the country, but both its desire and its capacity for doing that work are dwindling.

The farmers cry aloud for more labour. But they mean black labour. They do not want white workers. If they had them they would scarcely know what to do with them. Lord Selborne used to tell a tale of a Boer farmer who sat on his stoep lamenting because the weeds were suffocating his crops and he had no Kaffirs to pull them up. But it never struck the Boer farmer and his five or six stalwart sons to do the weeding themselves. Even the bywoners and the poor whites who formerly cultivated land on shares, or gave their labour under some similar local system, are being squeezed off the farm into the slums of the towns. There is no smallholder class growing up in South Africa comparable to that which has strengthened the white race in Australasia and Canada. The first demand of the settlers with capital who enter the Union in small numbers is for black labour. Agricultural expansion in South Africa upon present lines can do nothing to check the numerical preponderance of the coloured population; rather does it tend to augment it. One finds, too, that even if the new-comer from abroad begins by personal labour on the soil, the next generation falls easily into the traditional South African dependence upon coloured workers. As a rule South African farming is pictured to the potential immigrant as a gentlemanly business in which the white man's part will lie in riding over his estate supervising the labour of black men.

The mining industry is large and valuable, but one finds in it a marked tendency to lower the ratio of white to coloured employees. The Rand strikes of 1906, 1913, and 1922 proved that the gold can be won without even the customary ratio of 1 white to 9 or 10 blacks. As the grade of ore becomes lower there will be a powerful excuse for reducing working costs by diminishing the proportion of white labour used. In the tin, coal, copper, iron, and other enterprises of the country the white man is merely an overseer.

Statistics relating to the manufacturing activities of the Union have only been prepared in recent years, and their accuracy is not above question. But whether one studies these returns, or the older figures relating to the

Cape and Natal alone, there is revealed a steadily growing dependence upon coloured labour. Strong tradeunionism protects two or three special industries—such as the printing business-but in the majority of enterprises there is a distinct tendency for coloured labour to increase at the expense of white. A good many years ago, when Mr John X. Merriman was Premier of the Cape Colony, he objected publicly to a deputation of white workmen designating themselves the workers' of the colony. You don't represent the real workers of the colony,' he said, 'who are very seldom heard at meetings of this kind. You represent the dominant caste in this country-the white people.' And he added that there was no work which could not in time be done by the black man as well as by the white man. The dominant caste, yes! But a white nation? Even the laws of South Africa tend to divide the country into a white aristocracy and a coloured proletariat. Years ago the Transvaal Mining Industry Commission arrived at the conclusion that existing conditions there

'combine to render the native more attractive to an employer than his personal qualities and powers as a labourer in competition with a white man would by themselves warrant. Of two labourers, one a white man and the other a native, of equal efficiency and prepared to work at the same cost to the employer, the law gives a premium to the employer to employ the native.'

A mass of statistical evidence could be adduced to show that the whole of producing South Africa is steadily offering less work for white people and more work for coloured people. That this is so is admitted by every official in the Union who has investigated the tendencies of recent years. The boom' period concealed, but did not alter, the age-long trend of economic life in the country, which is distinctly pro-colour-employing and not pro-white-employing. At this very moment the outstanding features of South African life are :—

(1) White emigration exceeding white immigration in volume.

(2) The constant growth of the poor white class.

(3) A continuous decline in the proportion of whites in the population.

These facts should cause no surprise. The majority of South African employers prefer coloured labour to white labour. They regard a cheap black labour force as the country's greatest asset. Their only regret is that it is not larger and cheaper. They have tried in the past to make it both by importing Indians and Chinese, and they are still importing Mozambique natives. The labour of the coloured man has been made, and remains, the very basis of all agricultural and industrial activity. South Africa has done, and can do, without white labour; it does not believe it could exist without coloured labour.

And as the country has sown so it has reaped. The results which are sometimes deplored to-day are precisely those which one would expect to flow from such conditions, and precisely what similar conditions have always produced elsewhere in the world. They are not in themselves extraordinary. What is extraordinary is that a white community which has based all its activities upon such a system should imagine that it could evolve from it a white nation, or maintain unimpaired a white civilisation.

