abounds in raw material, which is sent to England, and is there converted into articles of luxury, use, and apparel. Up to the present time there is little or no desire on the part of South African colonists to manufacture for themselves. In Canada, and Australia, and New Zealand the colonists have been able to compete with the mother-country in some branches of industry. In North America there is unrivalled water power coming to the assistance of the colonists, and helping them in their industries; in South Africa this power can hardly be said to exist, the water-wheels being few and far between, and devoted chiefly to the purposes of grinding corn and wool-washing. Coal, also, of a very superior quality is found in such parts of the Colonial world as Nova Scotia, the North-West Territories, British Columbia, and elsewhere; but in South Africa it is only just being developed.

Again, the British South African Colonies are the means of introducing British commerce to an absolutely limitless market for manufactured goods in the interior. In these days of trade competition nations are striving to reach a market where they can command a large native trade. Durban and Capetown are two distinct termini of railway systems which must eventually open up the Zambesi and Congo valleys and Equatorial Africa. The natives themselves, as already proved, are very profitable from a trader's and merchant's standpoint. After having earned money in helping to develope the country as a labourer, generally at the gold or diamond fields, the Kaffir spends it on articles of European manufacture, and this process of working and buying has gradually leavened the whole of South Africa to an indefinite extent. As a rule the native workman is impressed at the fields with the safety and security that prevails under the British flag. He may not be a very assiduous

or painstaking labourer at first, still he has done a great deal in South Africa and for South Africa.

(22) Trade depends for its prosperity upon the amicable union of labour and capital. In the Pacific Colonies there is endless friction and discomfort in the labour market; where the white man is the labourer, asks for a monopoly, and often deters immigration by every means in his power. Conditions are different in South Africa, and the black man is, after all, a cheap labourer. A Kaffir 'herd' or shepherd can often be engaged for £1 a month on a farm, with food and hut, and this is very moderate. When he learns to be skilful he naturally asks for more; but up to the present time, anyhow, he has helped to solve the labour question and to give an impulse to trade. When the Kaffir fails the Bombay coolie steps in on the east coast, and in Natal especially. For the present there is no such opposition to his importation, as there is in Australia to the Chinese; but with so many natives at hand, it seems unreasonable to encourage more from other countries.

(23) The shipping to South Africa is done almost entirely by British vessels, and there is no mercantile marine and no Colonial shipping, as in the Dominion of Canada, to compete with their coasting trade. The Union Steamship Company and the Castle line furnish a striking object-lesson to convince us of the expansion of Cape trade. The U.S.S. Company was formed in 1853, and was at first intended to engage in the coal-carrying trade, but as the Crimean war broke out, five vessels of an aggregate tonnage of 2,327 only ran from Southampton to Constantinople and Smyrna in place of the P. and O. boats, which were occupied in postal and war services. After the war in 1856, these vessels traded between Southampton and Brazilian ports with cargoes. This business, however,

was not very profitable, and some of the steamers were taken off and sent voyaging between Hamburg and Liverpool. But in 1857 the Company took a contract from the Government to run the mails to the Cape, and they have been engaged in this ever since, though this service has been shared with the Castle or Donald Currie line since 1873. In 1876 the mail contract was divided between them'.' These vessels carry the mails beyond Capetown to Natal, Delagoa Bay, Inhambane, Quillimane, and Ibose, and the Castle line runs direct from Flushing to South Africa, carrying mails for the Dutch Government. The English services come into rivalry with the Portuguese along the Mozambique coast; but the Portuguese service is deficient here, as it is in other matters when brought into competition with British energy. At present there is little profit to be made either by the Castle or Union lines north of Delagoa Bay; unless, indeed, Beira on the Pungwe River developes speedily as the nearest point to Mashonaland. The ships of these two British Companies are a fleet in themselves. The Union boats are twenty-one in number, with an aggregate tonnage of 57,781. The two Companies together take out annually about 18,000 passengers and bring home 10,000, whilst the cargoes they carry are an index of the value of South African trade 2. The limits of speed on both lines are not considered to be touched even yet, and the U.S.S. Company have built a steamer, the Scot, which on all occasions outpaces the others on the Cape lines. Such vessels, magnificent monuments of the skill and industry of British workmen, sweep these seas unchallenged. They are really among the marvels of this present century, and are the visible links which keep the Colonial world in touch with the mother-country. 1 'Murray's Magazine,' May, 1891.

2 Appendix XVIII. Trade and The Flag.

Propelled at the rate of nearly twenty miles an hour, they seem to falsify Burke's statement, and annihilate the barriers of time and space.

For many reasons, therefore, the South African trade is very valuable to Great Britain; more so, perhaps, than that of any of her Colonial possessions, if its prospective value be considered. For after all, English traders and English merchants are only on the fringe of the great Continent. The very position also of the Cape is a matter of importance to a maritime power like England. It stands half-way, as it were, between east and west, and shares in the traffic of the whole world.

(24) Such, in its main aspects, is the tale of progress and development in the Cape Colony, the premier Colony of South Africa. Her annals are interesting to us, as they illustrate a page of Colonial progress, government, and administration of which every Briton must be justly proud. Unfortunately the record of good deeds, quiet development, and substantial prosperity has been blurred by visions of rough border wars and unfortunate disputes with the old Dutch and French settlers. Very often England has been represented as a greedy persecuting power in South Africa, with an overweening pride and insatiable lust of conquest over which she throws a mantle of hypocrisy. Such is the opinion often passed upon her position by hostile continental critics. A bare statement of acknowledged facts will be the best answer to those who dispute England's title-deeds to the first place in South Africa. In every department of state and in every detail of administration the British authorities and the British colonists have led the way to an altered and improved state of society in South Africa. In the first place, the brunt of conquest, as evidenced in a long series of costly Kaffir campaigns, has fallen upon her shoulders. During their long history at the Cape the Boer

voertrekkers had to face, in the first instance, miserable hordes of Hottentots and Bushmen whom they found it not very difficult to shoot down by means of their superior weapons. When they met the Zulus they had of course many desperate encounters in which they fought courageously against great odds; but the main task of subjugating the Kaffirs thoroughly and completely has rested with the British forces from the days of the first occupation, at the beginning of this century, to the decisive battle of Ulundi in 1880. The cost of these wars for England has been tremendous. Sir W. Molesworth once stated in a parliamentary debate on South African affairs in July, 1855, that our military expenditure at the Cape amounted to a sum of nearly half a million annually. Mr. Gladstone, speaking more recently on a Bechuanaland debate, estimated the cost of Kaffir wars to England at twelve millions of money. Our South African possessions have been built up at an enormous sacrifice of men and money.

(25) It is more pleasant to turn to the triumphs of peace and administration, following the alarms of war. Historical contrasts are useful and instructive, and it is by contrast between what the Cape was before and what it was after British occupation that we can best understand the great and beneficent work England has done in the Cape Colony. In the first place, as regards the government, she at once began to establish a progressive and enlightened system in the place of the old and effete monopoly that had brooded over the country for 150 years, in the hands of the Dutch East India Company. Full civic enfranchisement was not to come for some years, but the signs of a better régime were quick in appearing in all the details of administrative government. All European colonists in South Africa, whether of Dutch or French extraction, began first to understand