CHAPTER III

THE PROBLEM OF SLAVERY

There is yet one point to be noticed in the early condition of the Boer

before we pass to his later history.

The forefathers of the Boer were slaveholders.

When the first white men arrived in South Africa it was inhabited by

three distinct native peoples.

From the shores of Table Bay to the Orange River on the north, and from

the Atlantic to the Maluti Mountains, over thousands of miles, were

scattered two of these races, quite unlike and yet more nearly related

to each other than to any other branch of the human family. The most

important in number and the most widely spread of these people were the

Hottentots, a small wiry folk, with yellow faces, black wool in little

hard knobs on the head, protruding jaws, low foreheads, and small

eyes. They were split up into endless tribelets, dispersed over all

the western and central portions of South Africa. More or less loosely

organized under chieftains, the same tribes inhabited permanently the

same tracts of country; though they moved from point to point to find

pasturage for their cattle in the dry and wet seasons, as the Boer

did later. Their condition of civilization was not high compared with

that of many other African peoples; they had large flocks and herds,

on whose flesh and milk they lived, but they had little agriculture.

Their round houses, made of slight wooden frames, with mats fastened

over them, could at any moment be taken up and removed; and the

little clothing they wore was of skins. But they were a versatile,

excitable, lively, little folk, as their few remaining descendants

are to-day; rather gentle than fierce, and very emotional; and loving

dancing and song. They could fight if compelled, but preferred peace.

Later they were found to make good fighters under European leaders,

but they could not lead or organize themselves. Their senses were

preternaturally keen, their perceptions quick, but they were incapable

of bearing a long-continued intellectual or emotional strain. They are

the eternal children of the human race. Their language, peculiar for

the vast number of klicks it contained, formed by striking the tongue

in different ways against the palate and teeth, was yet a fairly well

organized form of speech, capable of expressing tolerably complex

conceptions. It was certain of these Hottentot tribes, under their

native chiefs, whom the first white settlers found inhabiting the

shores of Table Bay and the slopes of the mountains; and it was these

folk with whom they traded, and whom they ultimately fought and drove

away.

Scattered among these Hottentot tribes throughout the whole western

half of South Africa was found another and yet more interesting human

variety, the astonishing little people known as the South African

Bushmen. Akin in race and speech to the dwarf races found in Central

Africa, they are lighter in colour, being a dirty browny-yellow,

perhaps owing to the cooler climate of the south, which they have

probably inhabited for countless ages, and in which they may have

originally developed. So small in size are they that an adult Bushman

is not larger than an ordinary European child of eleven; they have tiny

wizened faces, the wool on their heads growing in little balls, with

naked spaces between. The sex organs of the female differ materially

in structure from those of any other human female; while round the

skull is a curious indented line forming what is called by the Boers

a double head; and their ears, as looked at from the back, seem to

grow out on small pedestals. These people seem to resemble, not so

much a race of children as a race caught in the very act of evolving

into human form. Their language, full of klicks, while nearer to the

Hottentot than to any other, is yet as remote from it as Sanscrit from

French; showing merely that there must have been at some distant period

a common origin; the language, like the person of the Bushman, seeming

to represent a type from which the Hottentot may have developed in the

course of countless ages, possibly by crossing with higher African

races, such as the Bantu.

These small people had no fixed social organization; wandering about

in hordes or as solitary individuals, without any settled habitations,

they slept at night under the rocks or in wild-dog holes, or they made

themselves a curious little wall of loose bushes raised up on the

side from which the wind blew, and strangely like an animal's lair;

and this they left again when the morning broke. They had no flocks

or herds, and lived on the wild game, or, when that failed them, ate

snakes, scorpions, insects, or offal, or visited the flocks of the

Hottentots. They wore no clothing of any kind, and their weapons were

bows and arrows, the strings of the bows being made from the sinews

of wild animals, and the arrows tipped with sharpened bones or flint

stones, poisoned with the juice of a bulb or dipped in the body of

a poisonous caterpillar; and these formed their only property. They

had no marriage ceremony, and no permanent sex relations, any man and

woman cohabiting during pleasure; maternal feeling was at its lowest

ebb, mothers readily forsaking their young or disposing of them for a

trifle; and paternal feeling was naturally non-existent. Their language

is said by those who have closely studied it to be so imperfect that

the clear expression of even the very simplest ideas is difficult. They

have no word for wife, for marriage, for nation; and their minds appear

to be in the same simple condition as their language. The complex

mental operations necessary for the maintenance of life under civilized

conditions they have apparently no power of performing; no member of

the race has in any known instance been taught to read or write, nor

to grasp religious conceptions clearly, though great efforts have been

made to instruct them.

At the same time they possess a curious imitative skill, and under

shelving rocks and in caves all over South Africa their rude etchings

and paintings of men and animals are found, animated by a crude life

and vigour. Their powers of mimicry are enormous. We have known an old

Bushman, living in a place where there were a dozen Europeans; the

old man could by a few contortions of the face and figure represent

each one, bringing out even their subtle peculiarities of appearance

and of character, without uttering a word. When he had finished his

performance he would generally burst into a wild dance of artistic joy,

and ask for tobacco or brandy!

In no instance has a member of this people been truly civilized. When

confined in European houses and compelled to wear European clothing,

they contract consumption and die. By the early settlers and the

Hottentots they were supposed to be absolutely incapable of feeling,

and the Boers, and even the Kaffirs, still regard them as only

half-human, and probably descended from baboons.[24] They will bear

resentment for long years with the persistency of many wild animals,

but have also a curiously strong sense of gratitude, and are not

incapable of powerful affection of a dog-like kind.

[24] This is a view we have heard seriously expressed by

some Kaffirs.

Some years ago we came into contact with a Bushboy, who had been

procured from his mother for a bottle of brandy, and who was carefully

tended in the hope of civilizing and rearing him. He, however,

contracted consumption. On the day of his death, his mistress seeing

what his state was, bade him lie down in the little box which was the

only bed he could be induced to use. Half an hour after we discovered

him in the yard cleaning the knives, with the struggle of death

already in his face and the rattle in his throat. Asked why he had

come, he shook his head and said he could not allow his mistress to

have her dinner with an unpolished knife. We took him back to his

box, and gave him a sugar-stick. He curled himself up; gave a look of

unutterable gratitude and affection to his mistress, gave one suck at

his sugar-stick, and died--like a small wild animal--but one capable of

profound gratitude and affection.

These people have now almost disappeared; a few hordes in the

North-West, and solitary individuals hanging about the pale of

civilization, are all that is now left of them: but at the time of the

arrival of the early settlers they formed a most important element in

the population.

Wholly distinct from both these peoples, and yet more widely divided

from them in appearance and social institutions than from the

Indo-Europeans, is the third order of people whom the early settlers

found in South Africa.

They filled the whole of the eastern side along the shores of the

Indian Ocean, and are still to be found there in undiminished or

even increasing numbers. Divided into two great branches, and these

again being split up into endless tribes, they yet all belong to the

great Bantu family. Unlike the little Hottentot, and the yet smaller

Bushman, the Bantu is tall and dark, sometimes approaching in colour

to the black of the Negro. Physically, he is finely proportioned and

of unusual strength; his appearance suggesting a Negroid people with a

cross of Arab blood; his traditions, customs, and certain words in his

language, seeming to bear out this suggestion. Branches of this people

are found as far north as Zanzibar. They differ from the West-coast

Negro; and, in place of his child-like abandon, have a proud reserve,

and an intensely self-conscious and reflective mental attitude. The

language they speak is of a perfect construction, lending itself

largely to figurative and poetical forms, yet capable of giving great

precision to exact thought.

The two great branches into which they are divided are about as

distinct from one another as are the Celtic and Teutonic branches

of our own Indo-European family; the language of one half being as

intelligible to the other as French is to the German. When analysed,

the derivation of their speech from some common source is clear. Of the

one branch, popularly known in the Colony as the "Kaffir,"[25] the Zulu

and Matabele nations may perhaps be taken as the best examples at the

present day.

[25] Kaffir: A loose term, derived from the Arabic, and

sometimes employed to signify all dark-skinned Africans,

but generally used in the Colony to designate this

particular branch of the Bantu people.

Of the other, or Chuana family, one of the best examples to be found is

the Basuto, or Ma' Katees nation (so called from Ma' Katees, a warlike

chieftainess who ninety years ago gathered a number of broken tribes

under her rule and settled them among the Maluti Mountains in what is

now Basutoland); or another, in the Bamangwato under their noteworthy

chieftain Kama; a man whose persistent endeavour at the present day to

enable his people to grasp the incoming tide of civilization, and to

rise on its waves instead of being submerged by them, is unique in the

history of savage peoples; his endeavour to preserve his tribe from

the evils of civilization, till they are strong enough to grasp its

benefits, constituting one of the most interesting social experiments

which is being carried on anywhere on the earth's surface at the latter

end of the nineteenth century. To this Chuana family belong also the

Mashonas and other kindred tribes.

