r speed and exactitude is everywhere a feature of high-pressure city
life rather than of life in the country. The town artisan of to-day must
be quick and accurate, whereas the agricultural labourer is found
satisfactory so long as he is a steady worker, and the home atmosphere
of the two types is bound to be affected by these considerations. The
home atmosphere of the ordinary Bantu family in process of acquiring the
ways of Western civilisation will be more like that of the agricultural
labourer than of the town artisan or shopkeeper, and it is conceded on
every hand that the home influence has a direct and important bearing on
the children's progress in school. Take as an example the children of
the back-veld Dutch in South Africa. I have been told by many of their
teachers that the difficulty in teaching these children is not so much
to make them work as to rouse them to a sense of the importance of speed
and accuracy, and yet we often see children from this class growing into
men and women of very high intellectual ability.

There are also some who think that the Native has no great capacity for
mechanics and engineering generally, but I have seen so many instances
of mechanical resourcefulness and inventiveness in Natives who have only
had a superficial acquaintance with machinery that I cannot doubt that
with technical education like that given to European apprentices they
will attain to proficiency equal to that of the whites.

I do not profess the knowledge of a pedagogue in these matters. I speak
simply from an insight gained through many years of observation and
study at first hand. I have listened to thousands of old Native men of
many different tribes in my time, I have heard them speak their inmost
thoughts, not through interpreters--who ever learned anything through an
interpreter?--I have studied these people in and out of Court,
officially and privately, in their kraals and in the veld during many
years, and I say that I can find nothing whatever throughout the whole
gamut of the Native's conscious life and soul to differentiate him from
other human beings in other parts of the world. In his sense of sorrow
and of humour, in his moral intuitions, in his percipience of proportion
and in all the subtle elements that go to make up the mental
constitution of modern man, I see no difference in him from the European
variety which to-day stands at the highest point of human achievement,
but I freely confess th