SOUTH AFRICAN STUDIES.
South African Studies. By A. P. Hillier, M.D. (Macmillan and Co. 6s.) —Dr. Hillier has put together in book-form a series of very miscellaneous lectures, articles, and letters on South African subjects. Some of these are very slight, but an essay on the " Issues at Stake in South Africa," reprinted from the Fortnightly Review of January, 1900, is well worthy of permanent record. The writer has lived for sixteen years among Boers and Outlanders, he possesses a judicial mind, and he is an acute observer. Two chapters in the present book seem to be reprinted from his previous volume, " Raid and Reform," which we noticed some two years back. There is an effective reply to Mr. Bryce's famous article in the North American Review, and there are sound observations on the African climate and British military marks- manship. It will be seen that all this is much more easy to catalogue than to criticise. Dr. Hillier was connected with the reform movement in the Transvaal, and has no misgivings on the necessity of bringing to an end the Pretoria system. But he does not look on the Boers as enemies of the human race, and his calmness is valuable. Often
the Colonial Englishman judges much more soundly than the home-staying, and herein is the hope for the future. We wish to call particular attention to Dr. Hillier's chapter on the " Native Races." We have never joined in wild denunciation of Johannesburg financiers, but it is most important that the public should realise that what the Empire needs is the conversion of the Kaffirs into decent, sober people, and what a good many influential and vociferously " loyal " people in the Transvaal Colony will clamour for is a constant supply of labour. There is not much danger of ill-treatment of native miners, which does not pay, but the capitalist's interest in the miner ends when that individual, having worked for his contract time, returns to his own tribe. Here, we might almost say, is where the Imperial difficulty begins. Reports from Basutoland, which is in some respects a model "native reserve," before the war tended to show that the return to their native kraals of young men who had earned enough money in a few months to be, as it were, rentiers for the rest of their lives, was by no means advan- tageous to the tribe. The labourers bad often picked up bad habits, and bad invariably lost their respect for their chiefs and for tribal customs without acquiring any real notions of civilised order. Dr. Hillier has no panacea, but he understands the gravity of the " native question." Now that all South Africa is to be within the Empire, it is time that we studied the risks of the future. The mines are a great solvent of tribal distinctions. Gradually the incidence of our rule will obliterate tribal land- marks. Have many of us really considered what it will be to find ourselves confronted with an enormous quarter civilised Bantu nation ?
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