Closely as these branches of the Bantu family resemble each other

in the eyes of a stranger, one who has lived among them and studied

them will tell a Chuana from a Kaffir with as much ease as a keen

observer will tell an Italian from an Englishman. Their difference in

intellectual tendencies and social customs is as great as in language

and appearance. The Chuana is more devoted to agriculture, more skilled

in handicrafts, having been a skilful smelter of iron and builder of

dams and walls long before the first arrival of the white man. He

builds his house square, has a great love of property, is acquisitive

and economical. He takes to modern civilization with an ease that is

astonishing, and his desire for learning is intense. A white-headed

Basuto man of seventy came to us once with a cow and a calf, the most

prized of his earthly possessions, offering to give both if he could

be taught to read, and went away in tears when told it was impossible.

"Ah! it is because you do not wish me to be wise like the white man,"

he murmured bitterly.

The Kaffir branch, on the other hand, differs from the Chuana in

being more warlike; agriculture is left much more to the women. The

Kaffir is more proud, more sensitive, more inclined to dominate and

rule than the Chuana. He has in full development all the virtues of

the military type, but has perhaps fewer of those of the industrial.

He is absolutely without fear, and faithful to his word when in his

savage condition. The Chuana will fight in defence of his land or his

beloved property; the Kaffir merely to maintain his own freedom and for

the love of conquest. He prefers power to wealth, and independence to

security. But when cultured he shows the same avidity for study as the

Chuana.[26] In both his vices and his virtues he curiously resembles

the Anglo-Saxon of the past.

[26] So considerable is the aptitude for abstract study

displayed by the Bantu, that there are cases in which even

Bantu females, preparing for the matriculation examination

of the Cape University, are found not to be inferior to the

average male Europeans sharing the same course of study.

At the time of the arrival of the white man all these Bantu peoples

were organized (as they still are to-day wherever unbroken by the

white man's power) into tribes, under chieftains to whom the whole

people owed an absolute devotion, but who were largely aided in their

deliberations by the older and leading men. They were in a state of

civilization apparently much higher than that of the Britons at the

time of the Roman Conquest, and more resembling that of the Saxons

before the first introduction of Christianity. They had well-built

round or square houses, kept sheep, goats, and cattle; their skin

clothing and shields were often shaped with high art; and they had

a complex agriculture, rich in grains and vegetables; they made

serviceable and ornamental pottery, smelted iron, and their weapons

and hoes were of marvellous workmanship, when the rude nature of their

tools is considered. Their social feeling was, as it is at the present

day when not destroyed by contact with Europeans, almost abnormally

developed. The devotion of the tribe to its chief, and of the tribesmen

to each other, and the intensity of their family feeling, can hardly

be understood by those who have not lived among them. When a chief

or headsman is arraigned, innocent men will often step in, blaming

themselves to shield him. An interesting case of this kind occurred

some years ago, when the headsman of a village being tried in a

Colonial Court for a crime of which, by no possibility, could more than

one man have been guilty, three of his men stood up, each declaring

that he, and he alone, was the guilty person! The heaviest punishment

that can be inflicted on a Bantu is to sever him from his family and

social surroundings; death has, when compared to this, small torture

for him.

Each Bantu tribe holds its land in common; re-apportioning it as the

increase or diminution of its numbers may require. The doctrine that

land can become the private property of one is a doctrine morally

repugnant to the Bantu. The idea which to-day is beginning to haunt

Europe, that, as the one possible salve for our social wounds and

diseases, it might be well if the land should become again the property

of the nation at large, is no ideal to the Bantu, but a realistic

actuality. He finds it difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile

his sense of justice with any other form of tenure. And it is only

painfully and slowly (and perhaps never quite successfully!) that under

the pressure of autocratic European rule he is brought to allow that

absolute, individual property in land may be consistent with right.

It may be remarked in passing that if it be desired to deal justly

with the South African native, it is as necessary to grasp this mental

attitude of his with regard to the possession of land as in dealing

with the Boer it is necessary never to forget his theocratic conception

of his claim on South Africa, and his passionate affection for it.[27]

[27] "I cannot understand you," said a thoughtful Bantu to

us once; "a man can have his own cow and his own knife, but

land is for all."

The laws and traditions of all Bantu races are very complex, and,

though orally transmitted from age to age, they are scrupulously

observed. "It is our custom," ends all argument with the Bantu. Their

etiquette in ordinary social life, before they have come in contact

with the lower phases of civilization, seems often based on a higher

sense of honour than that which governs the ordinary relations of

Europeans. When one Kaffir approaches two who are talking he frequently

stands still at some distance from them, and then comes nearer. When

asked why he does this he replies: "Lest they should not see me coming,

and I should overhear what they say."

In the division of labour women have the almost entire charge of

agriculture and manufacture. House-building, pottery-making, the

shaping of clothes and implements are left to them--and especially

among the Kaffir branches, all agriculture is entirely in their hands.

The men fight and hunt and make their weapons, and the young lads tend

the cattle, leaving all other labour to the females.

It was by these three orders of native people that South Africa was

inhabited when the first white men settled here. And, as we have seen,

it was especially with the little, lively, child-like yellow-faced

Hottentots, inhabiting the Cape Peninsula, that the newcomers came in

contact. The white men had apparently received orders from the East

India Company to treat the natives well, in order that they might be

induced to trade; and at first it would seem that good feeling existed

between the friendly little Hottentots and the white newcomers. The

Hottentots gladly sold their cattle to the Company for brandy, beads,

or knives; and the Company made vast profits by the trade.

Later, when the white men began to enclose the ground of the Peninsula,

and ordered off the Hottentots with their cattle, the Hottentots (who,

in common with most African races, can easily understand the sharing

of lands, but little, or not at all, their exclusive possession by

individuals) resented this exclusion from the lands on which for

countless ages their forefathers had fed their cattle and built their

huts.

There was much bitter feeling, and finally there was war. The little

Hottentots were exterminated or driven back; and the white men settled

down peacefully on the beautiful Cape Peninsula, and in the fruitful

valleys beyond.

Then it was that the white men began to look about for slaves to till

their ground and build their houses, as was everywhere the manner of

seventeenth-century colonists. But it was not among the native races of

South Africa that they found what they were in search of.

It is a curious little fact, and one which it may be forgiven to the

South African, if he, having so little else in the past history of

his peoples to be proud of, gloats over for a moment, that of all the

races which, within the range of historic record, have inhabited South

Africa, not one of them has lent itself readily and completely to the

uses of slavery! Be it the effect of our climate, with its curious

tendency to excite and exhilarate the nervous system, be it the reflex

action of our scenery with its vast untamed features, breeding in us

an intense consciousness of individuality and a rebellion against all

restrictions, or be it merely a coincidence, this remains certain: that

Boer, Bantu, Bushman, Hottentot, or Englishman--not one of us has been

of the stuff of which serviceable slaves are made! This characteristic

is the one bond that unites our otherwise discordant nationalities. We

do not easily bow our wills at the dictation of another, nor are we

readily shaped into mere beasts of burden.

The little Bushman when we pressed him hard could creep away among his

stones, and die; leaving nothing behind him but his little arrowheads

beside the fountains and his bits of pictures on the rocks and stones,

to show how he too was once on the path to become human. And our little

Tottie could laugh and dodge and play at working, till he also has

vanished, leaving only a few Half-caste descendants, soon to fade away

after him. And our Bantu, still with us and increasing in numbers, sets

his broad back persistently against compulsion to perform unremunerated

labour, his strong social and tribal feeling making him hard to crush.

In truth our early fellow countrymen were and are as little fitted to

play the part of the dumb instruments of labour as the South African

Boer or the South African Englishman of to-day.

That little door, which nature always leaves ajar that the meanest of

her creatures who will may go out by it, and escape--where the voice of

the oppressor is heard no more--that little door we all of us know how

to enter if need be, rather than lay aside the "I will" that makes the

man. If we know nothing else, at least we all of us know how to die.

It would have been as easy for the early Boers to catch and convert

into beasts of draught the kudus and springbucks, who kick up our

African dust into your face, and are off with the wind, as to turn

into profitable beasts of burden our little, artistic Bushmen, or our

dancing Hottentots; and our warlike Zulu Bantus from the East Coast

would hardly have been more acceptable as domestic slaves than a leash

of African lions. Then, as now, when submissive slaves are desired in

South Africa, they have to be imported: we do not breed them.

The folk whom the early settlers procured as slaves, were mainly

negroes from the east and west coast of Central Africa; a people who,

combined with a great deal of muscular power, and a charming gift of

devotion to others, exhibit a weakness of will, and an absence of

individuality, which in all ages has fitted them to inflict the evils

of slavery on the more dominant races. With these were Madagascan and

other Eastern folk, with more individuality, who, we are told, gave

their owners much trouble.

These captive people were brought in ships to South Africa, and on

their arrival portioned out among the early settlers. It was by the

hands of these folks that the walls of the old Dutch houses, whose

thickness we still so much admire, were raised, and it was they who

planted the long lines of oak avenue and vineyard which still stretch

mile after mile across our land.

It is sometimes thrown into the teeth of the Boer, as an accusation

which sets him on a completely lower platform than that on which his

English fellow-citizen stands, that his fathers were slave-owners. That

this should be so is, indeed, remarkable; not only when we reflect that

most of those ships which brought the first slaves to South Africa were

the property of Englishmen and manned and officered by English seamen;

but when we further reflect that, if the houses and avenues of the

Cape Peninsula are often the work of slaves, the yet fairer homes and

the easeful leisure of certain cultured English men and women at the

present day are the result of their fathers' traffic in black flesh.

