merous, while in the
other territories, British, German, and Portuguese, the disproportion is
very much greater, possibly some four or five millions of natives
against nine or ten thousand Europeans. The total number of whites south
of the Zambesi hardly reaches 750,000, while that of the blacks is
roughly computed at from six to eight millions. At present, therefore,
so far as numbers go, the country is a black man's country.

It may be thought that this preponderance of the natives is only natural
in a region by far the larger part of which has been very recently
occupied by Europeans, and that in time immigration and the natural
growth of the white element will reduce the disproportion. This
explanation, however, does not meet the facts. The black race is at
present increasing at least as rapidly as the white. Unlike those true
aborigines of the country, the Hottentots and Bushmen, who withered up
and vanished away before the whites, the Kafirs, themselves apparently
intruders from the North, have held their ground, not only in the
wilder country where they have been unaffected by the European, but in
the regions where he has conquered and ruled over them. They are more
prolific than the whites, and their increase is not restrained by those
prudential checks which tell upon civilised man, because, wants being
few, subsistence in a warm climate with abundance of land is easy.
Formerly two powerful forces kept down population:--war, in which no
quarter was given and all the property of the vanquished was captured or
destroyed, and the murders that went on at the pleasure of the chief,
and usually through the agency of the witch-doctor. Now both these
forces have been removed by the action of European government, which has
stopped war and restrains the caprice of the chiefs. Relieved from these
checks, the Kafirs of the south coast and of Basutoland, the regions in
which observation has been easiest, are multiplying faster than the
whites, and there is no reason why the same thing should not happen in
other parts of the country. The number of the Fingoes, for instance
(though they are no doubt an exceptionally thrifty and thriving tribe),
is to-day ten times as great as it was fifty or sixty years ago. Here is
a fact of serious import for the future. Two races, far removed from one
another in civilization and mental condition, dwell side by side.
Neither race is likely to extrude or absorb the other. What then will be
t