grown more anti-English than ever. On the other hand, the English of the Colony, whose English sentiment was quickened by these events, have remained more thoroughly English than those of most British Colonies, and have never conceived the idea of severing their own connection with the mother country.

That the emigrant Boers became republicans was due rather to circ.u.mstance than to conscious purpose. A monarch they could not have, because there was no one designated for the place, as well as because they had the instinct of general disobedience. But for a long time they tried to rub along with no more government or leaders.h.i.+p than the needs of war required. Seldom has any people been so little influenced by abstract political ideas, yet seldom has a people enjoyed so perfect an opportunity of trying political experiments and testing the theories of political philosophers. But the Boers were, and are still, a strictly practical people. Their houses give them cover from sun and rain, but nothing more; there is little comfort and no elegance. So their inst.i.tutions were the fewest and simplest under which men have ever governed themselves. It is therefore no theoretical attachment to democracy that has helped the Boers to resist the English; it is merely the wish to be left alone, and a stubbornness of will that made independence seem more desirable the more it was threatened.

Even this admirable stubbornness would hardly have carried them through but for the dispersion over vast s.p.a.ces. That dispersion, while it r.e.t.a.r.ded their political growth and social progress, made them hard to reach or to conquer. The British Government despaired of over-taking and surrounding them, for they were scattered like antelopes over the lonely veldt, and there was a still vaster and equally lonely veldt behind them into which they could retire. To pursue them seemed a wild-goose chase, and a costly one, in which there was much to spend and little to gain.

Thus their weakness has proved their strength, and the more settled they become in the future, the less can they hope to escape the influences they have so long resisted.

But for the maintenance of the sentiment of Boer nationality by the two Boer Republics, the antagonism of Dutch and English in Cape Colony would have ere now died out, for there has been little or nothing in colonial politics to sustain it. The interests of the farmers of both stocks are identical, their rights are in all respects the same, and the British Government has been perfectly impartial. The Boers in the Colony are good citizens and loyal subjects. It is only the character of the country and the conditions of their pastoral life that have r.e.t.a.r.ded their social fusion with the English, as it is only the pa.s.sions aroused by the strife of Boers and Englishmen in the Transvaal that evoked in 1881, and again evoked in 1896, a political opposition between the races. Fortunately, the sentiments of the Dutch have possessed a safe outlet in the colonial Parliament. The wisdom of the policy which gave responsible government has been signally vindicated; for, as const.i.tutional means have existed for influencing the British Government, feelings which might otherwise have found vent in a revolt or a second secession have been diverted into a safe channel.

The other set of race troubles, those between white settlers and the aborigines of the land have been graver in South Africa than any which European governments have had to face in any other new country. The Red Men of North America, splendidly as they fought, never seriously checked the advance of the whites. The revolts of the aborigines in Peru and Central America were easily suppressed. The once warlike Maoris of New Zealand have, under the better methods of the last twenty-five years, become quiet and tolerably contented. Even the French in Algeria had not so long a strife to maintain with the Moorish and Kabyle tribes as the Dutch and English had with the natives at the Cape. The south-coast Kafirs far outnumbered the whites, were full of courage, had a rough and thickly wooded country to defend, and were so ignorant as never to know when they were beaten. A more intelligent race might have sooner abandoned the contest. The melancholy chapter of native wars seems to be now all but closed, except perhaps in the far north. These wars, however, did much to r.e.t.a.r.d the progress of South Africa and to give it a bad name. They deterred many an English farmer from emigrating thither in the years between 1810 and 1870. They annoyed and puzzled the home government, and made it think the Colony a worthless possession, whence little profit or credit was to be drawn in return for the unending military expenditure. And they gave the colonists ground for complaints, sometimes just, sometimes unjust, against the home government, which was constantly accused of parsimony, of shortsightedness, of vacillation, of sentimental weakness, in sending out too few troops, in refusing to annex fresh territory, in patching up a hollow peace, in granting too easy terms to the natives.