And it is yet more remarkable that the fact of a slave-owning ancestry

should ever be thrown in the face of the Boer when we reflect that it

is not forty years since the leading branch of the Anglo-Saxon people

found no other means of removing the institution from among themselves

than by rending their national life well-nigh to fragments.

Slavery is, in truth, a condition so common in the very early stages

of social growth, and when it occurs in those stages is generally so

comparatively innoxious that it may almost be regarded as a natural if

not quite healthy concomitant of early social development. When the

primitive master and his slave live in like huts, share like food, and

are engaged in like occupations, slavery is slavery in nothing but

name. It is exactly in proportion as a society has attained to a high

intellectual and material development that the institution exhibits its

most malignant features; causing an arrest of both moral and material

progress in any highly cultured and civilized society in the midst of

which it is found.

Slavery may, perhaps, be best compared to the infantile disease of

measles; a complaint which so commonly attacks the young of humanity

in their infancy, and when gone through at that period leaves behind

it so few fatal marks; but which when it abnormally attacks the fully

developed adult becomes one of the most virulent and toxic of diseases,

often permanently poisoning the constitution where it does not end in

death.

It certainly cannot be said of the African Boer that he continued

to maintain this institution when he had reached a higher stage of

development than that at which other European nations have forsaken

it. Though in point of time he maintained it later than some, yet it

cannot be asserted by any one who has considered the matter that it

was more at variance with his intellectual and emotional standpoint,

and therefore more immoral, that the African Boer should have kept

slaves in South Africa seventy years ago than that the Greek of the

time of Pericles, or the Roman of Cicero's day, should have done so.

And it certainly was far less at discord with his intellectual and

moral condition than with that of the highly-cultured and enlightened

Anglo-Saxons who in America and Jamaica have continued to support and

fight for the institution within the memory of this generation. In

truth, we must allow that the full-fledged institution was less at

discord with the moral and intellectual condition of the Boer than are

to-day at variance with our own those lineal descendants of slavery,

the disabilities attaching to sex or class, which in our most civilized

societies still exist.

It is then not surprising, though much to be regretted, that two

hundred years ago the Boer sought to become, and did become, a

slave-holder.

If it be asked, "Was slavery, as carried out at the Cape, of a more

or less vindictive nature than as carried on among other civilized

nations?" the reply can only be that slavery among civilized folk is a

disease so monotonous in its symptoms that whether we study its story

as inlaid on the mud tablets of ruined Chaldean cities, or as described

in Greek or Roman literature, or view its image in such stone picture

as that which Sennacherib, King of Assyria, caused to be made (and

which to-day hangs on the walls of the British Museum for him who wills

to see); or whether, on the other hand, we examine it as described in

the nineteenth-century novel, or sit in the evening beside the old

Boer grandmother, as, with her feet on her stove, she describes the

remembrance of her far-off youth--the story is one, and its details

monotonously unvarying.

Old white men and women are still living in South Africa who can

remember how, in their early days, they saw men with guns out in the

beautiful woods at Newlands hunting runaway slaves. They can tell you

what a mistress once did when a slave became pregnant by her master;

and there are stories about hot ovens--such stories as the story of

Dirk, whose master seduced his wife, and Dirk bitterly resented it.

"And one day," says the narrator, "we children saw Dirk taken across

the yard to the wine house; we heard he was to be flogged. For some

days after we fancied we heard noises in the cellar. One night, in

the moonlight, we heard something, and got up and looked out; and we

saw something slipped across the yard by three men. We children dared

say nothing, because my grandfather never let anyone remark about

the slaves; but we were sure it was Dirk's body." There is nothing

new in these stories; they are as old as the times of the Romans and

Chaldeans, and older than the ruin of Nineveh which they preceded. They

would be echoed by the walls of half the out-buildings still standing

in Jamaica and Cuba, had they the power of speech. To pretend we have

never heard them before is hypocrisy; to be surprised at them is folly;

to imply that they are peculiar to South Africa and the outcome of the

abnormal structure of the Boer soul is a lie.

Old black men and women are still living in South Africa who remember

how, as little children, they were playing on a beach in a hot land,

where there were tall, straight trees that do not grow in South Africa,

and how white men came and took them away. They remember the names of

some of their playmates; and the "yellow food" that they used to eat,

they say it does not grow here. If you look at their backs, from their

necks to below their thighs they have white stripes which have been

there for sixty or seventy years, and with which they will go to their

graves. Neither in this is there anything peculiarly South African.

No more were these people always submissive. Sometimes the human in

them woke. Especially the Madagascar slaves got tired, and tried to

run away. "They are a most evil-disposed people," says an old German

writer, "and have always only one thought, and that is, _to escape_."

"They fear nothing so that they may be free of their masters."

These people looked up at Table Mountain, and at our blue African

sky, and our veld with its sage-green bushes, all the world that for

the rest of us has meant freedom, and which for them meant despair,

and their one idea was to flee. They did not know the land across the

mountains, but singly or in parties they were always running away. They

were caught and brought back, and flogged or broken on the wheel, says

the old Chronicle; they hardly ever escaped.

There are times to-day, riding across the plains in the direction of

Hottentots Holland, when the vision of these creatures creeping across

the veld in search of freedom comes suddenly to one; and a curious

feeling rises. We are not in that band that rides booted and spurred

across the plain, looking out to right and left and talking loud.

We are in the little group cowering behind the milk bushes; we are

looking out with furtive, bloodshot eyes, to see how the masters ride!

We--we--are there;--we are no more conscious of our identity with the

dominant race. Over a million years of diverse evolution white man

clasps dark again--and we are one, as we cower behind the bushes; the

black and the white.

But slavery in South Africa, as elsewhere, did not always show its

misshapen and deformed side; there were cases in which as men grew

up they learnt to feel gently to the hands that had tended them in

early infancy, and showed kindness; and kindness begat gratitude, and

gratitude begat love--and the circle of human beatitude was complete.

In certain rare instances the words master and slave came to mean not

user and used, but giver and lover, and human nature was justified in

the lowest of her kinships.

If it were, however, made absolutely compulsory on us to pass a

relative judgment on slavery as it existed at the Cape or elsewhere

among civilized nations, we should say that probably it was less

touched by humanizing and elevating conditions than was the case

occasionally where, as among the Greeks and Romans, it existed among

men of the same colour, and often of the same race and intellectual

standing; but that the Boer, being, though not more gentle when roused,

yet naturally of a somewhat more pacific nature than the Spaniard or

Englishman, it is highly probable that slavery at the Cape was of a

much _less_, than more, ferocious nature than elsewhere, where an Aryan

people has enslaved a dark one.

If a more minute and exact history of what slavery really was in South

Africa be required, it will perhaps be found best recorded by each of

us in our hearts. If in those lowest moments which come, if rarely, to

each human soul, when the primitive man wakes, and hatred and passion,

aided by self-interest, fight for the mastery within us; if at these

moments the most developed among us will turn our gaze inwards, and

imagine that the object of our hatred or desire lies in our hand,

unshielded from us by any fear of reprisals, unguarded from us by that

mighty wall, which long ages of contact with our brethren has built up

in the human heart round the rights of our equals--if we imagine that

the wall reared by conscience does not in this case exist, hedging our

fellows from us, that early training has convinced us that he lives

for _us_, and that the primal law of his moral being in submission to

_our_ will--we shall then have a clearer picture of what slavery really

was in South Africa and elsewhere than any pen can paint. We shall

understand, as none can make us, why it is that humanity, as she creeps

on her upward path, is slowly but surely withdrawing herself from all

remnants of those institutions which are based on the conviction that

it may be well for one man to dominate another for his own ends.

The causes and evils of slavery are not to be studied in South Africa

or America, but among the shadows within our own hearts. And this

much-talked-of slavery in South Africa was but what you and I, and the

man over the way would have made it had we lived in South Africa two

hundred years ago.

Slavery in its legal form was extinguished at the Cape about the

year 1834. The English Government, who had at that time taken over

the Colony, purchased and liberated all the slaves at the cost of

£1,247,000. Official slavery passed away; but it left, as always, its

indelible marks on the dominant race who had suffered from it. We

shall deal later with its intellectual and emotional reaction on South

Africa. We have now only time to consider one of its large legacies.

Slavery bequeathed to the Boer, and to South Africa mainly through

him, its large Half-caste population: a population which constitutes

at once the most painful, the most complex, and--if any social problem

were insoluble in the presence of human energy and sympathy, we might

add--the most insoluble portion of our South African national problem.

