These three writers, and indeed all the writers of merit, belong to the English or Anglified section of the population. The Dutch section is practically disqualified by its language (which, be it remembered, is not the language of Holland, but a debased dialect) from literary composition, even were it otherwise disposed to authorship. Literature will always, I think, remain English in character, bearing few or no traces of the Dutch element in the people. But otherwise things are likely to change in a few years. The conditions which have been described as unfavourable to intellectual production are not necessarily permanent, and the time will probably come when the Europeans of South Africa will emulate their kinsfolk at home or in North America in literary and artistic fertility. The materials for imaginative work, whether in poetry or in prose, lie ready to their hand. The scenery deserves some great native landscape-painter, and such a genius will, no doubt, one day arise.
Journalism has now everywhere become, in point of quantity, the most important part of literature. The South African newspapers impress a visitor favourably. Several of them are written with great ability, and they were in 1895 comparatively free from that violence of invective, that tawdriness of rhetoric, and that proneness to fill their columns with criminal intelligence which are apt to be charged against the press in some other new countries. No journal seems to exert so great a political power as is wielded by several of the Australian dailies. As might be expected, the Press is chiefly English, that language having sixty-one papers, against seventeen printed in Dutch and twenty-three in both languages.
Although the dispersion of the small European population over an exceedingly wide area makes it difficult to provide elementary schools everywhere,[72] education is, among the whites, well cared for, and in some regions, such as the Orange Free State, the Boer element is just as eager for it as is the English. Neither are efficient secondary schools wanting. That which is wanting, that which is urgently needed to crown the educational edifice, is a properly equipped teaching university. There are several colleges which provide lectures,[73] and the Cape University holds examinations and confers degrees; but to erect over these colleges a true university with an adequate teaching staff seems to be as difficult an enterprise at the Cape as it has proved to be in London, where thirteen years had to be spent in efforts, not successful till 1898, to establish a teaching university. It is strange to find that in a new country, where the different religious bodies live on good terms with one another, one of the chief obstacles in the way is the reluctance of two of the existing colleges, which have a denominational character, to have an institution superior to them set up by the State. The other obstacles are the rivalry of the eastern province with the western, in which, at Cape Town, the natural seat of a university would be found, and the apathy or aversion of the Dutch section of the people. Some of them do not care to spend public money for a purpose whose value they cannot be made to understand. Others, knowing that a university would necessarily be mainly in English hands and give instruction of an English type, fear to establish what would become another Anglifying influence. Thus several small colleges go on, each with inadequate resources, and the Cape youth who desires to obtain a first-rate education is obliged to go to Europe for it. He cannot even get a full course of legal instruction, for there is no complete law school. It is no doubt well that a certain number of young men should go to Europe and there acquire a first-hand knowledge of the ideas and habits of the Old World; but many who cannot afford the luxury of a European journey and residence remain without the kind of instruction to which their natural gifts entitle them, and the intellectual progress of the country suffers. Were Cape Colony somewhere in the United States, a millionaire would forthwith step in, build a new university, and endow it with a few millions of dollars. But South Africa is only just beginning to produce great fortunes; so the best hope is that some enlightened and tactful statesman may, by disarming the suspicions and allaying the jealousies I have described, succeed in uniting the existing colleges, and add to their scanty revenues an adequate Government grant. This may possibly be effected. But the jealousies and ambitions which those who control an institution feel for it are often quite as tenacious as is the selfishness of men where their own pockets are concerned; and since these jealousies disguise themselves under a cloak of disinterestedness, it is all the more hard to overcome them by the pressure of public opinion.
