country will have to depend on its other resources. However
unremunerative the reefs may prove, these other resources will in the
long run assure to it a settled white population and a reasonable
measure of prosperity. But these are days in which we all have learned
to take short views of life for nations and countries as well as for our
individual selves, and unquestionably the more or less of gold in its
quartz will for this country make all the difference between its speedy
and its slow development.

_Peace._--Thirdly, there remains the question whether the natives can be
kept quiet. The first occupation of Mashonaland was so tranquil, the
first conquest of the Matabili so swift and easy, that everybody
perceives that some further trouble ought to have been expected before
British control could be deemed secure. Now there has been a second
struggle and a pacification if not a victory. Has the suppression of the
revolt given permanent security? Are the natives at last aware that the
superiority of intelligence and organization on the part of the whites
more than counterbalances their own immense preponderance in numbers, a
preponderance of fully one hundred to one? No one will speak confidently
on this point who remembers how implicit and how vain was the confidence
felt in 1895 that the natives were contented and submissive. There was
some little risk of trouble in the spring of 1899 among the Matabili,
but the unrest became known in time, and is believed to have subsided.
On the whole, there is reason to think that if the natives are ruled in
a prudent and friendly spirit, making due allowance for their often
unreasonable alarms and suspicions, no fresh rising need be feared. The
chief aim of the ruling officials should be to draw and not to drive
them to labour, and to keep in check those white adventurers who hang
about the frontiers of civilization and sometimes ill-use or defraud the
Kafir in a way which makes him hostile to the next whites, however well
intentioned, who come into his neighbourhood. It may be some years yet
before the natives will seek work at the mines to the extent desired,
for they dislike underground labour. They were reported in 1899 to be
still deaf to the mine-owners' blandishments, although the average wage
is L2 a month; and the want of labour is assigned as a cause why many
mines said to be promising have made little progress. But policy, as
well as humanity and justice, forbids any r