re are the relations of the two
European races--races which ought long ago to have been happily blended
into one, but which have been kept apart by a train of untoward events
and administrative errors. Few of the newer countries have had a more
peculiar or more chequered history; and this history needs to be studied
with a constant regard to the physical conditions that have moulded it.
Coming down to our own time, nowhere are the struggles of the past seen
to be more closely intertwined with the troubles of the present; nor
does even Irish history furnish a better illustration of the effect of
sentiment upon practical politics. Few events of recent times have
presented more dramatic situations, and raised more curious and
intricate issues of political and international morality, than those
which have lately been set before us by the discovery of the Transvaal
gold-fields and the rush of nineteenth-century miners and speculators
into a pastoral population which retains the ideas and habits of the
seventeenth-century. Still more fascinating are the problems of the
future. One can as yet do little more than guess at them; but the world
now moves so fast, and has grown so small, and sees nearly every part of
itself so closely bound by ties of commerce or politics to every other
part, that it is impossible to meditate on any great and new country
without seeking to interpret its tendencies by the experience of other
countries, and to conjecture the role it will be called on to play in
the world-drama of the centuries to come. I have sought, therefore, not
only to make South Africa real to those who do not know it, and to give
them the materials for understanding what passes there and following its
fortunes with intelligence, but also to convey an impression of the kind
of interest it awakens. It is still new: and one sees still in a fluid
state the substance that will soon crystallize into new forms. One
speculates on the result which these mingled forces, these ethnic habits
and historical traditions, and economic conditions, will work out. And
reflecting on all these things, one feels sure that a country with so
commanding a position, and which has compressed so much history into the
last eighty years of its life, will hold a conspicuous place in that
southern hemisphere which has in our own times entered into the
political and industrial life of the civilized world.

PART I

_NATURE_

CHAPTER I

PHYSICAL