t, and rightly, for as things are now the white
race would lose more by the admixture than the coloured race would gain.

The Kafirs will be far more generally educated than they are now, and
will have developed a much higher intelligence. That they will remain
inferior to the whites in all intellectual pursuits and in most
handicrafts may be concluded from American experience; but they will
doubtless be able to compete with white men in many trades, will to some
extent enter the professions, will acquire property, and (assuming the
law to remain as at present) will form a much larger part, though
probably for a very long time a minority, of the electorate. From among
them there will doubtless arise men fit to lead them for social and
political purposes. A talent for public speaking is already remarked as
one of their gifts.

Thus the day will arrive when South Africa will see itself filled by a
large coloured population, tolerably homogeneous, using the same
language, having forgotten its ancient tribal feuds, and not, like the
people of India, divided by caste or by the mutual hatred of Hindus and
Mussulmans. Most of this population will be poor, and it may, unless
successive Colonies are led off to the more thinly peopled parts of
Africa, tread hard upon the means of subsistence which the land offers;
I say the land, for the mines--or at least the gold-mines--will have
been exhausted long before the day we are contemplating arrives.

When will that day arrive? Probably not for at least a century, possibly
not for two centuries. Fast as the world moves in our time, it must take
several generations to develop a race so backward as the Kafirs. Many
political changes may occur before then; but political changes are not
likely to make much difference to a process like this, which goes on
under natural laws--laws that will continue to work, whatever may happen
to the Boers, and whatever may be the future relations of the Colonies
to the mother country. It is only some great change in human thought and
feeling, or some undreamt-of discovery in the physical world, that can
be imagined as likely to affect the progress of the natives and the
attitude of the whites toward them.

When, perhaps in the twenty-first century, the native population has
reached the point of progress we have been imagining, the position may
be for both races a grave or even a perilous one, if the feeling and
behaviour of the whites continue to be wh