ars have
revealed are likely to be discovered in other places. This also may
happen,--South Africa, it has been said, is a land of surprises,--and if
it does happen there may be another inrush like that which has filled
the Rand. All that one can venture to do now is to point out the
probable result of the conditions which exist at this moment; and these,
though they point to a continued increase of mineral production, do not
point to any large or rapid increase of white inhabitants.

Twenty years hence the white population is likely to be composed in
about equal proportions of urban and rural elements. The urban element
will be mainly mining, gathered at one great centre on the
Witwatersrand, and possibly at some smaller centres in other districts.
The rural element, consisting of people who live in villages or solitary
farmhouses, will remain comparatively backward, because little affected
by the social forces which work swiftly and potently upon close-packed
industrial communities, and it may find itself very different in tone,
temper, and tendencies from its urban fellow-citizens. The contrast now
so marked between the shopkeeper of Cape Town and the miner of
Johannesburg on the one hand, and the farmer of the Karroo or the
Northern Transvaal on the other, may be then hardly less marked between
the two sections of the white population. But these sections will have
one thing in common. Both will belong to an upper stratum of society;
both will have beneath them a mass of labouring blacks, and they will
therefore form an industrial aristocracy resting on Kafir labour.

[Footnote 88: It is still doubtful whether very large areas can be
irrigated by means of artesian wells.]

[Footnote 89: The Transvaal coal-fields are said to extend over 56,000
square miles; there is also a coal-field in the eastern part of Cape
Colony, near the borders of the Orange Free State.]

CHAPTER XXVII

REFLECTIONS AND FORECASTS

In preceding chapters I have endeavoured to present a picture of South
Africa as it stands to-day, and to sketch the leading events that have
made its political conditions what they are. Now, in bringing the book
to a close, I desire to add a few reflections on the forces which have
been at work, and to attempt the more hazardous task of conjecturing how
those forces are likely to operate in the future.

The progress of the country, and the peculiar form which its problems
have taken, are the resultant