hear of the existence of some solitary last Maori. It may be that this was necessary. All the evidence we have seems to show that it was so. But it is hardly the less sad because it was necessary. In Australia we have been successful. We are clothed with its wools. Our coffers are filled with its gold. Our brothers and our children are living there in bounteous plenty. But during the century that we have been there we have caused the entire population of a whole continent to perish. It is impossible to think of such prosperity without a dash of suffering, without a pang of remorse.
In South Africa it is not so. The tribes which before our coming were wont to destroy themselves in civil wars have doubled their population since we have turned their assagais to ploughshares. Thousands, ten thousands of them, are working for wages. Even beyond the realms which we call our own we have stopped the cruelties of the Chiefs and the no less fatal superstitions of the priests. The Kafir and the Zulu are free men, and understand altogether the privileges of their freedom. In one town of 18,000 inhabitants, 10,000 of them are now receiving 10s. a week each man, in addition to their diet. Here at any rate we have not come as a blighting poison to the races whom we have found in the country of our adoption. This I think ought to endear South Africa to us.
But it must at the same time tell us that South Africa is a black country and not a white one;—that the important person in South Africa is the Kafir and the Zulu, the Bechuana and the Hottentot;—not the Dutchman or the Englishman. On the subject of population I have already shewn that the information at my command is a little confused. Such con-
