The story of Southern Rhodesia and of German South-West Africa is the story of conflict between white invaders and African peoples for the possession of the soil in the colonisable area of the Southern Continent. That conflict of a kind should ensue from such racial contact is as inevitable as contact itself. It is, nevertheless, pure sophistry to contend that the crimes and treacheries which have stained the history of contact in South Africa might not have been avoided. They were unnecessary and, in the main, they were provoked by the white man's conduct. The validity of the white man's excuse for this kind of wrong-doing decreases progressively with his cultural advance. That which was pardonable in a ruder age becomes unpardonable in our own. Yet between the exploits of the 16th Century Spaniard in the West Indies and South America, and those of the 19th Century Dutchman, Anglo-Saxon, and Teuton in South Africa, there is little material difference.
