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which such problems everywhere impose. South Africans are familiar with a polity built in distinct layers and exhibiting the rights of man in distinct stages of development. People in England, and practically in Australia, are not. Allowance should be made for that. Are not most South Africans outside Natal anti-Indian? Were not all South Africans anti-Chinese till quite recently? If they are converted to the expedient now—and the conversion is admitted by a hostile witness whom both sides respect^[1]—it is not because they like the addition to the racial and civic variegations of their country for its own sake, but because they recognise it as the solution of a crisis which could not wait With Milner, whose business it was to find the solution, and whose habit it is to face facts, the recognition was swifter, but the stages of it were the same which South Africa has travelled after him. The crisis which converted him was a double one, economic and political. The economic crisis could not wait, because the commercial, industrial, even the agricultural, prosperity of the whole of South Africa is nowadays so bound up with that of the mining industry that, with the Rand halting, South Africa could not recover from the war. Some critics reason as if the country might have been kept waiting indefinitely for the ideal solution; as if, after all the suffering of the war. South Africa might fitly have been prescribed a long diet of bread of affliction and water of affliction to cool the warlike passions. The gold, they point out, would not have run away. This may be nigh philosophy, but the truth is South Africa could no more afford to be philosophic about the Rand labour problem than Lancashire about a cotton shortage, or Wales about a coal strike. Equally, the political crisis could not wait. The necessary period of autocratic rule should be got through quickly and easily. To let depression drift unrelieved into bankruptcy was at once to make the period odious and indefinitely to

1. F. H. P. Creswell, 'The Chinese Labour Question from Within,' p. 89.