The bulk of that Half-caste population which to-day fills our Western

towns and throngs upon our Western farms, and which is found scattered

over the whole of South Africa, arose originally and mainly as the

result of sexual intercourse between the Boer and his imported slaves;

and also with such aboriginal Hottentots or Bushmen, as he obtained

possession of.[28]

[28] There are a few Half-castes now in South Africa who

are results of the union of Englishmen with the Boer

Half-castes who are the result of slavery; and even a few

who are the result of the union of Englishmen, principally

soldiers, with the aboriginal natives. But the mass of

Half-castes were in existence seventy years ago when

the English first began to people the country. It need

hardly be said that the preponderance of Half-castes who

owe their origin to the Boer in no way indicates any

superiority in the matter of sexual self-respect on the

part of the English. There exists at the present day in

our seaport towns, under the ægis of the English flag,

and legislated for by the English Government, a traffic

between English soldiers and sailors and the lowest class

of Half-caste women, more anti-social, and, if it be

possible, more degrading than any relation between the

ancient slave-holders and their female slaves. Yet, as the

women concerned in this traffic belong very largely to

that unhappy class, not one in fifty of whom is fruitful,

and whose children, when such are born, generally die in

infancy, there is no very great effect produced on the

population of the country; the thousands of Half-castes

born every year being mainly the result of unions between

Half-castes. It should be well borne in mind, in dealing

with this subject, that so rapid is the rate of human

increase under even tolerably favourable conditions, that

four Half-castes born two hundred years ago, might easily

be the progenitors of at least two hundred Half-castes at

the present day, without any further admixture of European

blood.

In the early records of the Colony we find that out of every four

children born to slave-mothers three were at one time the children

of white men and masters. Only nineteen years ago there died in

the Colony an old white man who left behind him forty Half-caste

descendants--grandchildren and others--and whose standard saying in

his early days is reported to have been: "When I want a smart slave,

then I beget him!"

It may be remarked that no particular turpitude can be attributed to

the action of the Boer in this matter. English, Dutch-Huguenot, or

Spaniard, our Indo-European pride of race and our vaunted self-respect

have always failed to save our breed where Aryan males have become

absolutely possessed of even the most loathsome or degraded females of

non-Aryan peoples. That our pride should have the strength to save our

blood is the dream of the future, not a realization of the past.

As long as slavery continued at the Cape this mixture of Boer and black

men went on.

Into the absorbingly interesting question of Half-castism as looked at

from the scientific standpoint, it is not possible for us now fully to

enter. This one thing is certain, that to the question, "What are the

exact physiological, intellectual, and moral results which arise from

the admixture of Aryan with Negroid or other non-Aryan races?" science

has as yet no really definite answer to give. The whole question--one

of the most vital and wide-reaching of those which lie before the human

intellect for solution in the ages to come--is yet one the very hem of

whose skirt science has not begun to raise.

To obtain any really exact knowledge on the subject it would be

necessary to carry on extensive experiments: to obtain large numbers

of individuals of pure Aryan blood, of non-Aryan blood, and of

mixed blood, and placing them in exactly identical conditions (not

merely materially, but morally and emotionally), to exclude from

them the knowledge of any tradition or history which might modify

their development. If this were done it would then be possible, if

the numbers were large enough to exclude individual variations, to

determine exactly in how far the mixed creature was better, worse,

different from, or like to either parent species. As, however, the

human race is not likely to undertake such experiment during the next

millennium, and as we have at present no such exact knowledge of the

conditions which govern the laws of inheritance as would enable us to

deduce the nature of offspring from the study of the two parent forms

(our knowledge even with regard to animals being purely empirical on

this point), we are obliged to fall back on cruder and less scientific

methods.

We are compelled, in the first place, to study the vulgar verdict,

which rough, ungeneralized human experience has recorded, and to see in

how far any other evidence we can obtain sustains or opposes it. The

universality and unanimity of the popular verdict on the Half-caste

is remarkable. The Half-caste, it is asserted in every country where

he is known, whether it be in America, Asia, or Africa, and whether

his ancestors be English and Negroid, Spanish and Indian, or Boer

and Hottentot--the Half-caste is by nature anti-social. It is always

asserted that he possesses the vices of both parent races and the

virtues of neither; that he is born especially with a tendency to be a

liar, cowardly, licentious, and without self-respect. "You may catch a

jackal among the bushes, but not a Half-caste when he doubles," says

the Indian. "God made the white man, perhaps he made the black; but the

devil made the Half-caste," says the South American. "The devil sits

behind the ears of a Half-and-half," says the Boer proverb. "Who the

white man is we know; and who we are we know," says the black Bantu to

his Half-caste fellow-servant; "but what are you? Half-monkey whom no

one can believe!" "The Half-caste as he creeps out of his mother's womb

is a born liar," says the Colonial Englishman; "he is never a man."

This unanimity of verdict demands our attention. Like the old faith

that the earth was stationary and the sun moved round her, it would not

be universally received were there not some specious appearances in its

favour, though it need contain no necessary truth. Mankind is easily

duped, but not without an adequate show of reason. In South Africa the

truth of the assertion of the inherent depravity of Half-castes seems

on the surface borne out to the full by facts. Three-fourths of the

prostitutes who fill our brothels and lock-hospitals are "coloured,"

or Half-caste; only the remaining fourth are of pure breed.[29] In

the smaller criminal cases tried in our Magistrates' Courts, the

"coloured-man" figures out of all proportion to the pure-blooded

Europeans, Bantus, or Malays. If you pass a gang of convicts clanking

in their chains, you will find the number of tawny faces exceeds those

pure white or black in a manner not warranted by their proportional

numbers in the community.

[29] Except in Johannesburg.

On the whole, there can be no doubt as to the superficial appearance of

strong anti-sociality on his part; the only debate which can arise in

the mind being, as to whether this anti-sociality is inherent and the

direct result of the mixture of bloods, or is an accident, dependent on

external and changeable conditions.

In early childhood we remember to have heard a sapient old lady remark

that she had always noticed that orphan and adopted children, as

born, were differently constituted from all others; you might take

them from their birth and bring them up with your own: they never

turn out the same! It has since often occurred to us that the fallacy

underlying that old lady's induction, and patent even to a childish

intelligence, might, in a more complex form, underlie the dictum with

regard to the Half-caste. As the old lady overlooked the fact that,

while _materially_ the position of the adopted child might resemble

that of her own, _emotionally_, and therefore eventually _morally_,

its training was wholly unlike. That a child brought up in a home

which it feels its own by right, and surrounded from infancy by the

yearning affection born of parental instinct, has a moral training

differing by at least three-fourths from that of a child who grows

up always doubtful of its own standing, and looking out with fierce

and bitter eyes into a world which has no welcome for it: so it has

always appeared to us that a Half-caste, even in a state in which he

is politically on the same footing as his fellow-citizens, must find

a something in his emotional relations with the world about him which

would account for his assuming a lower social attitude, without any

necessity of appealing to a theory of inborn depravity.

The social position of the South African Half-caste has been peculiar.

He has originated in almost all cases, not from the union of average

individuals of the two races uniting under average conditions, but as

the result of a sexual union between the most helpless and enslaved

females of the dark race and the most recklessly dominant males of the

white. He has risen from a union not only devoid of the intellectual

sympathy and kinship between man and woman which translates the

relation of sex from the sphere of the crudely physical to that of the

æsthetic and intellectual; but even that lower utilitarian element

was wanting to this union which exists wherever men and women of the

same race, and moderately respecting each other, unite permanently for

the purpose of producing offspring and sharing the material burdens

of life. The Half-caste came into the world as the result of the most

undifferentiated sex instinct. He saw the first light usually in the

back room of the slaves' compound, or in the hut across the yard,

and entered a world in which there was no place prepared for him. To

his father he was the broken wineglass left from last night's feast

or as the remembrance of last year's sin--a thing one would rather

forget--or, at best, he was a useful tool. To his master's wife, if

there were one, he was an object of loathing (of that curious loathing,

known perhaps only to the Aryan woman, who sees the blood that flows

in her children's veins, flow also beneath the dark skin of an alien

race; unless, indeed, it be shared by the dark man, when he sees on his

wife's arm a child that is not of his colour); his mother had often a

black husband or lover of her own; and the Half-caste crept about the

backyard of its father's house, and in and out of the slave cells, and

as it grew, it learnt that it belonged neither wholly to the black

group who ate their food in the kitchen doorway, nor to the white, in

the great dining-hall. When full consciousness came to him, half he

despised the black flesh about him, with the instinct of a white man's

son; and half, he hated, with the passion of the black woman's child,

the folk in the large house.

He belonged to neither--the very breast he had sucked was not of the

same colour as himself. But it was not even the fact that he was born

into a society in which there was no appointed station for him, and no

class with which he was wholly at one, that constituted the forefront

of his wrong and suffering.

The true key to the Half-caste's position lay in the past, as it still

lies to-day, in the fact, that he is _not at harmony within himself_.

He alone of all living creatures despises his own blood. "I could bite

my own arm," a coloured girl once said in our presence, "when I see

how black it is. My father was a white man!" The Half-caste alone of

all created things is at war within his own individuality. The white

man loves the white man incarnate in him, and the black man loves the

black. We are each of us our own ideal. The black may envy the white

his power or his knowledge, but he admires himself most. "You say

the devil is black! But I picture him a white man with blue eyes and

yellow hair," said to us a Bantu once. "I have a great sorrow," said

an intelligent native preacher. "I know that the Lord Jesus Christ was

a white man, yet I could not pray to Him and love Him as I do if I did

not picture Him as black and with wool like myself."

