velopment is likely to be quite different from
what it has been there.

From these conclusions another of great importance follows. The white
population will remain scanty in proportion to the area of the country.
At present, it is, in the two British Colonies and the two Dutch
Republics, only about one and a half persons to the square mile, while
over the other territories it is incomparably smaller.

The country will probably remain, so long as present agricultural
conditions continue, a wilderness, with a few oases of population
scattered at long distances from one another. The white inhabitants
will, moreover, continue to be very unequally distributed. At present,
of a total population in the last-mentioned four States of about
730,000, more than one-fourth lives in the mining district of the Rand;
one-sixth is found in the five principal seaports on the southern and
south-eastern coast; the remaining seven-twelfths are thinly dispersed
over the rest of the country in solitary farms or villages, or in a very
few small towns, the largest of which, Kimberley, has only 10,000
inhabitants. The only towns that are growing are those five seaports,
and Johannesburg with its tributary mining villages. Assuming the
present growth of the Rand to continue, it may have in ten years about
500,000 whites, which will be not much less than a half of the then
white population of the whole country. Stimulated by the trade which the
Rand will supply, the five seaports will probably also grow; while
elsewhere population may remain almost stationary. Unless the gold reefs
of the country beyond the Limpopo turn out well and create in that
region miniature copies of the Rand district, there seems no reason to
expect the total number of whites to reach 1,200,000 in less than twenty
years. After that time growth will depend upon the future of
agriculture, and the future of agriculture depends on so many causes
independent of South Africa that it would be unsafe to make any
predictions regarding it. I know some South Africans, able men, who
think that the day will come when the blacks will begin to retire
northward, and a large white population will till their own farms by
their own labour, with the aid of irrigation. Of the advent of such a
day there are no present signs, yet stranger changes have happened in
our time than this change would be. Other South Africans believe that
minerals not less valuable than those which the last twenty ye