And, finally, there is one further result now coming to light which one might also have expected to flow from such conditions. A large section of the white population is deteriorating, and its capacity to resist the rising flood of coloured efficiency is weakening. In the mass the poor whites are incompetent, helpless, and improvident, and their children include an alarming percentage of mental defectives. Dr Dunstan, the Commissioner for Mental Disorders in the Union, recently told the Education Commission that the number of retarded boys and girls in the Transvaal was 'more than three times the proportion found similarly retarded in the American schools.' He added: 'I do not hesitate to say that the problem is so important that unless in some way or other we can solve it, the white population must in the end sink as the native population rises, and there can only be one end—a black and yellow nation.'

Such, then, are the main facts. And in the face of those facts there is no parallel in history which suggests that if present conditions and tendencies continue, the white race in South Africa can maintain either its

domination or its civilisation. Already a slow process of white attrition has set in. Decay must quicken as the years pass. The unskilled work of all Southern Africa is in the hands of the coloured races. Practically the whole of the semi-skilled work has fallen to them. More and more of the skilled work is becoming their heritage as well. The small upper class among the whites may continue to be the landlords, the professional men, and the large merchants. But the lower class is living more and more down to a coloured standard, and one section of it is already definitely mixing with the coloured race. Poverty breaks down the oldest social barriers.

A small white aristocracy cannot indefinitely control, and deny political rights to, a coloured proletariat rapidly attaining an overwhelming numerical superiority. Had South Africa remained a British Colony having behind it the armed strength of a powerful white nation, the position would have been less menacing. But the small white minority claims self-government, nationhood, and virtual independence. Place the white minorities in Jamaica or India upon such a basis, and how long would their domination survive?

If present conditions continue there are only two alternatives before South Africa. One is for the white minority to insist upon retaining its place as the ruling aristocracy regardless of everything, until the overwhelming weight of numbers of the developing and dissatisfied coloured majority produces an upheaval. The other is for the white minority to give the coloured majority some share in the Government, in which case the price of the coloured vote would be further and further concessions until at last the ruling power passed into its hands and South Africa became a coloured country both in name and reality.

With a continuance of present conditions the former fate is the more likely, because White South Africa will never willingly admit the equality of colour. But it is a form of domination which must inevitably be confronted by ever increasing difficulties as both the numerical strength and the social and political restlessness of the coloured majority grows. World development everywhere denies the conclusion that in South Africa alone a white aristocracy of dwindling strength and no

external support can for all time rule a coloured nation.

There is yet a third alternative, but it involves a drastic change in the conditions which offer only the two alternatives outlined. It demands nothing less than the rebuilding of South Africa upon a different foundation. Old traditions and policies must be replaced by the rigid and sustained enforcement of the White Man ideal. Such a task is not impossible if the national faith be sufficiently strong and the national will sufficiently resolute. But success can only be attained by the overcoming of obstacles formidable enough to chill all but the highest enthusiasm and depress all save the stoutest hearts.

For the building of this new South Africa free from an ultimate coloured fate, it is essential that the idea that coloured labour is the country's greatest asset should be abandoned, and that the assumption that it is the duty of the State to ensure for every industry a supply of black workers should be denied. Such a change of attitude forms the only gateway to success. Nothing lasting can be achieved as long as it is believed that the only way to provide employment for whites is to increase the employment of blacks. That school of thought can never rebuild a South Africa not menaced by a coloured fate. What would save White South Africa would be a courageous and sustained national policy covering the following points :

(1) The placing of selected whites on the best land of the country to grow the crops which experts decided would be most profitable for the particular soils. A large proportion of these settlers should be drawn from oversea, as the country needs new blood. If necessary really good land should be expropriated for this purpose. In these settlements coloured labour should be excluded, or very severely limited, under the terms of occupation.

(2) All taxation imposed on industries, whether for protection or revenue purposes, should be adjusted in order to foster the employment of an increasing proportion of white labour.

(3) A segregation policy encouraging the natives to develop in their own territories. There would be no general prohibition on the use of black labour outside native areas, Vol. 244.-No. 483.

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