all the
staples of the warmer parts of the temperate zone and of subtropical
regions can be grown in some district or other of the country.

The introduction of irrigation would enormously enlarge the area of
tillage, for some of the regions now hopelessly arid, such as the
Karroo, have a soil of surprising fertility, which produces luxuriant
crops when water is led on to it. Millions of acres might be made to
wave with corn were great tanks, like those of India, constructed to
hold the rains of the wet season, for it is not so much the inadequacy
of the rainfall as the fact that it is confined to three or four months,
that makes the country arid. Something might also be hoped from the
digging of artesian wells dug like those which have lately been
successfully bored in Algeria, and have proved so infinitely valuable to
parts of Australia. Already about three hundred thousand acres are
cultivated with the aid of irrigation in Cape Colony. At present,
however, it has been deemed hardly worth while to execute large
irrigation works or to bore wells.[88] The price of cereals has sunk so
low over all the world that South Africans find it cheaper to import
them than to spend capital on breaking up waste lands; and there is
plenty of land already which might be cultivated without irrigation if
there were settlers coming to cultivate it, or if Kafir labour was
sufficiently effective to make it worth the while of enterprising men to
undertake farming on a large scale. The same remarks apply generally to
the other kinds of produce I have mentioned. As population grows, and
the local demand for food increases, more land will be brought under the
plough or the hoe. Some day, perhaps, when the great corn-exporting
countries of to-day--North America, La Plata, central India, southern
Russia--have become so populous as to have much less of their grain
crops to spare for other countries, it will become profitable to
irrigate the Karroo, on which the Kafir of the future will probably
prove a more efficient labourer than he is now. But that day is distant,
and until it arrives, agriculture will continue to play a very
subordinate part in South African industry, and will employ a
comparatively small white population.

Ever since the last years of the seventeenth century, when the settlers
were beginning to spread out from the Cape Peninsula towards the then
still unknown interior, the main occupation of the colonists, first of
the Dut