ful war of competition for the whole. Delagoa Bay, with its practically unlimited harbour and its shorter railway route to Johannesburg, is the bugbear of the British coast Colonies, and places the Transvaal in a position to treat with them on at least an equal footing. Party politics in Natal, and to some extent in Cape Colony also, are divided by competing schemes for the development of their railways and harbours. The two Colonies are divided against one another by the competition of Port Elizabeth and East London with urban. Both agree in a common denunciation of the Transvaal for saving herself to the advantage of a seaport which is Portuguese. South Africa as a whole—and this hard geographical fact is, after all, the dominant factor in the situation—is not so well supplied either with ports or railways that she can afford to lose anything through jealousy; and the only practical way in which she will make the most of her resources is to place the management of the whole under a single Federal Board, of which the existing Railway Committee of the Intercolonial Council may perhaps form the nucleus. In other countries the federation of railways has been the climax of the federation of States. In South Africa it seems inevitable that it should be a preliminary step.
Most serious, perhaps, of all the requirements of a peaceful and United South Africa is the adoption of some uniform policy towards her vast native population. The Native Problem must clearly be of paramount importance to a country which up to the present has been harassed at least once in a decade by a serious native war, and in which the white inhabitants are to-day outnumbered by the black in the proportion of five to one. It was the conflict upon this question, more than any other, between the Downing Street ideal and the Dutch colonial ideal, that led to the Great Trek and the establishment of two antagonistic political systems in South Africa.
Now, it may frankly be admitted that there is no very marked divergence in South Africa to-day between Boer
