Page:South Africa (1878 Volume 1).djvu/223

This page needs to be proofread.

then he would have become a being very much altered for the worse and not at all fit to be trusted among loose property. The saints in Kafirland will say that I have heard all this exclusively among the sinners. If so I can only say that the men of business are all sinners.

For myself I found it very hard to form an opinion between the two, I do believe most firmly in education. I should cease to believe in any thing if I did not believe that education if continued will at least civilize. I can conceive no way of ultimately overcoming and dispelling what I must call the savagery of the Kafirs, but by education. And when I see the smiling, oily, good humoured, docile, naturally intelligent but still wholly uneducated black man trying to make himself useful and agreeable to his white employers, I still recognise the Savage. With all his good humour and spasmodic efforts at industry he is no better than a Savage. And the white man in many cases does not want him to be better. He is no more anxious that his Kafir should reason than he is that his horse should talk. It requires an effort of genuine philanthropy even to desire that those beneath us should become more nearly equal to us. The man who makes his money by employing Kafir labour is apt to regard the commercial rather than the philanthropic side of the question. I refuse therefore to adopt his view of the matter. A certain instinct of independence, which in the eyes of the employer of labour always takes the form of rebellion, is one of the first and finest effects of education. The Kafir who can argue a question of wages with his master has already become an objectionable animal.