extent to which the progress of the country is dependent at present upon mineral wealth. Apart from direct and indirect employment, the mining operations furnish good markets for the farmer, and an outlet for the products of the British manufacturer. Every new mine that starts, and is able to give employment to, say, 2,000 hands, has a beneficial effect upon the county, generally quite disproportionate to the persons directly engaged. It is, therefore, of great importance to South Africa that the cost of winning gold should be as low as possible, in order that ore of low value may be brought within the sphere of profitable manipulation.
In addition to the distribution of money in wages, and for commodities consumed, the general revenue of the country, partly through the tax on profits, and partly through the railway system, which in South Africa is used to some extent as a means of taxation, benefits by an expansion in the mining operations. The cost of living is abnormally high, and the only hope of a very material reduction lies in the development of the internal resources of the country, and the establishment of local industries for which the conditions are favourable. State encouragement, through the provision of transport facilities, and possibly by other expedients, may have an effect infinitely more far-reaching than a calculation based upon the existing conditions would indicate.
South Africa needs, above all things, a larger white population, which is, at present, only about one-fourth of the numerical strength of the coloured people. The gravity of the position is illustrated by comparison with the United States, where, in spite of there being six white to every coloured man, the latter constitutes a serious social problem. But apart from this aspect of the case, the race differences between the Dutch and the English would lose much of their significance if a stream of Europeans continued to flow into the country, because their survival is far more likely to be sustained by the struggle for political ascendancy than by the perpetua-
