onds or gold by their
personal enterprise on the spot, the majority return to Europe and spend
their incomes there. The country, therefore, does not get the full
benefit, in the way either of payments for labour (except, of course,
labour at the mines) or of increased consumption of articles, out of its
mineral products, but is rather in the position of Mexico or Peru in the
seventeenth century, when the bulk of the precious metals won from the
mines went to Spain as a sort of tribute. There are at this moment
probably not more than a dozen rich men, as Europe counts riches,
resident in the country, and all of these are to be found either at
Johannesburg or at Cape Town. Most of them will after a time betake
themselves to Europe. Nor is there any sign that the number of local
fortunes will increase; for the motives which draw men away from
Johannesburg to Europe are likely to continue as strong in the future as
they are at present.

Secondly, as the whites are not--except at Johannesburg, where the
lavishness of a mining population is conspicuous--large consumers of
luxuries, so the blacks are poor consumers of all save the barest
necessaries of life. It is not merely that they have no money. It is
that they have no wants, save of food and of a few common articles of
clothing. The taste for the articles which civilized man requires is
growing, as the traders in Bechuanaland have already begun to find, but
it grows slowly, and is still in a rudimentary stage. The demand which
South Africa is likely to offer either for home-made or for imported
products must, therefore, be measured, not by the gross population, but
by the white population, and, indeed, by the town-dwelling whites; for
the Dutch farmer or ranchman, whether in the British Colonies or in the
Dutch Republics, has very little cash in his pocket, and lives in a
primitive way. It is only the development of the mines that makes South
Africa a growing market for European goods.

Thirdly, there is not much European immigration, except of artizans; and
these go chiefly to the gold mines of the Rand. Few agriculturists come
out, because farms have seldom been offered by any of the Governments on
the same easy terms as those which prevail in Canada or New Zealand, and
because the climate and the existence of a black population deter the
agricultural classes of northern Europe. Although the Government of Cape
Colony has little or no land obviously fit for tillage to d