ife. This feature of South African society, though it
implies a slow material development, is very agreeable to the visitor,
and I doubt if it be really an injury to the ultimate progress of the
country. In most parts of North America, possibly in Australia also,
industrial development has been too rapid, and has induced a nervous
excitability and eager restlessness of temper from which South Africa is
free. Of course, in saying this, I except always the mining districts,
and especially the Witwatersrand, which is to the full as restless and
as active as San Francisco or Melbourne.

The comparative ease of life disposes the English part of the population
to athletic sports, which are pursued with almost as much avidity as in
Australia. Even one who thinks that in England the passion for them has
gone beyond all reasonable limits, and has become a serious injury to
education and to the taste for intellectual pleasures, may find in the
character of the climate a justification for the devotion to cricket, in
particular, which strikes him in South Africa. Now that the wild animals
have become scarce, hunting cannot be pursued as it once was, and young
people would have little incitement to physical exertion in the open air
did not the English love of cricket flourish in the schools and
colleges. Long may it flourish!

The social conditions I have been describing are evidently unfavourable
to the development of literature or science or art. Art has scarcely
begun to exist. Science is represented only by a few naturalists in
Government employment, and by some intelligent amateur observers.
Researches in electricity or chemistry or biology require nowadays a
somewhat elaborate apparatus, with which few private persons could
provide themselves, and which are here possessed only by one or two
public institutions. English and American writers have hitherto supplied
the intellectual needs of the people, and the established reputation of
writers in those countries makes competition difficult to a new colonial
author. The towns are too small, and their inhabitants too much occupied
in commerce to create groups of highly educated people, capable of
polishing, whetting, and stimulating one another's intellects. There are
few large libraries, and no fully equipped university to train young men
in history or philosophy or economics or theology. Accordingly, few
books are composed or published, and, so far as I know, only three South
Af