he
use of coin there will come in time a desire for European goods, which,
in its turn, will draw more labour toward the mines, and perhaps at
last create even among the home-keeping Kafirs a disposition to till the
land or raise cattle for sale. The destruction of cattle by the murrain
which has been raging over the country may accelerate this change.
Already wandering traders and gold-prospectors traverse regions beyond
the border of civilization; and to keep these people, who are often
reckless and lawless, from injuring the natives and provoking them to
take vengeance on the next white man who comes their way, is one of the
greatest difficulties of the British Government, a difficulty aggravated
by the absence in nearly all cases of sufficient legal evidence--for all
over South Africa native evidence is seldom received against a white
man. The regions in which white influence is now most active, and which
will most quickly become assimilated to the two British Colonies, are
those through which railways have been or are now being
constructed--Bechuanaland, Matabililand, and Mashonaland. Should the
mines in these countries turn out well, and means be found for replacing
by new stock the cattle that have perished, these regions may in fifteen
or twenty years possess a considerable population of non-tribal and
semi-civilised natives. Within the next half-century it is probable
that, at least in the British territories as far as the Zambesi, as well
as in the Transvaal and Swaziland, the power of the chiefs will have
practically vanished and the natives be in a position similar to that
which they now hold in Natal and the greater part of Cape Colony; that
is to say, they will either dwell among the whites under the ordinary
law, or will be occupying reservations under the control of a European
magistrate, their old land customs having been mostly superseded and
their heathen rites forbidden or disused.

The position which the whites and the blacks hold toward one another in
South Africa is sufficiently similar to that of the two races in the
Southern States of America to make a short comparison between the two
cases instructive. There are no doubt many differences. In the United
States the Southern negroes are strangers and therefore isolated, with
no such reserve of black people behind them as the Kafirs have in the
rest of the African continent. In South Africa it is the whites who are
new-comers and isolated, and they