t does not possess a single hotel that would bear
comparison with those of Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Auckland,
Christchurch or Dunedin. The very best is only just suited for
commercial travellers, who must needs be satisfied with whatever may
offer. The suburbs, however, which are peopled by about 32,000--and it
is well that invalids and tourists should remember it--contain hotels
where rest and quiet may be found, in the midst of oak and fir groves
and scenes of surpassing beauty. No city that I know of in our colonies
possesses superior suburbs. They are simply lovely. They are stretched
along the base of Table Mountain, and an entire day's carriage-drive
would not exhaust the exquisite beauty for which the suburbs of Cape
Town are famed.

Cape Colony possesses three valuable assets, which seem to me to have
received scant attention. A traveller who has visited Southern
California and Arizona will understand immediately he visits South
Africa what fortunes might be made of the waste land, the rainfall, and
the glorious climate with which Nature has blessed it. The land is
unworthily despised, the rainfall is allowed to waste itself in thirsty
sands deep down beneath the level of hungry plains, while the climate
does not seem to have suggested to any capitalist that a revenue
superior to that obtained from the Main Reef at Johannesburg might be
drawn from it. The leaders of South African enterprise appear all
absorbed in diamonds, gold mines, or dynamite.

If I were to follow the authorities of Worsfold in his "South Africa,"
pages 126, 127, I should have to admit that this indifference to the
land, the rainfall and climate, is due to the Boers. Captain Percival,
in 1796, a hundred years ago, wrote:--

"The Dutch farmers never assist the soil by flooding; their only labour
is sowing the seed, leaving the rest to chance and the excellent
climate."

"No part of the world has had its natural advantages so abused as the
Cape of Good Hope. The very minds and dispositions of the settlers
interfere with every plan of improvement and public utility."

It may be that the Boers do cling to old-fashioned ideas somewhat more
tenaciously than they ought to do; but they cannot possibly interfere
with capitalists uniting to build up-to-date hotels on the most
salubrious and scenic sites in Cape Colony, and beautifying their
neighbourhoods with shade trees and gardens, so that the thousands of
invalids who throng th