parity of treatment on the two sides of an artificial line can only result in perpetual agitation and unrest from end to end of the country. 'South Africa can never prosper under two conflicting political systems;' it is as true of the native population to-day as it was of the white races before the war, and the adoption of a uniform native policy is a vital and immediate necessity.
Happily, the first great stride in the direction of common action has recently been made through the work of the Native Affairs Commission, itself the offspring of the Bloemfontein Conference. For a year and a half the greatest experts in native questions of all the South African Colonies have been travelling through the country, engaged in a close investigation and discussion of the whole vast problem of native administration; and the report of the Commission, published early in the present year, is admittedly a monument of collective wisdom, and likely to form the basis of coherent policy in the future.
Besides these heroic efforts, the last three years have seen minor conferences innumerable between the statesmen of the different Colonies. Railway matters have furnished the ground for most of them—the apportionment of rates on the old through lines from the coast, and the construction of new lines to the benefit of more than one Colony. At the present moment, for instance, as the result of such conferences, the Government of Natal are extending their railway system into the Orange River Colony, to the mutual advantage of the latter, which needs railways before everything else, and of themselves, who desire to push their trade from the coast. Irrigation again, most pressing requirement of that dry and thirsty land, is a matter in which individual State action is neither possible nor desirable. The two great rivers of South Africa, the Vaal and the Orange, form State boundaries, and the disposal of their waters is even now forming the subject of intercolonial commissions. As other signs of the growth of joint action,
