he is no more anxious to work hard for
small wages, no more and no less capable of honesty and thrift, no more
and no less endowed with human virtue, no more and no less cursed with
the vices of the world, no more human and no less divine than is his
master, the white man.

When Machiavelli asserts in general of men that "they are ungrateful,
fickle, false, cowards, covetous, and as long as you succeed they are
yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life and
children--when the need is far distant; but when it approaches they turn
against you." He thought, no doubt, of white men only, but to me his
appreciation of the baser side of human nature seems no less applicable
to the black people of South Africa, and when, on the other hand,
Shakespeare declaims:

"What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in
faculty!"

he also, we may be sure, thought of his own kind, but to me, again, the
beautiful words, which usage cannot cheapen, express the wonder I have
often felt at the wealth of imagery, the mental grasp, the wisdom and
the natural dignity in very many untutored natives I have met with, and
it is this experience which makes me believe that the present difference
between the Europeans and the Native race is one of degree and not of
kind, and that, in the fullness of time, achievement will follow the
latent genius with which, as I hold, nature has endowed, in equal degree
with ourselves, the great Bantu branch of the human family.

Yet I am no encomiast of the Natives, for I know them to be no better
than other people, but search as I may, I cannot find that Native
character which is alleged to be inherently different from the white
man's character. Did not Mark Twain find, as the most conspicuous result
of his travels, that "there is a good deal of human nature everywhere,"
and is it not true that human nature is everywhere the same?

We are far too apt to exaggerate both in our disparagement and in our
praise of backward people. Many people still think, if they think at
all, of the South African Native as a being of the kind imagined by
Hobbes when he wrote: "Man in his natural state is towards man as a
wolf," and, on the other hand, there are still many who regard him,
after the fancy of Rousseau, as a sort of primitive man-child existing
in a state of natural innocence from which he is being driven by the
corrupting influence of the civilised invaders. But all t