n number of friends and advocates in the legislatures of the
Colonies, and a certain amount of public opinion, the opinion of the
best part of the community, disposed to protect them. Nevertheless, no
traveller can study the colour problem in South Africa without
anxiety--anxiety, not for the present, but for the future, a future in
which the seeds that are now being sown will have sprung up and grown to
maturity.

What is the future of the Kafirs likely to be? Though a writer may
prophesy with an easy mind when he knows that the truth or error of the
prophecy will not be tested till long after he has himself quitted the
world, still it is right to make the usual apologies for venturing to
prophesy at all. These apologies being taken as made, let us consider
what is likely to come to pass in South Africa.

The Kafirs will stay where they are and form the bulk of the population
all over South Africa. Some sanguine men think they will move off to the
hotter north, as in America the centre of negro population has shifted
southward toward the Gulf of Mexico. This is improbable, because the
South African white seems resolved to rely upon natives for all the
harder and rougher kinds of labour, not to add that, although the
European can thrive and work, the Kafir is more truly the child of the
soil and of the climate. And not only will he stay, but, to all
appearances, he will increase faster than does the white man.

The Kafirs, now divided into many tribes and speaking many languages and
dialects, will lose their present tribal organization, their languages,
their distinctive habits. Whether some sort of native _lingua Franca_
will spring up, or whether they will all come to speak English, is
doubtful; but probably in the long run English will prevail and become
the common speech of the southern half of the continent. They will also
lose their heathenism (though many superstitions will survive), and will
become, in name at least, Christians. Thus they will form to a far
greater extent than now a homogeneous mass pervaded by the same ideas
and customs.

While thus constituting one vast black community, they will probably
remain as sharply marked off from the whites as they are to-day. That
there will be no intermarriage may safely be assumed from the fact that
mixture of blood has greatly diminished since the days of slavery, just
as it has diminished in the Southern States of America. White opinion
universally condemns i