Of that divine contentment with his own inalienable personality which

lies at the root of all the heroic and half the social virtues, the

Half-caste can know little. If it were possible for him with red-hot

pincers to draw out every ounce of flesh that was black man's, and

leave only the white, in most cases he would do it. That race which

would accept him he despises; and the race he aspires to refuses him.

So the first Half-caste arose: a creature without a family, without a

nationality, without a stable kind, with which it might feel itself

allied, and whose ideals it might accept.

As time has passed in South Africa the slave has been set free, the

Half-caste has multiplied, and now forms a more or less distinct

section of society, and so, to a certain extent, his position has

improved on that of his first progenitor. He may now marry legally with

one of his own more or less uncertain type; he may have his home;

and his children are his own. Nevertheless, socially his position

remains much what it was. Without nationality, traditions, or racial

ideals, his position is even to-day not analogous in South Africa

with that of any folk of pure-bred race. For even the Bantu, till we

have utterly broken him under the wheels of our civilization, grows

up with a solid social matrix about him, which inevitably results in

a social training from which the Half-caste is excluded. Even when

severed from that tribal organization with which all his most heroic

virtues are connected, and subjected under the feet of a dominant race

which does not understand him, and which he does not understand, the

position of the ordinary Colonial Bantu is not identical with that

of the Half-caste. We may not ourselves much more value him, and his

chances of cultivating social affections and virtues may seem small

as regards ourselves. But let the despised Kaffir leave you and go

home; once in his hut, surrounded by his wives, his children, and his

friends, he sits there a man among men. He is in a society which has

its own stern traditional social standards and ideals, by living up to

which he may still become an object of admiration and respect to his

fellows, and, above all, to himself. His ideals and traditions may not

be ours, but they form no less the basis of an invaluable discipline in

social feeling. His tribe may be broken up, but he still feels himself

an integral part of a great people, up to whose standard he is bound to

live, and in whose eyes, as in his own, he is one of the goodliest and

completest creatures on God's earth. Until we have robbed him entirely

of this sense of racial unity and of racial self-respect he is not

morally on the same footing as the Half-caste.

If I go into my kitchen in the early morning on my farm, and find the

Kaffir herd lighting his pipe at the kitchen fire while he waits for

his rations--if anxious to find out his tribe I ask him whether he

belongs to this or that tribe, naming the wrong one, he starts to his

feet, his eyes flashing and his shoulders drawn back, "I am Tambook

oprecht!" he replies proudly. ("I am a pure-blooded Tambookie.") An

ancient Greek or a modern Englishman, when proclaiming his unity with

his nation, could not thrill with greater emotion than this menial of

my kitchen. And I know that that fountain of social virtue, which on

occasions may well out into a Marathon or a Thermopylæ, is strong in

him; that beyond the narrow interests of the personal life for him, as

much as for me, there exists a great human entity to which he is bound

by the bonds of honour and love.

The Englishman will swear to you on the word of an Englishman, and the

Bantu on the word of the Bantu, but no Half-caste ever yet swore on the

honour of a Half-caste. The world would break into cackling laughter

did he do so: "The _honour_ of a _Half-caste_!"

Neither is the condition of the Half-caste woman analogous to that of

the pure-blooded Bantu in our society. (We again ask no forgiveness

for the length of this digression on Half-castism. It will be seen

when we come to sum up, and combine the different portions of our

South African problem, that no time spent in the consideration of

this subject is wasted if it tends to throw any light on it. There

are certain questions in South Africa on which no man is qualified to

pass an opinion till he has studied as far as possible this matter,

and made up his mind as to the direction in which action with regard

to them is desirable.) However much the standard of sexual virtue

among Bantus may differ from our own with regard to polygamy and other

institutions, at least officially disapproved among us, officially

approved among them, there does exist a standard, and it is often more

closely adhered to than our own. We have it on the most irrefragable

evidence that when, after war, a few years back, a regiment of English

soldiers was stationed for many months in the heart of a subdued Bantu

tribe, not only was the result of the contact between the soldiers and

the native women nil as regarding illegitimate births, but it had been

practically impossible for the soldiers to purchase women for purposes

of degradation throughout the whole time.[30] Even when draggled

under the feet of our savage civilization in European seaport towns,

the Bantu woman seldom shows the same inveterate tendency to gravitate

towards sexual self-abandonment which the Half-caste exhibits,

preferring, in a majority of instances, the healthier and more equal

sex-relationships with men of her own race, to prostitution under the

foot of the white man at any price.

[30] (Added in 1896.) We are not referring to that which

takes place when Englishmen, untrammelled by any public

opinion, are absolutely dominant over a crushed native

race, as in the territories north of the Limpopo to-day.

We shall deal with this, to an Englishman most sorrowful

matter, at some future date.

It is impossible that the Half-caste should possess that traditional

standard and racial pride which tend to save the black woman from

absolute degradation.[31] She necessarily feels it small disgrace to

bring her children into the world as her own ancestors were brought;

and better to her often is the most degrading relationship, which

binds her children closer to the ancestral race she covets, than the

most honourable which binds them to the ancestral race she scorns.

No ancestral code of honour rises up in her case, strengthening her

self-respect.

[31] We must, of course, be understood to speak generally.

There are to be found, among the lowest class of our

Half-castes, women of the most spotless sexual integrity

and of irreproachable sexual pride. But one is undoubtedly

justified in stating, that, generally speaking, the

Half-caste is less sexually self-respecting than the

white woman, or even than the black woman is till she has

been totally severed from her own social surroundings and

therefore practically reduced to much the same condition

as the Half-caste. In her native state the Bantu woman is

in many respects in a higher sexual position than large

numbers of civilized females. Of the price paid for her at

her marriage she receives nothing, it passes to her family.

She not only supports herself by her own labour, but is

the mainstay of the society in which she exists, largely

feeding and clothing it by her exertions. Her position is

probably much farther from that of the female who lives

idly and parasitically on society through the sale of her

sex functions than is that of most European women, married

or single.

That almighty "we," the consciousness of which lies at the base of all

organic virtue, and which in the perfect socialized man so extends the

narrow consciousness of the little individual "I," that it inwraps

at last not only all human races, but even broadens itself out till

it covers the creatures not yet human, on the good old earth--this

consciousness of unity with the living world about it, in the

Half-caste often of necessity narrows itself, till nothing is left but

an awfully isolated "I."

We all learn our first lesson in the school of human solidarity, and

therefore in the true school of virtue, as we lie infants against our

mother's breast, white against white, black against black; and, looking

to the face above, know dimly we are not alone, it is I and thou--we.

Our knowledge widens when we stand betwixt our father's knees, and feel

the strong hands guarding us from harm--it is father, mother, and I

who are the great human "we" for us. It increases through our contact

with the brethren of our blood, who eat of the same bread with us; it

spreads wider when in the sports and studies of youth we are linked

with certain of our fellows identical with ourselves, and it takes a

vast stride when, as adults, beyond the limits of kinship and personal

contact, we recognize our union with that vast body of human beings who

share our speech and our historic past; till the final expansion takes

place when, beyond the limits of the nation, and even of the race, in

the heart of the poet, the saint, or the sage, the fully-developed

human creature, that little "we," which for the infant meant only

"mother, breast, and I," and for the child, kindred; and for the youth,

comradeship; and for the adult, nation and race,--so widens itself that

it enfolds, not merely kindred or nation, but all sentient life, and

the final goal of human morality is reached.

In this high school of the affections and therefore of morality, in

which the last steps are attainable only because the first have been

passed through, the Half-caste has but very partially been able to

graduate. Often without a family, always without a nation or a race, a

more or less solitary nomad, his moral training has been often only in

that pseudo-school, where repression and fear but ill supply the place

of the affections.

The flotsam and jetsam thrown up on the shores of life as the result of

contact between the lowest waves of conflicting races, loved by none,

honoured by none, where was he to learn those lessons in social feeling

from which alone are capable of blossoming the highest social virtues?

In those countries in which the wild elephant is found, it is well

known that when, as frequently happens, an individual is expelled

from the herd, and compelled to wander alone, his nature frequently

undergoes a change. Originally of the same character as the rest of

the group, the mild and retiring nature of the social elephant leaves

him. He not only attacks man and beast without provocation, but in his

spleen rends branches from the trees, and ploughs up the earth with his

tusks. He is then known as the rogue elephant, and, hated and feared by

man and beast, if he does not in a few years die, worn out with his own

ill temper, he is killed by the creatures he attacks.

The Half-caste is our rogue elephant. While he remains severed from our

social herds, he does, and must, constitute an element of social danger.

Reviewing, thus, the popular verdict on the Half-caste, it must be

granted that there do exist in his external conditions causes more

than adequate to account for his low development in social feeling;

and this, apart entirely from any necessary or congenital anti-social

taint. The cowardice, inveracity, and absence of self-respect and

self-restraint with which he is accredited, are exactly those qualities

which ostracism, and lack of organic unity with the body social,

must always tend to cultivate. Had he been begotten by Cherubim upon

Seraphim and born before the throne of God, and then transported to

a slave-compound, to grow up raceless, traditionless, and believing

himself contraband, we should in all probability have had a being with

the same anti-social characteristics we often have to-day. That amongst

the most despised class of our labouring Half-castes we have all met

individuals, not only of the highest integrity, but of the most rare

moral beauty and of heroic and fully developed social feeling, does not

impugn the theory of his unfortunate position. If you should sow human

seed inside the door of hell, some of it would yet come up white lilies.