Whoever reviews the whole South African policy of the British Government during the ninety-three years that have elapsed since 1806 cannot but admit that many errors were committed. Many precious opportunities for establis.h.i.+ng British authority on a secure basis were lost. Many things were done imperfectly, and therefore had to be done over and over again, which it would have been cheaper as well as wiser to have finished off at once. Many steps, prudent in themselves, and dictated by excellent motives, were taken at a moment and in a way which made them misunderstood and resisted. Reflecting on these mistakes, one sometimes wonders that the country was not lost altogether to Britain, and thinks of the saying of the old Swiss statesman: _Hominum negligentia, Dei providentia, regitur Helvetia_. It may nevertheless be truly said for the British Government that it almost always sought to act justly, and that such advances as it made were not dictated by an aggressive spirit, but (with few exceptions) compelled by the necessities of the case. And it must not be forgotten that, as all home governments err in their control of Colonies--Spain, Portugal, and France have certainly erred in their day far more fatally than England--so many of the errors which now most startle us in the annals of South Africa were all but inevitable, because the wisest man could not have foreseen the course which things have in fact taken. Who ever tries to look at the events of sixty, thirty, or even twenty years ago with the eyes of those times, and remembers that Colonial ministers in England had to consider not only what they thought best, but what they could get the uninstructed public opinion of their own country to accept, will be more indulgent than the colonists are in their judgment of past mistakes. For instance, it is apt to be forgotten that the Cape was not occupied with a view to the establishment of a European Colony, in our present sense of the word.

The Dutch took it that they might plant a cabbage-garden; the English took it that they might have a naval station and half-way house to India. Not till our own time did people begin to think of it as capable of supporting a great civilised community and furnis.h.i.+ng a new market for British goods; not till 1869 was it known as a region whence great wealth might be drawn. Hence Britain, which during the first half of this century was busy in conquering India, in colonising Australasia, and in setting things to rights in Canada, never cared to bend her energies to the development of South Africa, then a less promising field for those energies, spent no more money on it than she could help, and sought to avoid the acquisition of new territory, because that meant new troubles and new outlays.

The views of colonial policy which prevailed in England down till about 1870 were very different from those which most of us now hold. The statesmen of the last generation accepted that _consilium coercendi intra terminos imperii_ which, according to Tacitus, Augustus held sound for an empire less scattered than is that of Britain; they thought that Britain had already more territory than she could hope to develop and (in the long run) to govern; and they therefore sought to limit rather than increase her responsibilities. And they believed, reasoning somewhat too hastily from the revolt of the North American Colonies, that as soon as the new English communities to which self-government had been or was in due course to be granted, reached a certain level of wealth and population they would demand and receive their independence.

That the fruit would fall off the old tree as soon as it was ripe was the favourite metaphor employed to convey what nearly all publicists took to be an obvious truth. No one stated it so trenchantly as Disraeli when he wrote: "These wretched Colonies will all be independent too in a few years, and are a millstone round our necks;" but the dogma was generally accepted by politicians belonging to both the great parties in the state. Those, moreover, were days in which economy and retrenchment were popular cries in England, and when it was deemed the duty of a statesman to reduce as far as possible the burdens of the people.

Expenditure on colonial wars and on the administration of half-settled districts was odious to the prudent and thrifty contemporaries or disciples of Sir Robert Peel and Richard Cobden. Accordingly, the chief aim of British statesmen from 1830 till 1870 was to arrest the tide of British advance, to acquire as little territory as possible, to leave restless natives and emigrant Boers entirely to themselves. Desperate efforts were made to stop the Kafir wars. We can now see that the tendency--one may almost call it a law of nature--which everywhere over the world has tempted or forced a strong civilised power to go on conquering the savage or half-civilised peoples on its borders, the process that has carried the English all over India and brought the Russians from the Volga to the Pamirs in one direction and to the mouth of the Amur in another, was certain to compel the British Government to subdue and annex one Kafir tribe after another until either a desert or the territory of some other civilised State was reached. But fifty years ago this was not clearly perceived; so the process, which might have inflicted less suffering if it had been steadily and swiftly carried through, went on slowly and to the constant annoyance of statesmen at home.

