w
Guinea, the West Indian Islands, and tropical Africa there is no
possibility of ever planting a healthy European population. These
dependencies may grow food for us, or send us articles which we can
exchange for food, but they are not, and never can be, colonies of
Anglo-Saxons. The prospects of South Africa are very dubious. The white
man is there an aristocrat, directing semi-servile labour. The white
population of the gold and diamond fields will stay there till the mines
give out, and no longer. Large tracts of the country may at last be
occupied only by Kaffirs. The United States of America are becoming less
Anglo-Saxon every year, and this process is likely to continue, since in
unskilled labour the Italian and the Pole seem to give better value for
their wages than the Englishman or born American, with his high standard
of comfort. In Canada, the temperate part of Australia, New Zealand, and
Tasmania the chances for a large and flourishing English-speaking
population seem to be very favourable, though in these dominions the
high standard of living is a check to population, and in the case of
Australasia the possibility of foreign conquest, while these priceless
lands are still half empty, cannot be altogether excluded.

Even more interesting to most of us is the future of our race at home.
As regards quality, the outlook for the present is bad. We have seen
that the destruction of the upper and professional classes by taxation
directed expressly against them has already begun, and this
victimisation is certain to become more and more acute, till these
classes are practically extinguished. The old aristocracy showed a
tendency to decay even when they were unduly favoured by legislation,
and a little more pressure will drive them to voluntary sterility and
extermination. Even more to be regretted is the doom of the professional
aristocracy, a caste almost peculiar to our country. These families can
often show longer, and usually much better pedigrees than the peerage;
the persistence of marked ability in many of them, for several
generations, is the delight of the eugenist. They are perhaps the best
specimens of humanity to be found in any country of the world. Yet they
have no prospects except to be gradually harassed out of existence, like
the _curiales_ of the later Roman Empire. The power will apparently be
grasped by a new highly privileged class, the aristocracy of labour.
This class, being intelligent, ene