We are not able, it is true, dogmatically to assert that the mixture

of blood in his veins may not have something to do with his mental and

moral attitude. As we have before stated, at the end of the nineteenth

century we are still too much in the dark as to the laws which govern

inheritance to hazard dogmatic assertion. We are at present as little

able to declare what will be the result of the mixture of two human

creatures and how they will re-act upon each other in the offspring,

as we are unable to assert what will result from the mixture of

two unanalysed chemicals which we throw into the crucibles in our

laboratories.

There is, indeed, one, though it appears to us only one, scientific

fact which in any way lends support to the theory of inherited

anti-sociality on the part of the Half-caste.

It has been ascertained by those who have profoundly studied the

matter, that where two varieties of the same domestic animal--such,

for example, as the totally distinct varieties of the pigeon--which

have for generations bred perfectly true, are crossed, that in

certain cases the progeny resulting from this cross resembles not so

much either of its parent forms, but _reverts in colour, shape, and

other characteristics, to that original parent stock from which both

varieties have descended_. Thus, in the case of pigeons: if a white

fantail, which breeds quite true, be crossed with a black barb, a

variety which also breeds very true, the offspring being always black,

yet the mongrels resulting from this cross may be black, brown, or

mottled; but they may also resemble neither father nor mother in any

way; they may have the brilliant blue colour, the black wing bar,

the barred and white-edged tail feathers of the wild rock pigeon,

from which original all the different domestic varieties of pigeon

descended. Why this crossing of different varieties which each breed

perfectly true should produce these unstable creatures with a tending

to revert to the primitive original type of the race, is not known;

that it does so, is certain.

If, now, we apply the same law of inheritance to human creatures, and

suppose that two wholly distinct human varieties cross, and take, for

example, the Zulu and the Englishman--both of which varieties breed

perfectly true, the Englishman always producing a white European

and the Zulu a black Bantu; both races being characterized by the

strongest social feeling, and both being remarkable for their bravery;

if we leave this law of reversion out of consideration, the natural

supposition would then be, that the offspring of such a cross, while

in colour and other matters they represented a compromise between the

two parent forms, would, as far as social feeling and courage are

concerned, which are common to _both_ parent varieties, be at least as

well endowed in these qualities as either parent variety. But it might

not be so. If this law of reversion holds with human creatures (and we

have no reason to assert that it cannot do so); and supposing that the

original type from which in the remote past both Zulu and Englishman

have descended was of a lower order as regards social feeling and

courage, than that to which both Englishman and Zulu have attained

to in the process of ages of development, then their offspring might

revert to that lower type; and the vulgar dictum, that the Half-caste

is more anti-social than either his parent forms would in this case be

naturally and scientifically true.[32]

[32] Of course the same law of reversion might, under

certain conditions, produce development and not

retrogression. If, as is sometimes held (though we

ourselves are very strongly of the opposite opinion),

the Hottentots and Bushmen of South Africa are not human

creatures caught in the very act of developing from lower

forms, but are the result of degeneration from some higher

type; then the creature resulting from a cross between the

two might revert to that higher type, and be of higher

social feeling and loftier intellectual power than either.

We have ourselves in only one instance met an individual

who was a cross between the English and Kaffir races,

though we are aware that several such exist in South

Africa. This man was certainly merely a composite of the

two races, without any tendency to revert to a lower type.

He was the son of an English gentleman, his mother was a

wild Kaffir woman who had not been draggled under the feet

of civilization. The man was proud, determined, resolute.

Self-educated, he raised himself to a post of high trust

under the English Government; he combined the dash and

courage of the Kaffir with the pride and intelligence of

the Englishman. He had the fault which is common to both

his parent races, of being cruel and indomitable when

opposed; but of the vices supposed to be inseparable from

Half-castism, servility, and insincerity, he had not a

trace. He was a man and a gentleman. But, whether if such

crosses were common such men would generally arise, is

quite another question.

If it be objected that the crossing of races among Europeans causes

no retrogression; that the two most mixed races in Europe, the

English and the French, show no more tendency to revert to a lower

social type than the less mixed nations, such as the Scandinavian;

and that further, when at the present day a cross is made between

two European branches, such as the Italians and English, or the

French and the German, the offspring are of unusual virility and

power, intellectually, morally, and physically; that further, those

individuals on whom depends the progress of the race, and who

constitute its efflorescence--its men of genius--have in European

countries, in a large proportion of cases, been of crossed European

descent[33]; and, finally, that we in South Africa have continually

practical evidence of the energizing effect of European crosses in the

remarkable vitality and intelligence of children who result from Dutch

and English intermarriages[34]:--we would reply that this in no way

bears on the question.

[33] This somewhat surprising result has been arrived at by

Havelock Ellis in the course of his scientific studies on

the nature and causes of genius. He has drawn up tables of

interest showing the relations of genius to race.

[34] It is interesting to note that two of America's most

celebrated literary men, Bret Harte and Walt Whitman, are

both of mingled Dutch and English descent.

The inhabitants of Europe, from the scientific standpoint, form

merely one variety, or rather a blend of closely allied varieties, so

intermixed that no invariable characteristic divides one from another.

Only those who look no deeper than the superficial demarcations of the

present, and who are ignorant of the manner in which, in the centuries

preceding and following the Christian era, our Aryan forbears peopled

Europe, when for twelve hundred years wave after wave of Aryan humanity

swept across the land, now from the Danube to Spain, and then from

Scandinavia to Italy or Greece; and again at other times back from

Italy or Greece over North-East Europe, each disposing, now here and

now there, its layer of folk, till the great conglomerate European

family was formed--only those who are ignorant of the peopling of

our old continent can regard as other than comparatively superficial

scorings on a solid surface those national lines which conquest and

political institutions, aided in the course of time by language and

manners, have drawn across an essentially homogeneous mass. It is no

mere coincidence which makes the Italian girl of Lombardy often as

fair-haired and fair-skinned as her Swedish sister; the same old Goth

may have forefathered both. And the English brunette and her Spanish

rival may have an even closer blood link than that which binds them

to the folk in their own street; while the so-called Teutonic peoples

are so manifestly one physiological folk, though politically and

socially severed, that were a German, a Dutchman, and an Englishman

to trace back their parentage, they might easily find that a short

twelve hundred years ago it centred in the same individuals. On the

extreme West of Europe, where the Portuguese may have his trace of

African blood, and on the East where the Russian has his strain of

the Mongolian, real differences of race do occur; but, taking Europe

roughly and as a whole, not only do our existing national divisions not

represent fundamental blood divisions, but they run transversely with

such variations in blood as do exist. The large blue-eyed Yorkshireman,

who mates the small dark-eyed South of England lass, may easily be

making a far more decided cross than had he married a large blue-eyed

Dutch or Danish cousin from over the water; the South German is

notoriously more distinct, in the shape of his skull and other fixed

mental and physical characteristics, from the North German than he is

from the Swiss and French folk across his own border; and language and

political unity as little indicate common racial descent in the past as

blood relationship in the present.

Common country and common political institutions resulting as they

do in common ideas, common interests and common habits, are the true

source of national life; and as such of vast political importance.

But they have small and sometimes no connection with the profound

physiological questions of race and consanguinity; and from the

physiological standpoint are of little count.

It is not only possible that the most pure-blooded descendant of the

Romans still existing may be some inhabitant of Treves or Marseilles;

but it is more than possible that not one man or woman with the blood

of the folk who founded the city on the Seven Hill exists among the

herd who creep round the Capitol to-day.

Languages, and the remnants of languages, in civilized or

semi-civilized conditions, remain often in places where they arose,

when the tribes of men who framed them have passed away; and except

among purely barbarous nations, who exterminate all whom they subdue,

a common language, or the absence of a common language, forms no

criterion of blood relationships. The empty shell of a mollusc may lie

on the spot where it lived long after the creature has died, or been

eaten out of it; and he is an unwary naturalist who, picking it up,

and finding it filled with the creatures who may have taken up their

abode in it, imagines there is any necessary organic relation between

the shell and its inhabitants. Like the unscientific naturalist, the

popular mind is quite satisfied where it finds persons using a common

language to suppose racial unity and descent; and, where there is no

common language, the opposite; while these things often merely signify

conquest or contact.

Thus the nations of Europe are far more homogeneous from the

physiological and racial standpoint than our sharply marked differences

of language and political institutions would suggest.[35]

[35] We are far from implying that there are no pure

sub-varieties of Europeans even at the present day. In

sequestered valleys and villages there undoubtedly are

still folk who have not mingled their blood for at least

two thousand years, and the inhabitants of certain Welsh

valleys, Cornish hamlets, and villages in Brittany and

Spain, though now divided from each other by speech,

and nationality, may be absolutely of one blood and one

descent. That even the artificial national lines which

were drawn in the middle ages, and which form the basis

of our national divisions at the present day, do coincide

in some ways with more or less organic distinctions, we

fully allow. In that great medley of Teutonic peoples who

inhabit the German Empire to-day, there does really appear

one mental characteristic which might almost mark them off

from the rest of Europeans as a distinct variety; this

is the musical talent. All the greatest composers have

been Germans, almost every peasant and burgher you meet

finds music an important element in his existence. Yet

is this peculiarity wholly organic? The English are the

least musical of all European nations, yet it is notorious

that a family of English children reared in Germany

exhibit often the same serious passion for music, the same

knowledge of it, and even the same power of producing it.