It was the same as regards the great plateau and the Boer emigrants who dwelt there. Not from any sympathy with their love of independence, but because she did not want the trouble of pursuing and governing them and the wide lands they were spread over, England resolved to abandon the interior to them. In 1852 and 1854 she made a supreme effort to check her own onward career, first by recognizing the independence of the Transvaal emigrants whose allegiance she had theretofore claimed, then by actually renouncing her rights to the Orange River Sovereignty, and to those within it who desired to continue her subjects. What more could a thrifty and cautious and conscientious country do? Nevertheless, these good resolutions had to be reconsidered, these self-denying principles foregone. Circ.u.mstances were too strong for the Colonial Office. In 1869 it accepted the protectorate of Basutoland. In 1871 it yielded to the temptation of the diamond-fields, and took Griqualand West. Soon after it made a treaty with Khama, which gave the British a foothold in Bechua.n.a.land. In 1877 it annexed the Transvaal. By that time the old ideas were beginning to pa.s.s away, and to be replaced by new views of the mission and destiny of Britain. The wish of the British Government to stand still had been combated all along by powerful inducements to move on. The colonists always pressed for an advance of the frontier.

The Governor usually pressed for it. The home government was itself haunted by a fear that if it abandoned positions of vantage its successors might afterwards have reason to rue the abandonment. These were the considerations that drove British statesmen to the most momentous forward steps that were taken. Two things, and two only, were really vital to British interests--the control of the coasts, and the control of an open road to the north. Accordingly, the two decisive steps were the occupation of Natal in 1842-3, which shut off the Boers from the sea, and the taking of Griqualand West in 1871 (followed by the taking of southern Bechua.n.a.land in 1884), which secured between the Transvaal on the one side and the Kalahari Desert on the other a free access to the great northern plateau.

The tide of English opinion began to turn about 1870, and since then it has run with increasing force in the direction of what is called imperialism, and has indeed in some cases brought about annexations that are likely to prove unprofitable, because the territory acquired is too hot and unhealthy to be fit for British settlement. The strides of advance made in 1884-5 and 1890 have been as bold and large as those of earlier days were timid and halting; and the last expiring struggles of the old policy were seen in 1884, when Lord Derby, who belonged to the departing school, yielded a new convention to the importunity of the Transvaal Boers and allowed Germany to establish herself in Damaraland.

But it is due to Britain, which has been accused, and so far as regards South Africa unjustly accused (down to 1896), of aggressive aims, to recall the fact that she strove for many years to restrict her dominion, and did not cease from her efforts until long experience had shown that it was hard to maintain the old policy, and until the advent on the scene of other European powers, whom it was thought prudent to keep at a distance from her own settled territories, impelled her to join in that general scramble for Africa which has been so strange a feature of the last two decades.

There have been moments, even since the occupation of two points so important as Basutoland (in 1869) and Griqualand West (in 1871) when it has seemed possible that South Africa might become Dutch rather than English, such is the tenacity of that race, and so deep are the roots which its language has struck. With the discovery of the Wit.w.a.tersrand gold-fields, drawing a new body of English immigrants into the country, that possibility seems to have pa.s.sed away. The process of territorial distribution is in South Africa now complete. Every Colony and State has become limited by boundaries defined in treaties. Every native tribe has now some legal white superior, and no native tribe remains any longer formidable. The old race questions have pa.s.sed, or are pa.s.sing, into new phases. But they will be at least as difficult in their new forms as in their old ones. I will devote the few remaining pages of this book to a short consideration of them and of the other problems affecting the future of South Africa with which they are involved.

Reasons have been given in a preceding chapter for the conclusion that both the white and the black races are likely to hold their ground over all the country, and that the black race will continue to be the more numerous. a.s.suming the conditions of agriculture to remain what they are at present, and a.s.suming that the causes which now discourage the establishment of large manufacturing industries do not pa.s.s away, there will probably be for the next seventy years a large white population on the gold-field and at the chief seaports, and only a small white population over the rest of the country. Even should irrigation be largely introduced, it would be carried on chiefly by black labourers.