but the separation of the population into distinct white areas and distinct black areas would be aimed at. In the white areas an effort should be made to get even the unskilled work done by whites. The greatest obstacle to this is the present colour mixture, and the false pride it engenders in the whites.

(4) The gradual elimination of all legislation which has the effect of placing an incentive upon employers to use coloured labour rather than white labour.

(5) The ultimate prohibition of the importation of black labour from outside the Union. What supplementary labour the country needs must after a given date be drawn from white sources, and not from black sources. Any shortage of labour resulting from this policy would naturally first give opportunities of employment to the now workless whites.

(6) The fostering of a powerful public opinion in favour of the White Man ideal.

Admittedly it would not be easy to persuade the White South Africa of to-day to embark upon such a national policy. The powerful industrial interests which demand the exploitation of the resources of the country by cheap coloured labour would oppose it. The farmers might object to it on the ground that it would produce a shortage of native labour and so raise native wages. All the ingrained prejudices of generations would be against it.

Nor could the new policy be carried out without sacrifices on the part of the white population. South Africa is not a high-grade country in which the yield either of farms or mines is so substantial that more expensive labour can be easily used. It may be true that the inefficiency of the present native labour tends to restrict output everywhere; but making due allowance for that it is probable that white labour would often have to be content with a smaller return than falls to it in America, Australia, or Canada. There is undoubtedly some truth in the assertion that South Africa is a low-grade country which is difficult to work save by cheap labour. One must not base a new policy on illusions regarding the results obtainable by using white labour more freely. White labour would have to be both hardworking and efficient in order to win even a moderately good standard of living. Still, in the country

as a whole there would continue to be employed a considerable proportion of cheap native labour which would so average down total production costs as to leave a fair margin for white wages.

The scheme outlined is not impossible. It would call for a preliminary scientific survey of all the resources of South Africa, and then the new policy would have to be gradually enforced, being applied first to the most promising activities revealed by expert examination. There must be no rash experiments, because there is very little margin in South Africa for wasteful effort. On the lines suggested it should be possible to get more of the work of South Africa done by white men, which when all is said and done is the only method by which the white race can maintain its domination and its civilisation. The result could be no more than a compromise, because it is scarcely possible now to eliminate the coloured element in the country. One could hope with some confidence, however, to check the present drift to an overwhelming majority of colour, and build up a white race sufficiently strong and entrenched to be able to hold its place.

Whether White South Africa has in it the faith and the courage necessary for the carrying through of such a task remains to be seen. The national attitude to-day is not encouraging; one can but hope that a clearer realisation of the fate toward which White South Africa is so plainly drifting may breed a new ideal. But of one thing there is no room for doubt. If there is no new aim and no change of policy-if present conditions and tendencies continue unchecked for a few more years— then South Africa will ultimately stand revealed as unmistakably a coloured man's land, with a coloured civilisation, ruled by a coloured race.

L. E. NEAME.

Art. 2.-SIR WALTER SCOTT.

1. The Intimate Life of Sir Walter Scott. By Archibald Stalker. Black, 1921.

2. The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, 1825-32. New Edition. Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1891.

3. Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott. By J. G. Lockhart. One Vol. Edition. Edinburgh: Black, 1871. 4. Letters and Recollections of Sir Walter Scott by Mrs Hughes (of Uffington). Edited by Horace Hutchinson. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1904.

TWEED was roaring down in October flood when the writer and a friend on their southward road, intending the pilgrimage to Dryburgh, persuaded each the other, against his better judgment, that it would be a pity to leave out Abbotsford, and were sorry for it afterwards. Even Dryburgh itself, than which no more perfect resting-place for a King of Faery can be imagined,† could hardly atone for their mistake. The guide books will tell you-do tell you that 'Abbotsford as viewed from the Ferry Station gives a fair representation of the individual taste of Sir Walter Scott.' Whether Mr Baddeley means to be ironical or no, we cannot say.

But Scott's lovers should not go there. The taste of George IV's days is not ours, and our hero's lack of artistic taste was consummate. We should rather go six miles up the water to Ashestiel even before we attempt to reconstruct in our minds the lost farmhouse of 1812 at Clarty Hole. Over the later Abbotsford will always hang a trouble engendered of something more than clouds and weeping rain.' Yet it is not to any faults of taste there may have been in Scott's life, or in his buildings, that we can attribute the comparative neglect of his writings by younger readers to-day. And, in truth, we are sorely put to it to account for this

6

The weather most bitchiferous, the Tweed swelled from bank to brae and roaring like thunder.' Scott to W. Clerk, Aug. 6, 1790. Lockhart, chap. vi, p. 45.