No two European nations are more unlike than the French

and English, yet perhaps the most typical Frenchman we

ever met was an Englishman born in Paris. And there can

be little doubt that a French boy reared from birth in

English surroundings would share the true Anglican worship

for rough outdoor games, and if fed plentifully from youth

upward on large quantities of beef, pudding, and ale, and

leading an outdoor life, would at least as much resemble

the typical John Bull of big belly, double chin, and red

face, as do the Englishmen of America and the Colonies!

The fact is that nine-tenths of what are popularly known

as national peculiarities are not even skin-deep. This is

proved when men of different nationalities are thrown into

the crucible of Colonial life; after two generations spent

there, if exposed to the same conditions and using the same

speech, the nationality is almost undiscoverable. We in the

Colonies, who stand at a vantage for perceiving how real up

to a certain point are the European national peculiarities,

and yet how essentially superficial, know that even the

Irishman, whose peculiarities are more marked than those of

any other purely European race, cannot with any certainty

be distinguished from his fellows of other blood after a

couple of generations, if born in a Colony. Even in the

case of the Semitic Jew who _does_ form a distinct variety,

breeding more or less true, national characteristics are

vulgarly attributed to blood which are undoubtedly the

result of circumstance. A Jew severed from his social

atmosphere and brought up in a society in which wealth was

at a discount and scientific and literary attainment at a

premium, would no doubt turn that intellectual fertility

which is the gift of his blood into those directions; and

though his descendants would undoubtedly inherit his nose,

they would probably show no inherent tendency to lend money

at sixty per cent.

When, therefore, a cross takes place between Europeans of different

nationalities, if the resulting offspring should revert to the parent

stock from which both arose, his reversion will carry him no further

back than a few thousand years (which in matters of racial development

is but yesterday afternoon!) to those common Aryan ancestors of the

race who were probably endowed with as much social feeling and perhaps

more courage than their latest descendants. In truth, so homogeneous

are the majority of Europeans in blood that a cross between two

nationalities is of the same nature as that which takes place when

farmers, having flocks of the same breed which they have inbred for

several years, seek to increase their virility by crossing them with

the flocks of their neighbours. There is no real change of breed;

merely that increase of vitality which comes from a change of the same

blood.

The fact, then, that interbreeding between men of European blood causes

no deterioration, or is of marked benefit, has no necessary bearing

whatever on the question as to what will result from the crossing of

widely severed human varieties; varieties so distinct that to find

the progenital link between them we might have to travel up the lines

of human life till we reached those early forms in which articulate

speech was only in process of development, differences which are

to-day, even in the fœtal condition, unmistakably distinct.

We have dwelt at this considerable length on this matter because it is

well we should attempt to look impartially on both sides of a question

of so vital import to the inhabitants of Africa, both in the present

and in the future. And it must be borne in mind that even among animals

not all the crossed descendants of widely separated varieties show this

tendency to revert to the primitive type, but merely that there is a

general tending for them to do so, and that there may be in any given

case other conditions which would entirely defeat the working of the

law.[36]

[36] Thus supposing, for example, a cross between English

and Japanese. Both these have now attained to the same high

point of intellectual and social developments, the Japanese

being probably more artistic and refined, the Englishman

possibly more dominant. If these varieties developed from

ancestors lower in the scale of growth than either are at

present, then their offspring might revert to that type

and be lower than either parent form; but it is also quite

possible that other factors may come into play, and the

extreme refinement and artistic instinct of the Japanese,

combining with the coarser virility of the Englishman,

might produce a creature higher in the scale of life and

more desirable than either parent species. All that we are

qualified to assert in the present infantile stage of our

knowledge is, that there is a danger, and we are inclined

to believe a very great danger, of reversion to the lower

primitive type where two widely severed varieties cross,

that humanity may by that process lose the results of

hundreds of years of slow evolution.

Summing up, then, what we know on this matter, with all the

impartiality of which we are capable of, this one thing only seems

certain--that there _do_ exist in the social conditions of the

Half-caste's existence, in almost every country in which he is found,

causes adequate, and more than adequate, to account for all, and more

than all, the retrograde and anti-social qualities with which he is

credited; and that therefore in spite of the fact that there do exist

certain circumstances which suggest the possibility of the crossing of

widely discovered varieties producing a tendency to revert to the most

primitive ancestral forms of both, yet, until science has been able

to demonstrate that not social conditions, but a congenital defect,

has made the Half-caste what we find him, the balanced and impartial

mind, in answer to the popular accusation against him of congenital

anti-sociality, can bring in only one verdict, that of--_Not Proven_.

If it be inquired what profit we gain from this analysis of the

Half-caste, seeing that, whether it be the result of inheritance or of

external conditions, it is equally allowed that he has a tendency to

certain anti-sociality, we would reply that the benefit is great.

Firstly:--There is a marked, though more or less illogical, tendency

in human nature to regard with greater aversion an individual whose

defects, whether physical or mental, are the result of conditions long

preceding their birth and fixed by inheritance, than an individual in

whom they are not inherent. As a hunchback, so made by some accident

after birth, is more kindly regarded than one who is so born; so, if it

be once grasped that the defects of the Half-caste may not be inherent,

but may be the result of post-natal conditions, there will undoubtedly

be a tendency on the part of many to regard him with greater kindliness.

Secondly:--It is all important, socially, that the fact should be

distinctly brought home to us, both as individuals and collectively

as a society, that the mingling of our breeds, whether through the

action of reversion or of the external conditions, is frequently the

cause of the production of persons with a low degree of sociality, and

therefore--_is almost always distinctly anti-social_.

Thirdly:--An analysis of the condition of the Half-caste brings home to

us, as nothing else can do, our own racial responsibility towards him.

The Bushman, Hottentot, and Bantu were here long years before we

arrived; the powers and forces which created and placed them here asked

no permission from us; we are at liberty to assert that had our advice

been asked not one would ever have been created or placed in South

Africa.

It is not so with the Half-caste; Englishman and Dutchman, we

brought his ancestor here for our own purposes--if we except the few

Half-castes descended from Hottentots and Bantus this is true; Boer and

later Englishman, we inoculated him with our virile blood to make him

permanent. He is here, our own; we have made him; we cannot wash our

hands of him.

When from under the beetling eyebrows in a dark face something of the

white man's eye looks out at us, is not the curious shrinking and

aversion we feel somewhat of a consciousness of a national disgrace and

sin?

The Half-caste is our own open, self-inflicted wound; we shall not heal

it by shutting our eyes and turning away from it.

(By a curious coincidence, while writing this on the Half-caste, there

hobbled up to our window a tall Half-caste woman, to whom we had often

given medicines. She stuck a letter through the window, and asked us

in Taal--the only language she spoke--to read it for her. The letter

had been written at the request of her second son, to inform her that

he had just received a sentence of four months, the crime not being

stated. It also asked her whether she had heard that his brother Jacob

was free again. On inquiring what this meant, she replied that her

eldest son had just served four years for attempted rape. We asked

her whether she had other children. She lighted up; the watery, blue,

Caucasian eyes looked at us out of the shrivelled, brown face. "I have

four daughters," she said, "the eldest is living with a white mason in

the Fraserburg district. I have always brought my children up well,"

she added proudly, "since they were so high"--indicating with her hand

a child of about three years old. "I have told them, 'Have nothing to

do with a black man, hold by the white.' My three youngest daughters

are all prostitutes among the gentlemen of Kimberley!" Her further

remarks cannot be recorded. She then asked us for more salve; and,

raising her skirt, showed the wound, where a gangrenous sore had eaten

away the flesh, till in some places the bone was showing.

To the white woman who looks at such an object as this, deeper than

any loathing--is shame. It is not the black man's sin that is staining

our African sunshine, as we watch that figure amble across the yard;

it is the white man's degradation. What the Boer began the Englishman

finishes.)

But it is not only in the existence of our lower class of Half-castes

that slavery has left to South Africa a heritage of suffering.

There are subjects which touch so closely the finest sensibilities of

human nature that the hand shrinks from dealing with them as it might

from etching a pattern on a palpitating human heart with the most

delicate of instruments. Nevertheless, it is essential this matter

should also be considered.

There were cases in which the ordinary Half-caste did not marry into

the dark race, but again into the white, their descendants becoming

ultimately almost purely white. There were also cases, though they

were rare,[37] in which love and genuine respect found the gulf which

divides race from race not wide enough to prevent their crossing, and

in which white men took as their lawful wives women of dark race. The

offspring of these lawful marriages naturally remarried into the white

race; and so it comes to pass to-day that there are certain white

men and women, both Dutch and English, often of the greatest natural

intelligence, and sometimes of great culture, wealth, and physical

beauty, who have in their veins this remote trace of non-European blood.

