Mind Humanity : a Story of Camp-Life in South Africa.
By J. R. Coupes. Illustrated by Irving Montagu. (Allen and Co.)—In the preface to this remarkable book the author states that one phase of his hero's career has its origin in his own, The refer- ence is probably to the pictures of life at the South African Diamond Fields, which constitute the book's principal claim to• notice. They display the direct and vivid touch which only per- sonal experiences can give ; and sufficiently dreary, ignoble, and missrablo is the mode of existence portrayed. The very physical surroundings are in keeping with the life led among them. The country round Kimberley is desolate,. barren, and monotonous. Plain after plain is relieved only by a flat-topped kopjo dotting the arid waste. There is no greenery except the karoo-scrub, struggling through the stone-bestrewn soil. Neither trees nor brooks are visible,—the only natural beauty is that of the clear, blue sky overhead, especially when the moon or stars shine with double the brilliance they display in England. The population consists of diamond-mine managers and overseers, Kaffir minors, and diamond thieves and receivers. The mining and thieving is chiefly done by the natives, the receiving by Europeans, often Jews, known as "I. D. B." (illicit diamond buyers); the overseers are, for the most part, waifs and strays of all kinds, from all parts of the world, and their main occupation is to watch the Kaffirs, who are adepts in the art of hiding the " stones " on, or even in, their scantily clad persons. Among these thieves and receivers
there is no honour, they freely rob and inform against each other, and not unfrequently an "I. D. B." is at one and the same time a receiver of stolen, and doubly stolen, "stenos," a police spy, and a privileged thief. In such a society, destitute of all that gave colour to the life of the gold-diggings in California or Australia, the greed born of purely speculative operations forms the woof, and gross and stupid debauchery the web, of human existence. The types of diamond-fields life presented in these pages are clearly portraits, and illustrate to the full the foregoing remarks. They are, almost without exception, wanting in every noble or attractive quality of human nature,—more, per- haps, by accident of surrounding circumstance than by mere hap of birth. The hero is a sort of ne'er-do-well, who owes what final success he achieves principally to his science as a pugilist ; hie patron, the mining manager, is a canny Presbyterian, who finds his solo relaxation in attendance at the prize-ring,—pugilism, in- deed, is almost the dominant note in the book ; the heroine is a sort of innocent courtesan who suddenly turns ultrasreligious, but reverts to common-sense in the dramatic nick of time ; while the minor characters on this South African stage aro all utterly repulsive in all they do and say. But the book is so written as to carry conviction to the reader that the author is guilty neither of invention nor of exaggeration. He describes in simple though realistic language what he has seen and known; and if his pic- ture is a gloomy one, the fault is not his, but that of the curiously mixed society he depicts. The impression which a perusal of the volume leaves on the mind is that the sooner the Diamond Fields are exhausted, the better it will be for South African humanity.
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