the
necessary inferences from previous defeats, and they never realized that
the whites possessed beyond the sea an inexhaustible reservoir of men
and weapons. Even the visit of Lo Bengula's envoys to England in 1891,
when they were shown all the wonders of London, in order that through
them the Matabili nation might be deterred from an attack on the whites,
failed to produce any effect upon the minds of the young warriors, who
were fully persuaded that they could destroy the few strangers in their
country as easily as they had overthrown the Mashonas. The only chiefs
who seem to have fully grasped the relative strength of the Europeans,
and thus to have formed schemes of policy suitable to their inferior
position, were Moshesh, who profited by the advice of the French
missionaries, and Khama, who was himself a Christian and the pupil of
missionaries. Nor did any chief ever rise to the conception of forming a
league of blacks against whites.

The natives, as we shall see, have had harsh treatment from the
Europeans. Many unjust things, many cruel things, many things which
would excite horror if practised in European warfare, have been done
against them. But whoever tries to strike the balance of good and evil
due to the coming of the whites must remember what the condition of the
country was before the whites came. As between the different tribes
there was neither justice nor pity, but simply the rule of the
strongest, unmitigated by any feeling of religion or morality. In war
non-combatants as well as combatants were ruthlessly slaughtered, or
reserved only for slavery; and war was the normal state of things.
Within each tribe a measure of peace and order was maintained. But the
weak had a hard time, and those who were rich, or had roused the enmity
of some powerful man, were at any moment liable to perish on the charge
of witchcraft. In some tribes, such as the Matabili, incessant slaughter
went on by the orders of the king. Nothing less than the prolific
quality of the race could have kept South Africa well peopled in the
teeth of such a waste of life as war and murder caused.

Of the character of the individual native as it affects his present
relations with the whites and the probable future of the race, I shall
have to speak in a later chapter (Chapter XXI), as also of the condition
and prospects of the Christian missions which exist among them, and
which form the main civilizing influence now at work.

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