[37] Such as the case of Eva the Hottentot, who married

in the early days Van Meerhof, and one of whose daughters

married a well-to-do Cape farmer.

These folks are often essentially and practically entirely Aryan;

the remote strain of dark blood during seven or eight generations of

white inbreeding being practically so eliminated that it is no more

present than a nightmare of ten years ago is present within my brains

to-day; and no more manifest than in the bull-dog who may win first

prize at a show is manifested the fact that, eight generations before,

his ancestral tables show a strain of spaniel blood. Nevertheless,

in South Africa, difficult as it may appear for those who have only

lived in Europe and who have never mingled with persons of mixed race

to conceive it, the position of such individuals is often one of pain

and difficulty, and the cause of as acute suffering as any which human

creatures are called on to go through. Over the heads of such men and

women in South Africa dangles a sword, which a twirl from the hand

of the most brutal and ignorant passer-by may at any moment send to

their hearts. And, as the low-bred cur, safe behind a grating, may bark

with safety at the noblest mastiff passing by, so the meanest and most

ill-descended beings, sheltered behind the consciousness of an unmixed

Aryan pedigree, may taunt with their descent men and women the latchet

of whose shoes they may not be worthy to unloose.

The true anguish of the position lies in the fact that so strong is

the Aryan prejudice against colour, that it affects the individuals

themselves; a taunt with regard to dark ancestry is always felt by the

person against whom it is directed as the most cruel and unanswerable

of blows, the extent of their silent suffering being measured by the

fact that as a rule no reply is ever attempted, and that by their

nearest friends it may not be referred to. It may be doubted whether,

even within the families themselves which are so situated, the fact of

such descent is ever openly discussed, as men in a chamber where one is

dying seldom use the word death--the thing itself is too near.

It is, moreover, on the most sensitive side of human nature that

suffering is often inflicted on such men and women. It is on the side

of the sex affections, and whenever the question of marriage arises,

that men and women who have perhaps never felt their disabilities

before are made to realize them, by reluctance on the part of those

they desire, or of their friends, that there should be a mingling of

the blood; it is then that the ancestral shadow looms large.

It may be questioned whether we, who have no such shadow hanging in

the background, can ever fully realize all it signifies to those in

whose existence it has place, however wide our sympathies. The man

who suffers from some ancestral disease, be it consumption or gout,

regards himself as an object for pity and interest, and may seek and

find consolation in the sympathy of his fellows; but the man or woman

who suffers from this imaginary ancestral stain must maintain a perfect

and unbroken silence. To offer him sympathy would be an insult; to

receive it he would feel a degradation.

This aspect of the matter is all important because it throws a further

light on that all-important question of the sociality or anti-sociality

of crossing races in a country situated as is South Africa at present.

It is clear that even in those instances in which no degradation or

manifest anti-sociality on the part of descendants is the result

of racial inter-breeding, and when, owing to education and happy

surroundings, they become eventually some of the most cultured,

valuable, and virtuous members of society; still, so great an amount

of suffering is inflicted upon them and their descendants in societies

constituted as ours are, that the original act which made possible

their existence must be regarded as distinctly anti-social, though

in this case the result has not been manifest human degradation, but

merely unjustly inflicted and wholly unmerited human suffering.

Fully recognizing that many persons of mingled descent are of

remarkable and even unusual mental power, of high social feeling, and

allowing that there is a possibility that in the ages to come, when

the great people of South Africa shall be fully formed, that if there

be in that great people an infusion of the blood of the African races,

it is possible, that instead, as is usually supposed, of that great

race being hopelessly degraded, and rendered inferior to other races,

because of its infusion of African blood, it may by crossing with the

dark and more undifferentiated African races, with their possibly less

developed nervous systems, and heavier animality, receive an increase

of hardihood and vitality, and a greater staying power, which may

enable such a mingled race actually to go further in the race of life,

than others not so mingled.

As the modern gardener who has a rare and highly developed double rose,

a Maréchal Neil or Cloth of Gold, if he wish it to be of exceptional

beauty and sturdy growth, does not graft it on the stalk of another

rare highly developed rose, but on a root of the old single wild rose,

from which all roses descended, so it may be that the mingling with a

more primitive type, under certain conditions, may fasten the roots of

a race on earth: and that even the despised African may have some other

mission towards humanity, as a whole, than the mere hewing of its wood

and drawing of its water, even the building up of the rough physical

basis of its life--allowing all this as possible, it is yet difficult

to conceive the condition under which the action which originates a

cross between the dark and light races in South Africa to-day shall not

be anti-social, and its results almost unmitigatedly evil, whether the

offspring be rendered anti-social by inheritance or circumstances; or,

whether, rising in the scale of being, they attain to the highest point

of development, and pay merely in unmerited suffering for the action of

others.

Future ages may attain to a knowledge of the exact laws of inheritance,

and may then know certainly what the result of such commingling of

widely distinct human varieties will be; but for us, to-day, it is a

racial leap in the dark which no man except under the most exceptional

conditions has the right to make. What the Black man is we know, what

the White man is we know: what the ultimate result of this commingling

will be no man to-day knows.

Of all the anti-social actions which can take place in a country

situated as South Africa is to-day, for cowardice and recklessness

perhaps none equals the action of the man who in obedience to his own

selfish passions originates such a cross of races[38]: for cowardice,

because the pain and evil resulting from his action can never under

any circumstances recoil on himself, but must be borne by others;

for recklessness, because the results of his action must go on for

generations after he has passed away, acting in ever-widening circles,

in ways which he cannot predict, and producing results which cannot be

modified.

[38] There may be, as we before said, rare cases in which

the crossing of black and white races in the first instance

was not the result of primitive lust, but of profound

self-abnegating affection and sympathy; in which the man

or woman has deliberately selected one of the darker race

for life-long companionship, and has been willing to endure

all that scorn and social contumely could conflict for the

sake of that companionship. Where honour and affection and

life-long marriage bind a man and woman of diverse breeds,

it is difficult to speak. Perhaps so mighty a love has laws

of its own; and the children of such a union might be far

better born and better trained than the children of average

pure-breed marriages. It can only be said that such cases

are so rare that practically they need hardly be considered

in studying the Half-caste problems of our day.

For, let it never be forgotten, the crossing of human breeds differs

entirely in one all-important point from that which is artificially

carried on by the breeders of domestic animals. If such breeder makes a

cross, and it be found to be undesirable, and injurious to his flock,

he may set to work again to eliminate it; and though every experienced

breeder will confess how difficult it is to accomplish this, how again

and again the strain he seeks to eliminate will crop up; nevertheless,

by the free use of destruction, and by rigorously preventing from

perpetuating themselves all animals which show a trace of this cross,

he may, after a certain number of generations, expunge the strain. But

humanity has no such power over itself. We are unable either to destroy

or to prevent from breeding such varieties in our societies as may

appear undesirable; and if such a variety should have physical virility

and fruitfulness, society would not only be incapable of repressing it,

but it might ultimately even people down all more desirable forms.

Each society, as each age, has its own peculiar decalogue, applicable

to its own peculiar conditions. For South Africa there are certain

commandments little heard of in Europe, because the conditions of life

raise no occasion for them, but which loom large in the list of social

duties in this land. The first of these would appear to be--_Keep your

breeds pure_!

In proportion as this commandment is accepted, and its injunction

carried out by our black and white races in South Africa during the

next fifty years, so probably, to a large extent, will be our healthy

growth and development.[39]

[39] We are well aware of the argument that, by bridging

the cavity which yawns between race and race, the

Half-caste serves to make possible a more kindly sense of

union between the two. We see the weight of this argument,

and allow something for it, even much; but, so enormous is

the amount of suffering inflicted by the intermingling of

the dark and light races in South Africa to-day, that no

hypothetical gain seems to justify it.

We have now dealt, with such fullness as for the moment we are

able, at the problem of Half-castism, which slavery has been mainly

instrumental in bequeathing to South Africa.

At the other multitudinous, and in certain ways more important, effects

of slavery on the peoples of South Africa, it will be more convenient

to glance later.

In South Africa, as elsewhere among civilized peoples, what an enslaved

race may have endured physically is amply avenged by emotional and

social loss on the part of the enslaving till the balance of loss

inclines, at last, rather in the direction of the owning than the owned.

The good, aboriginal, old South African thought, doubtless, as did his

English brother in America, that when his slaves were safely landed,

and the slaver had been paid and had sailed away, his black folk had

been settled for, and that he had now nothing to do but enjoy in peace

the fruits of their labour. But his descendants are learning, and will

yet have to learn, with their American cousins, that what was paid on

that day was but the first instalment of a long, national debt. We in

South Africa have been steadily paying it for two hundred years, and

when the last instalment will be due is not yet at all clear.

For the evils of slavery in a civilized community are like those

birds of prey which may indeed leave their nests in the morning, but

at nightfall return to the old nest, and are sure to be found there,

nestling soft and warm.

We have now glanced at those facts in the early condition of the Boer

which it is necessary we should look at if we are at all to understand

his relation to the land of South Africa; and we are prepared to pass

on to glance at his later history, and to an analysis of his condition

to-day.