"What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty!"
he also, we may be sure, thought of his own kind, but to me, again, the beautiful words, which usage cannot cheapen, express the
wonder I have often felt at the wealth of imagery, the mental grasp, the wisdom and the natural dignity in very many untutored natives I have met with, and it is this experience which makes me believe that the present difference between the Europeans and the Native race is one of degree and not of kind, and that, in the fullness of time, achievement will follow the latent genius with which, as I hold, nature has endowed, in equal degree with ourselves, the great Bantu branch of the human family.
Yet I am no encomiast of the Natives, for I know them to be no better than other people, but search as I may, I cannot find that Native character which is alleged to be inherently different from the white man's character. Did not Mark Twain find, as the most conspicuous result of his travels, that "there is a good deal of human nature everywhere," and is it not true that human nature is everywhere the same?
We are far too apt to exaggerate both in our disparagement and in our praise of backward people. Many people still think, if they think at all, of the South
African Native as a being of the kind imagined by Hobbes when he wrote: "Man in his natural state is towards man as a wolf," and, on the other hand, there are still many who regard him, after the fancy of Rousseau, as a sort of primitive man-child existing in a state of natural innocence from which he is being driven by the corrupting influence of the civilised invaders. But all this is wrong. The Native is not a savage. Even before the whites came to South Africa the Bantu lived in social order under a political system in which the principles of constitutionalism were clearly recognised. To-day the Bantu are simply a race of barbarians in various stages of transition from a crude civilisation to a highly developed civilisation, and we shall do well to remember that the process of transition which we are now witnessing is one in which individual mistakes and failures will be more conspicuous, though no more significant, than the general advance.
MISCEGENATION.
If it is true that the human nature of the Bantu is no whit different from the human
nature of the Europeans then it is a fair question to ask why the two races should not be able to live together in liberty, equality and fraternity as people of one nation or body politic. It is because human nature is governed by laws which, unlike the laws of mathematics, cannot be laid down with certainty that we find ourselves unable to give a positive answer to this question. The human nature of the whites, like the human nature of all races that have been predominant before, is swayed by the feelings of pride and prejudice that arise through differences of complexion, physical appearance and bodily odour, as well as the difference in racial achievement, and these essentially human feelings, if they remain as strong as they now are in South Africa, will render impossible the fraternity that implies the liberty to intermarry, so that there arises for our consideration a second question, namely, whether without full fraternity and social equality the two races may yet live together in the land in political liberty and equality.
We observe from the earliest times a rhythmic play, as it were, of opposite forces