And thus we have nothing left of Dryburgh' (it was an old family property on his Haliburton grandmother's side) 'although my father's maternal inheritance, but the right of stretching our bones where mine may perhaps be laid ere any eye but my own glances over these pages,* Autobiography, in Lockhart, chap. i, p. 2.

Scotland,' vol. 1, p. 43, Edition 1908.

·

neglect. Are we to say, as he himself said of Byron, that Stevenson 'bet' him on his own ground? We might more truthfully say that electric light beats sunlight. Or that Romance is dead? That would be even more untrue; Romance still brings up the 9.15,' and Scott would have been the first to acknowledge this, for did he not say he could see as many genii in the curling smoke of a steam engine, as perfect a Persepolis in the emblems of a sea-coal fire as any man'?

One of his misfortunes, suffered in common with Shakespeare and perhaps with no other great magician, is that of having been so frequently made the vehicle for instruction, either in Holiday Tasks or in that dismal subject which in Elementary and other Schools is called 'English.' We think Sir Walter would rather have resented this, though he might possibly have approved of the delightful stratagem by which that tenderest of cynics, Mr Bradby, persuaded his immortal Dick to listen to Old Mortality. Perhaps he would have said, as he may have said to daughter Anne, 'Oh, novels are bad for young people.' We may take up, however, any famous publisher's catalogue and we shall be surprised at the list of editions or abbreviations of the Waverley Novels.† Most of them are obviously Elementary School text-books. Sir Walter might be surprised to learn that they are exceedingly profitable productions, as they are 'paid for out of the rates.' How many times over might not the debt, which he so gallantly laboured to discharge, have been acquitted from that source! We do not exactly complain of all this, and yet are inclined to think it just a little horrible, and a rather sordid use to which to put such lofty romance. Is not the betting' rather against the chance of children so brought up reading Scott afterwards for sheer delight? However, on such a subject, pauca verba.

* Journal,' Jan. 1, 1827.

We have one such catalogue before us now, and we find, besides a complete edition in twenty-four volumes with illustrations, nine separate editions of single novels; we find six editions of 'Ivanhoe,' five 'Talismans,' four Quentin Durwards,' two 'Rob Roys' (two of these, 'Ivanhoe' and 'Talisman,' are dramatised at 4d. each for School use'); we find 'Selections from the Waverley Novels with explanatory lists of Scottish words for use in schools'; and, under the heading of 'Story Readers for Home and School use, 4th series, for children aged twelve to fourteen,' we find 'Bonnie Prince Charlie from the Waverley Novels, 128 pp., 18. 2d.'

A very different reason for the decline of Scott's popularity is given by Mr Archibald Stalker in the strangest of the books that now lie before us. It is indeed a strange book, and we would not seek to drag it from its three years of oblivion were it not marked in many places by shrewd good sense, and by a very real appreciation of some of Scott's great gifts. It is, however, a farrago rather than a book. One would like to put into parallel columns, first Mr Stalker's own selfcontradictions on his subject, and secondly the worst of his indictments side by side with the criticisms of Lockhart (whom he acknowledges as all but the greatest of biographers, and who, after all, knew his father-in-law better than Mr Stalker knows him). And what are we to think of the judgment of a critic who says that Boswell's Johnson has always seemed to him rather verbiage for the bookworm than the substance of life'; that the Elizabethan dramatists' (he does not mean to include Shakespeare, though he does not verbally exclude him) 'were as dull a set of ranters as ever existed, the Restoration writers, with all the resources of obscenity and viciousness, could not be humorous, the Miltons,* Popes, Swifts, Fieldings, Grays, and the rest, were dull and heavy.'t We merely ask whether this is a good initial equipment for a gentleman who writes, often with insight and sympathy, about Scott?

The truth seems to be that Mr Stalker is torn in two opposite directions, in the one by his admiration of Scott's iron will, sociable qualities, and sweetness of temper, in the other by hatred of his political and social opinions. Into this last, we think, it is that he contrives to read an estimate of Scott's literary gifts so low as to amount to contempt. Yet every now and then he wrenches himself violently back from this contemptuous attitude. Nil fuit unquam sic impar sibi as Mr Stalker. Take the following passages and compare them:

'Readers of books are yet alive who remember the time when it was still considered ridiculous to take Sir Walter's

'Milton's works are heavy, not a joke all through,' wrote a guileless schoolboy whom the present writer once examined.

+ P. 163; from an earlier passage on p. 2 we gather that he has some tenderness for Goldsmith.