the facts. There is no room simply because the proletariat is there already, and is black. Africa is neither Europe nor quite Asia, but between the two. The population of South Africa, to the extent of some seven-eighths, consists of natives, mainly of negroid race, enjoying full physical vigour. Can able editors project a future for those black masses aloof and apart? Where are you to find place for them in the white industrial scheme, if not as unskilled labour? That is where the line has been roughly drawn hitherto; and philanthropy, while aiming to fit the exceptional black to rise above it, has by no means aimed at intermixing the white below that line. To try that is to butt up against an unwritten social law which everybody who has studied it, either in the breach or the observance, is agreed wisely to let alone; while to escape by substituting whites wholesale implies a revolution in the whole economic system of the country, from Cape Town Docks, where you first encounter the muscular, cheery, sweating Kaffir, away to the Zambesi. A white man's living wage is just four to five times a Kaffir's. That is the gulf between the two standards of wants. Does anybody expect the working man to make it even a shilling less in the name of white immigration? Is the capitalist, then, expected in the same name to recast his business on the basis of paying a white man a minimum of nine or ten shillings a day for work the Kaffir does at two shillings?
Such are the heroic revolutions, social and economic, which it is suggested that Milner should have forced upon a staple industry in a time of struggling recovery after war. He decided otherwise. Of all men, he was the least likely—much less likely than some of his Australian critics have shown themselves in Australia—to forget the Imperial aspects of British immigration. But the British workers whom he sought were not drifting casuals, but men who would settle and bring up families in the country. And that these could only be skilled men at skilled wages I will cite a hostile but
