f course, no desire to
go lower and admit more blacks. The machinery of government is deemed
satisfactory; at any rate, one hears of no proposals to change it, and,
as will be seen presently, there is not in either Colony a wish to alter
the relations now subsisting between it and the mother country.

The reader may suppose that if all these grounds of controversy,
familiar to Europe, and some of them now unhappily familiar to the new
democracies also, are absent, South Africa enjoys the political
tranquillity of a country where there are no factions, and the only
question is how to find the men best able to promote that economic
development which all unite in desiring. This is by no means the case.
In South Africa the part filled elsewhere by constitutional questions,
and industrial questions and ecclesiastical questions, and currency
questions, is filled by race questions and colour questions. Colour
questions have been discussed in a previous chapter. They turn not, as
in the Southern States of America, upon the political rights of the
black man (for on this subject the ruling whites are in both Colonies
unanimous), but upon land rights and the regulation of native labour.
They are not at this moment actual and pungent issues, but they are in
the background of every one's mind, and the attitude of each man to them
goes far to determine his political sympathies. One cannot say that
there exist pro-native or anti-native parties, but the Dutch are by
tradition more disposed than the English to treat the native severely,
and, as they express it, keep him in his place. Many Englishmen share
the Dutch feeling, yet it is always by Englishmen that the advocacy of
the native case is undertaken. In Natal both races are equally
anti-Indian.

The race question among the whites, that is to say the rivalry of Dutch
and English, would raise no practical issue were Cape Colony an island
in the ocean, for there is complete political and social equality
between the two stocks, and the material interests of the Dutch farmer
are the same as those of his English neighbour. It is the existence of a
contiguous foreign State, the South African Republic, that sharpens
Dutch feeling. The Boers who remained in Cape Colony and in Natal have
always retained their sentiment of kinship with those who went out in
the Great Trek of 1836, or who moved northward from Natal into the
Transvaal after the annexation of Natal in 1842. Many of them are
co