South Africa is, and will continue to be, a great grazing country; for nearly all of its vast area is fit for live stock, though in large regions the proportion of stock to the acre must remain small, owing to the scarcity of feed. It will therefore continue to export wool, goats' hair, and hides in large quantities, and may also export meat, and possibly dairy products.
South Africa has been, is, and will probably continue to be for a good while to come, a country in which only a very small part of the land is tilled, and from which little agricultural produce, except fruit, sugar, and perhaps tobacco, will be exported. Only two things seem likely to increase its agricultural productiveness. One of these is the discovery of some preservative against malarial fever which might enable the lowlands of the east coast, from Durban northward, to be cultivated much more largely than they are now. The other is the introduction of irrigation on a large scale, an undertaking which at present would be profitable in a few places only. Whether in future it will be worth while to irrigate largely, and whether, if this be done, it will be done by companies buying and working large farms or by companies distributing water to small farmers, as the Government distributes water in Egypt and some parts of India, are questions which may turn out to have an important bearing on the development of the country, but which need not be discussed now.
South Africa has not been, and shows no sign of becoming, a manufacturing country. Water power is absent. Coal is not of the best quality. Labour is neither cheap nor good. Even the imposition of a pretty high protective tariff would not be likely to stimulate the establishment of iron-works or foundries on a large scale, nor of factories of textile goods, for the local market is too small to make competition with Europe a profitable enterprise. In these respects, as in many others, the conditions, physical and economic, differ so much from those of the British North American or Australian Colonies that the course of industrial development is likely to be quite different from what it has been there.
From these conclusions another of great importance follows. The white population will remain scanty in proportion to the area of the country. At present, it is, in the two British Colonies and the two Dutch Republics, only about one and a half persons to the square mile, while over the other territories it is incomparably smaller.
The country will probably remain, so long as present agricultural conditions continue, a wilderness, with a few oases of population scattered at long distances from one another. The white inhabitants will, moreover, continue to be very unequally distributed. At present, of a total population in the last-mentioned four States of about 730,000, more than one-fourth lives in the mining district of the Rand; one-sixth is found in the five principal seaports on the southern and south-eastern coast; the remaining seven-twelfths are thinly dispersed over the rest of the country in solitary farms or villages, or in a very few small towns, the largest of which, Kimberley, has only 10,000 inhabitants. The only towns that are growing are those five seaports, and Johannesburg with its tributary mining villages. Assuming the present growth of the Rand to continue, it may have in ten years about 500,000 whites, which will be not much less than a half of the then white population of the whole country. Stimulated by the trade which the Rand will supply, the five seaports will probably also grow; while elsewhere population may remain almost stationary. Unless the gold reefs of the country beyond the Limpopo turn out well and create in that region miniature copies of the Rand district, there seems no reason to expect the total number of whites to reach 1,200,000 in less than twenty years. After that time growth will depend upon the future of agriculture, and the future of agriculture depends on so many causes independent of South Africa that it would be unsafe to make any predictions regarding it. I know some South Africans, able men, who think that the day will come when the blacks will begin to retire northward, and a large white population will till their own farms by their own labour, with the aid of irrigation. Of the advent of such a day there are no present signs, yet stranger changes have happened in our time than this change would be. Other South Africans believe that minerals not less valuable than those which the last twenty years have revealed are likely to be discovered in other places. This also may happen,—South Africa, it has been said, is a land of surprises,—and if it does happen there may be another inrush like that which has filled the Rand. All that one can venture to do now is to point out the probable result of the conditions which exist at this moment; and these, though they point to a continued increase of mineral production, do not point to any large or rapid increase of white inhabitants.
Twenty years hence the white population is likely to be composed in about equal proportions of urban and rural elements. The urban element will be mainly mining, gathered at one great centre on the Witwatersrand, and possibly at some smaller centres in other districts. The rural element, consisting of people who live in villages or solitary farmhouses, will remain comparatively backward, because little affected by the social forces which work swiftly and potently upon close-packed industrial communities, and it may find itself very different in tone, temper, and tendencies from its urban fellow-citizens. The contrast now so marked between the shopkeeper of Cape Town and the miner of Johannesburg on the one hand, and the farmer of the Karroo or the Northern Transvaal on the other, may be then hardly less marked between the two sections of the white population. But these sections will have one thing in common. Both will belong to an upper stratum of society; both will have beneath them a mass of labouring blacks, and they will therefore form an industrial aristocracy resting on Kafir labour.