sing to receive their wonted offerings of native
beer.

What will happen when heathenism and the tribal system have vanished
away? Such morality, such principles of manly conduct as the natives now
have, are bound up with their ghost-worship and still more with their
tribal system, which prescribes loyalty to the chief, courage in war,
devotion to the interests of the tribe or clan. When these principles
have disappeared along with the tribal organization, some other
principles, some other standard of duty and precepts of conduct, ought
to be at hand to replace them. Where are such precepts to be found, and
whence are the motives and emotions to be drawn which will give the new
precepts a power to command the will? Although the Kafirs have shown
rather less aptitude for assimilating Christian teaching than some other
savage races have done, there is nothing in the experience of the
missions to discourage the hope that such teaching may come to prevail
among them, and that through it each generation may show a slight moral
advance upon that which has gone before. As the profession of
Christianity will create a certain link between the Kafirs and their
rulers which may soften the asperity which the relations of the two
races now wear, so its doctrines will in time give them a standard of
conduct similar to that accepted among the whites, and an ideal which
will influence the superior minds among them. So much may certainly be
said: that the Gospel and the mission schools are at present the most
truly civilizing influences which work upon the natives, and that upon
these influences, more than on any other agency, does the progress of
the coloured race depend.

[Footnote 70: After listening to their arguments, I did not venture to
doubt that they were right.]

CHAPTER XXIII

SOCIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE TWO BRITISH COLONIES

The two South African Colonies have not yet had time to develop new and
distinctive types of life and character. Though Cape Colony is nearly as
old as Massachusetts or Virginia, it has been less than a century under
British rule, and the two diverse elements in its population have not
yet become blent into any one type that can be said to belong to the
people as a whole. One must therefore describe these elements
separately. The Dutch are almost all country folk, and the country folk
are (in Cape Colony) mostly Dutch. Some, especially near Cape Town, are
agriculturists, but many more are