Page:The Past, Present and Future Trade of the Cape Colonies with Central Africa.pdf/30

much as all the twelve steamers in a year that met all the wants of South Africa twenty years ago. And the progress indicated in that single illustration is something too vast to be explained by the mere doings of the limited European population there; the native populations who are being awakened to the new and better life of industrial occupations, are undoubtedly largely contributory to it, and through their contributions, and through that alone, it is that Cape Colony has thus during the period named outrun in progress any other British Colony perhaps to be named. Colonel Warren has referred to the importation of ploughs into the part of the country where he has been, and he is well acquainted with what is going on in what I may term his own country—namely, Griqualand West; but from what I have witnessed, as one long stationed at what Imay term the great door of entrance to South Africa—I mean Port Elizabeth—I know that other native territories, even yet more than Griqualand, have been going in for the plough, and that to-day the importations of ploughs are in thousands where formerly they were not in hundreds when I first (some thirty years ago) opened up that trade. You cannot travel along a single road into the interior from Port Elizabeth without seeing waggon-load after waggon-load of ploughs destined for native use. (Hear, hear.) What does all that mean? Why, that our colonisation in South Africa is stimulating the whole native populations there into the better life, as I have described it, of industrious, peaceful, prosperous communities. Go not only to the Griquas, but also to the Basutos, and see there in Basutoland ranges of country waving with corn, and to such continuous extent as would astonish even people accustomed to the wide cornfields of the mother-country, and they are increasing the cultured areas day by day. (Hear, hear.) Another illustration of South African progress I will give you. At the present time the customs dues of the Cape Colony alone are at the rate of a million sterling a year. These dues are on an average ten per cent. on the value of the imported goods; and a million a year, therefore, of customs dues you may consider represents roughly importations approaching ten million pounds sterling per annum into Cape Colony alone. Now nine tenths of the whole of those goods come from Great Britain; and the lesson I wish to impress upon the meeting from this fact is, the untold value to the mother-country of our Colonial possessions in the demand which they make for the goods the manufacture of which gives such profitable employment to the teeming myriads of the old country. You have sent to South Africa not a third of a million of Europeans, all told, and these have awakened an industry