the spot,
and especially any one who has seen the evils which in America have
followed the grant of the suffrage to persons unfit for it, will form a
more charitable judgment. It is indeed impolitic to exclude people
merely on the score of their race. There are among the educated Kafirs
and Indians persons quite as capable as the average man of European
stock, and it is wholesome that the white, too apt to despise his
coloured neighbour, should be made to feel this, and that the educated
coloured man should have some weight in the community as an elector, and
should be entitled to call on his representative to listen to and
express the demands he may make on behalf of his own race. As the number
of educated and property-holding natives increases, they will naturally
come to form a larger element in the electorate, and will be a useful
one. But to toss the gift of political power into the lap of a multitude
of persons who are not only ignorant, but in mind children rather than
men, is not to confer a boon, but to inflict an injury. So far as I
could judge, this is the view of the most sensible natives in Cape
Colony itself, and of the missionaries also, who have been the steadiest
friends of their race. What is especially desirable is to safeguard the
private rights of the native, and to secure for him his due share of the
land, by retaining which he will retain a measure of independence. The
less he is thrown into the whirlpool of party politics the better.

Let me again repeat that there is at present no serious friction between
the black and the white people in South Africa. Though the attitude of
most of the whites--there are, of course, many exceptions--is
contemptuous, unfriendly, and even suspicious, the black man accepts the
superiority of the white as part of the order of nature. He is too low
down, too completely severed from the white, to feel indignant. Even the
few educated natives are too well aware of the gulf that divides their
own people from the European to resent, except in specially aggravated
cases, the attitude of the latter. Each race goes its own way and lives
its own life.

The condition of the wild or tribal Kafirs can be much more shortly
described, for they have as yet entered into few relations with the
whites. They are in many different grades of civilisation, from the
Basutos, an industrious and settled population, among whom Christianity
has made great progress, to the fierce Matabili of