One other intellectual force remains to be mentioned—that of the churches. In the two British Colonies no religious body receives special State recognition or any grants from the State.[74] All are on an equal footing, just as in Australia and in North America. In the two Boer Republics the Dutch Reformed Church is in a certain sense the State church. In the Transvaal it is recognized as such by the Grondwet ("Fundamental Law"), and receives a Government subvention. In that Republic members of other churches were at one time excluded from the suffrage and from all public offices, and even now Roman Catholics are under some disability. In the Orange Free State the Dutch Reformed Church receives public aid, but I think this is given, to a smaller extent, to some other denominations also, and no legal inequalities based on religion exist. In these two Republics nearly the whole of the Boer population, and in the Free State a part even of the English population, belong to the Dutch Reformed communion, which is Presbyterian in government and Calvinistic in theology. In the British Colonies the Protestant Episcopal Church (Church of England) comes next after the Dutch Reformed, which is much the strongest denomination; but the Wesleyans are also an important body; and there are, of course, also Congregational and Baptist churches. The Presbyterians seem to be less numerous (in proportion to the population) than in Canada or Australia, not merely because the Scottish element is less numerous, but also because many of the Scottish settlers joined the Dutch Reformed Church as being akin to their own in polity and doctrine. The comparative paucity of Roman Catholics is due to the paucity of Irish immigrants.[75] These bodies live in perfect harmony and good feeling one with another, all frankly accepting the principle of equality, none claiming any social pre-eminence, and none, so far as I could learn, attempting to interfere in politics. Both the bishops and the clergy of the Church of England (among whom there are many gifted men) are, with few exceptions, of marked High-church proclivities, which, however, do not appear to prevail equally among the laity. The Dutch Reformed Church has been troubled by doubts as to the orthodoxy of many of its younger pastors who have been educated at Leyden or Utrecht, and for a time it preferred to send candidates for the ministry to be trained at Edinburgh, whose theological schools inspired less distrust. It is itself in its turn distrusted, apparently without reason, by the still more rigid Calvinists of the Transvaal.
One curious feature of South African society remains to be mentioned, which impressed me the more the longer I remained in the country. The upper stratum of that society, consisting of the well-to-do and best educated people, is naturally small, because the whole white population of the towns is small, there being only four towns that have more than ten thousand white residents. But this little society is virtually one society, though dispersed in spots hundreds of miles from one another. Natal stands rather apart, and has very little to do either socially or in the way of business with Cape Colony, and not a great deal even with the Transvaal. So too the four or five towns of the eastern province of Cape Colony form a group somewhat detached, and though the "best people" in each of them know all about the "best people" in Cape Town, they are not in close touch with the latter. But Cape Town, Kimberley, Bloemfontein, Johannesburg, and Pretoria, the five most important places (excluding the Natal towns), are for social purposes almost one city, though it is six hundred and fifty miles from Cape Town to Kimberley, and one thousand miles from Cape Town to Johannesburg. All the persons of consequence in these places know one another and follow one another's doings. All mix frequently, because the Cape Town people are apt to be called by business to the inland cities, and the residents of the inland cities come to Cape Town for sea air in the summer, or to embark thence for Europe. Where distances are great, men think little of long journeys, and the fact that Cape Town is practically the one port of entrance and departure for the interior, so far as passengers are concerned, keeps it in constant relations with the leading men of the interior, and gives a sort of unity to the upper society of the whole country, which finds few parallels in any other part of the world. Johannesburg and Cape Town in particular are, for social purposes, in closer touch with each other than Liverpool is with Manchester or New York with Philadelphia. When one turns to the map it looks a long way from the Cape to the Witwatersrand; but between these places most of the country is a desert, and there is only one spot, Bloemfontein, that deserves to be called a town. So I will once more beg the reader to remember that though South Africa is more than half as large as Europe, it is, measured by population, a very small country.
CHAPTER XXIV
POLITICS IN THE TWO BRITISH COLONIES
The circumstances of the two South African Colonies are so dissimilar from those of the British Colonies in North America and in Australasia as to have impressed upon their politics a very different character. I do not propose to describe the present political situation, for it may change at any moment. It is only of the permanent causes which give their colour to the questions and the movements of the country that I shall speak, and that concisely.