much headway unless it be helped from without. It must have extraneous aid, it is quite powerless to work out a great future alone. There is not enough stuff in the place, nor will that stuff be born or evolved out of the materials in men and capital it at present possesses.

The first great necessity is a much larger European population; of this the colonists are conscious. Hence the fitful and feverish attention they pay to this question, but a system of immigration and settlement is wanted. The absence of this is the reason of the failure. The country requires to bring to her aid, the mature counsels of those who can model and plan, and have experience. She possesses grand endowments lying perdu but she has not learnt the magic word, the " open sesame," which will put her on the road to make them her own. South Africa must rest for a while, build her railways, docks, and bridges, clear and open up her waste lands, and then perhaps, and not till then, will she have room for skilled labour of the more advanced type.

In South Africa, "rough and ready" principles are in the ascendant. Nothing is brought to perfection there, as I have already remarked. Everything is sent home in the rudest pristinity to be made up on the European continent or in England. Thus the "unfinished hand," and the indifferent workman may stand a fair chance of bettering himself by making the colonies his home. In short, the Jack-of-all-trades is the man most wanted in a place where, for instance, the building and engineering professions are amalgamated into one. So that the terms, mason and bricklayer, are synonymous. The itinerant bricklayer, thatcher, and tiler is an institution no less than the resident tinker, a man of many qualifications, for he can undertake anything from repairing a smoking tube, or watch, and so on by easy transitions to putting the gloss upon a stove pipe hat.

It is the same in all new settlements. The man wanted and the man to get on, is not the thorough man in one particular trade, but the man of nerve, aptness, elasticity, and adaptability, who can conform to the rough and unformed industries of the place, doing a little of this and a little of that, turning his superficial knowledge to more account than he can at home, where all industries are

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settled in hard and fast grooves, and thoroughness in one particular thing, and in that alone, is required.

Agricultural labourers and tillers of the soil must everywhere precede skilled mechanics, for the bare necessities of life must be guaranteed before its luxuries can be thought of. Country immigrants will be more satisfied with the colonies than the inhabitants of the towns. The man who starts from his home carrying his destiny in the palm of his hand, knowing that he is doing so, and who is determined to get on, come what may, but has found himself too much hemmed in at home to make that end attainable there, may well hope and look with a calm faith for reward in South Africa. Such men as these are the German immigrants. Not only those who belonged to the German legion, and were granted tracts of land at the end of the Crimean War, but many others of the same nationality. They work steadily Mr. Merriman said

towards the goal of their own independence.

of them that they were not troubled with too much ambition, and in consequence of this, Africanders of position consider them to be safe and useful citizens. They pursue the even tenour of their way, neither diverging to the right nor to the left, but simply working for their present living, and to make provision for rainy days, and for old age. It is strange how soon these Germans forget their beloved Vaterland. A German who may have been resident in the colonies some ten years, comes to you one morning, and tells you that he thinks he has earned a holiday, and purposes making a run over to Europe. You ask him if he is going home. He answers, "Yes," and in your innocence you ask him to which of the German States he belongs. He will answer, laughingly: "Oh, I am going to your home, to England". This shows that the imperial idea has made some headway. These Germans are evidently believers in that which Dr. Johnson said was the Scotchman's creed-that the finest road he ever saw was the highroad which led him to England. The German makes the colonies that high-road.

I have more than once insisted that the labour question weighs very heavily upon the future of the colonies, and of this, immigration is only a part. Moreover, the area of British influence in

South Africa is at present too much proscribed. This really, more than any other cause, stunts her development. Africa's future will never be fought out in our present colonies; her future lies far away beyond the Transvaal, in the rich uplands of the Zambesi, and still higher up.

To sum up this question of immigration, let me say that the men who will succeed in Africa are either large capitalists who can bring experience of their own, or are allied to men of experience whom they can trust; or small capitalists with a knowledge of agriculture or with an aptitude for bargaining and bartering, or with a special technical knowledge combined with an adaptable temperament.

Shopkeepers' assistants will also I fancy do well. Clerks who do not mind turning their hands to manual labour and to assist in this manner in stores or shops receive salaries ranging from £10 to £20 a month. But what ought to be avoided for the sake of South Africa's fair fame is the system of persuading skilled mechanics to spend their little all to be assisted to the colonies of Natal at times when Natal cannot employ them. Men who might be fairly comfortable at home, or in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, or the States, naturally resent this conduct. In the Cape Colony immigrants are not allowed to come under the £7 fee, unless consigned to some particular employer of labour in the colony. This tends to mitigate the mischief of indiscriminate and ill-advised immigration, and keeps the evil within bounds, while it absolves the colonial authorities from all blame should disappointments and misunderstandings occur.

