Page:The Past, Present and Future Trade of the Cape Colonies with Central Africa.pdf/32

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
80
The Past, Present, and Future Trade of the

—would soon be invoked here, too, by our discontented, suffering, over-crowded classes; and is that an issue which those who rant against Colonial growth and Colonial extension desire to see brought about? (Hear, hear.) I believe that nothing tends so much to keep our people so contented with their situation as they are as the free field offered to all its adventurous spirits in our wide Colonial dominions. (Hear, hear.) I will add another reflection here. Not merely does the colonist become the best of all consumers for the productions of the old country, and thereby add to the general wealth and well-being of the population he has left behind him when he has gone abroad, but he becomes to his own particular circle of relatives and friends the helping brother, the helping relative, the helping friend, and his whole connection feels itself rising with his success and his rise. This I have witnessed in South Africa to a most wonderful and pleasing extent, how from one solitary member of a family who has gone abroad to the Cape there has been diffused, from his success, through his whole family connection, improved well-being, new hopes, higher aspirations, and the whole family has risen, not merely in what may be named comfort, but even in habit and character as well. Is not that worth taking into account when the Colonial question is being discussed? (Hear, hear.) But I have gone away from the subject of this evening’s discussion; yet things were uttered by the lecturer suggestive of these reflections in the great work of progress referred to by him as at present going on and to be greatly stimulated among the population of South Africa. (Hear, hear.) We have now passed through there, what Colonel Warren has so well described as the war epidemic, and with the convalescence of peace, it is well to dwell a little on the hopes for the old country which a period of healthy development of the teeming resources of South Africa may bring to its people. The home people with the colonists will share in the advantages. Great things are yet to be done in South Africa. Its native populations, although spoken of here as only a race of Savages, have many estimable qualities in their nature. They are in many respects most trustworthy. Their very devotion. to their chiefs, which in past times has given us so much trouble, is but one of the many forms of faithfulness which it is customary to admire; and business men of South Africa will all join with me in testifying to the trustworthiness with which a very useful class of natives—I mean Kafir and Fingo waggoners—carry goods for merchants any distance. During the many years I have been connected with South Africa, I do not remember but one case of a native carrier who ever made away with a single package of goods entrusted to