TROLLOPE'S VIEW OF SOUTH AFRICA.
MR. ANTHONY TROLLOPE is not a statesman, and does not profess, that we know of, to have mastered politics, but he occasionally gives the world valuable political infor- mation. He has immense experience of different countries, he has a habit of keen observation, and he can bring into pro- minence the broad view he wishes to make manifest better than most professional politicians. The effect of his book on South Africa, for instance, and still more of his lecture delivered on Saturday to the Working-Men's Club and Institute Union, is in one way quite original. We all knew, we suppose, that South Africa was not, as Australia or the Canadian Dominion, a thinly populated but endless land of white men ; that the dark-skinned races were still numerous ; and that if population were described by heads, South Africa could not be classed among European colonies ; but we did not realise how com- pletely the territory differs from the usual lands of emigrants. It is this which Mr. Trollope has succeeded in bringing home to his countrymen. Most of them have thought, we suspect, of South Africa as a land in which there were Europeans and there were natives, but they have never thought of their relative position, never made it clear to themselves whether they were intermingled, or how intermingled ; whether society was of the European or of the Indian type; whether, in short, South Africa was, in the proper meaning of the words, a colony, or only a dependency. Mr. Trollope makes this quite clear. South Africa is a little India, such as India would be if the natives were all aboriginals, Bheels, or Sonthals, or Gonds, and if all overseeing work and all the less laborious work were done by Europeans. The natives, he says, Kafirs, Hottentots, Fingoes, or what not, men of different races and varied languages and complex tribal relations, throughout South Africa, do nearly all the work, do it badly, do it carelessly, but still do it. They draw the water, and hew the wood, and do all domestic ser- vice, and perform most of the labour of agriculture, and are, in fact, the labouring people ; and the Europeans, comparatively a mere handful, only 140,000 Englishmen and 200,000 Dutch- men among 2,500,000, direct their work, keep the shops, set up the hotels, fill most of the upper situations, own the farms, and in the American phrase, beginning to be understood here, "do the bossing" generally. They will not do the active work, farming partly excepted, or rather, any work in which the natives, with their lower standard of wages, comfort, and civili- sation, can compete with them. They cannot, in fact, do it, and they are consequently disinclined to remain, and unless able to turn farmers, or in some other way become employers, move further onwards, to Australia or New Zealand. It is in fact plantation life modified by conditions of climate, and not English colonial life, which prevails in South Africa ; and the emigrants wanted there are not labourers, highly skilled artisans excepted, but men with a little capital, small farmers, horse-breeders, planters, builders, and the like, who can employ rough labour skilfully. The kind of man to succeed is the foreman with a few hundred pounds, and a power of making dark men work readily without tyranny ; and the men who must fail are the unskilled labourers, who know little, but hope to earn comfortable homes by strenuous manual toil. The competition tends to kill them out.
It will kill them out more and more. Nothing, to our minds at least, comes out more strongly in Mr. Trollope's book and his lecture than that South Africa, if things go prosperously, will become slowly a second India, with white men for its superior castes. All the native races multiply, all are reinforced from the North by an endless immi- gration, of which Mr. Trollope scarcely makes enough, but which attracts constant attention in the Colonial Office, and all are passing through a singular stage in civilisation, during which tribes originally nomad, pastoral, hunting, or warlike, settle down to daily work. The natives, the Kafirs more especially, will work without being enslaved. Regular wages of 10s. a week have for them irresistible attractions, and though they are restless, shiftless, and childish, and apt to be inattentive in every capacity but one, that of attendants on children, in which they are as trustworthy as big dogs, they swarm towards decent employers, and do all work well enough, in a provokingly careless way, but still a way that can be en- dured, and that is profitable to those who can manage them. So strong is their desire for wages and the consequent security of life, and so rapid the growth of their liking for the quiet British rule, under which nobody hunts them, or kills them, or administers emetics to take bad thoughts out of them, that it acts as a solvent on their tribal organisations, which, as Mr. Trollope clearly believes, if superseded by Magistrates, will slowly or rapidly break up. They learn gradually to get rid of their faults as labourers, they are submissive to orders — though the savage love of independence will break out occasionally — and they tend, as time goes on, to become industrious. There is no reason for wonder at this change. Experienced zoologists say that the life of most wild beasts must be a very painful one, full of terror, full of severe, though intermittent, exertion in procuring food, full of long spells of the painful hunger which has helped to make them so ferocious; and the life of a nomad savage, oppressed by his chiefs, oppressed by superstitious fears, liable to long periods of hunger and thirst and flight, is nearly akin to that of the wild beast. It is much more com- fortable to have ten shillings a week, and a home, and secure food and fair justice, even if there is work to be done in return. The European master is not gracious or always just, and the European mistress may be exacting and a fidget, but neither of them will club the native, or stick a spear into him, or send him off on a dangerous expedition. And so the savage grows tame, and enters " the competitive wild-beast's den," which turns nomads into citizens, and gets clothed and orderly, and multiplies, and leaves his own place to be filled up by new swarms from an interior we scarcely know, who again experience the same impulses. The process in these cases is as inevitable as a law of Nature. By-and-by, the native, becoming slightly provident, slightly forecasting, and deeply experienced within a limited range of ideas, will cultivate his own plot, as the most certain way of getting his ten shillings, and then we have India as India is seen in counties like Sonthalistan, or the Bheol Territory, or many portions of that little-known Pashalic, the " Central Provinces," a series of districts filled with an industrious, rather careless, quarter-civilised popula- tion, guided and governed by men who, possibly by their good-luck, possibly by their ill-fortune, will, in the instance of South Africa, be Europeans. The natives will probably be Christians of some odd type, there being no connection between Christianity and indolence, as some observers seem to think, and will pay some sort of revenue very easily. Many people will think we have drawn from Mr. Trollope a very unpleasing prediction ; and many Cape Colonists will be very angry, and send us all sorts of evidence that farms with- out Kafirs get on very well indeed ; but we cannot so regard the prospect. There will be enough of our race in Europe, Australia, and America, anyhow ; and we do not see any par- ticular good in filling up the world so full with a people which, except when it is at work making money, is greatly at a loss what to do with itself. It seems to us that to have provided a system under which harassed tribes can come out of the African interior into a fair climate, and there find at once quiet camping - ground till they lose their terrors, and then gradually take to labour and settle and become reason- able citizens, though of a low level, and can get protec- tion and some endurable measure of justice, and some little instruction, be it only in ploughing and the value of castor-oil, and some elementary rules of life, such as monogamy and an objection to murder without reason, and self-restraint enough to leave desirable articles alone, and become capable of development, is a work of grand beneficence, before which most of the work we English do, as we stumble about the world, shrinks into moral insignificance. It is very nice to make endless shirtings cheaper than anybody else, but if we did not make them, man would not be much worse off in his old wools—some physicians say he would be better off—and man is the better, decisively the better, for British dominion in South Africa. There is, because of that dominion, a great decrease in the sum of human suffering in the most suffering continent, and a great increase in - the potential capability and happiness of a low but swarming race, and we are not sure that this is not a result to be. genuinely proud of, that it is not a result better for the world than the acquisition of one more estate for Islington to reproduce itself in. There are enough of Islingtons, and un- popular as the notion now is, we rather like to see Islington manifest on so large a scale its one separate happiness-pro- ducing faculty: that of imposing on dark races a vivifying rule. We have plenty of crimes to answer for down there under the Southern Cross, and we do not know that the government of South Africa is among our virtues ; but It least we have made . that corner of the world better than we found it, and we do not know that a brighter people than that which dwells in Islington, would.
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