Thoughts on South Africa — Part Two: III. The Problem of Slavery

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.

CHAPTER IV