In conclusion, I feel called upon to say, how deeply I regret that the Home Government should allow its nervous dread of increasing its responsibilities, or of being accused of earth hunger, or "imperialism"-that much maligned and ill-treated word, seeing that an imperialistic policy should be the first duty of the government of an Empire-to betray it into a most unfair, shortsighted, and callous, nay criminal indifference, in this matter of emigration. The colonies themselves, are also miserably supine in their attitude towards this important subject. They have a grand inheritance, in the reserve force of brain and muscle, stored up in the lumber rooms of this little isle; and we have an equally

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glorious portion in the fields for the further expansion aud development of our race with which our colonies have endowed us. Let us be up and doing. Let every ratepayer, every honest citizen, every subscriber to charity organisations, every guardian of the poor, or justice of the peace, every minister of religion, or disciple of socialism, in brief every true patriot or lover of his fellow-men-bring his full weight to bear upon our government to compel it to introduce as much order and method into all the emigration that proceeds from these shores, as at present obtains in the Post Office, Horse Guards, and Admiralty. We want a new grand imperial department-a National Emigration Office.

And moreover, let all classes of artisans and labourers, instead of emasculating their energies in miserable strikes, ie., in an everlasting effort to destroy capital and so drive all trade and prosperity from the country; no less than in vapid vapourings against land owners, and against the constitution of society; which if it is to be changed at all, can only be changed by revolution and communism, or in other words, general national collapse and annihilation; or else by a slow and healthful process of natural transition bring all that waste force to bear upon the government to constrain it, not only to retain and annex all the circumadjacent lands in the vicinity of our colonies, in order that they may be meted out in a common sense and systematic manner to British subjects; but also to treat with the colonies and dependencies of the Crown, so that openings may be created for our surplus citizens, where they would be capable of doing magnificent service to the general interests of the grandest empire the world has ever seen, and to the human family at large.

Thus I have endeavoured to deal with this all-important subject of immigration in as broad and liberal, and at the same time as exhaustive and comprehensive a manner, as I could command, and I hope that my honest endeavour to throw a little light upon a vexed question has resulted in doing justice to the subject itself and to South Africa and its citizens in particular. The land question is intimately connected with the foregoing topic, and although I have already alluded to it from time to time, I think it is of sufficient importance and interest to deserve a chapter to itself.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE LAND AND ITS MASTERS.

THE EARTH!-WHERE IS MY EARTH?"

"I do not admit that the government has any right to interfere with those who hold land here, no matter how large the monopoly may be; and I do not think it just to place any special tax on absentee proprietor's land or any body else's. The same tax should be on everybody's land, and every man's right to what he honestly holds should be respected without distinction, even if he hold half the country. It is nobody's business but his own what he does with his land as long as he does not break any of the country's laws. If the government has been foolish enough to allow large tracks of land to slip through its fingers, it has done a wrong, and it should suffer the consequences, not make the present owner of the land feel the weight of its shortcomings. If it wish to open up any of the land so held, it should make overtures in an honourable way for its purchase, and if the owner would rather have it locked up, let him alone fill up all the land about him, until he is smothered to death in his own exclusiveness, by the potent march of civilization. Because certain individuals choose to govern their own business as it suits them, it is no reason that the government should shut itself up in a like hard steel of fossil non-progressiveness."—Address by Mr. J. E. Fernside at the Council Chamber,

Durban.

"Mr. Fernside had said, we must break no laws to counteract detrimental legislation on the land question. But by means of taxation, or by some other proceedings, we must regain possession of alienated lands. Until the government had land to give, and had adopted some comprehensive scheme for the permanent location of small farmers and agricultural labourers upon it, he could see no hope for the advancement of Natal."-Excerpt from Speech by J. S. L. on foregoing Address.

"This is a danger inherent in the constitution of imperfect human nature-that. rights based on custom should insensibly lead to the assertion of exclusive rights. As population crowds closer against the boundaries of the acred magnate, so will his lot appear more enviable to the thickening mass; so will the value of his possessorship become more actual and more visible to himself, and so will he claim for himself a closer-bound network of legal protection. No forms and no amount of legislation can prevent this tendency, and its development must be awaited with patient apprehension. But in the ordinary course of events, in a popularly go. verned country, the evil will not be an all-absorbing one until a matured and prosperous commonalty has advanced far on the stage of progress, and has arrived at a height of political intelligence, based on the lessons of experience, which may enable it skilfully to unloose, instead of violently to dissever, the environing cords of an oppressive land system."-C. J. Rowe in "Bonds of Disunion, or, English Misrule in the Colonies".