THE COUNTRY 337 
of the country. They deplore the gross ignorance of some of 
their fellow countrymen, they say that to permit the children 
to grow up as Boer children often do is to entrench ignorance 
and disloyalty in the land. ‘They also say that unless the 
more progressive elements among themselves are helped and 
encouraged to educate the children on the farms, the 
greater part of the young will grow up as the father, knowing 
no more, asking for nothing better. 
Let the authorities offer educational help now and they 
can do so on their own terms. Let them neglect to do so 
and soon they will find the Boer, even in South Africa, asking 
to have the Taal (debased Dutch) and not English taught, 
and anyone can realize what that will mean. 
It might be well worth while to make at least an experi- 
ment with a totally different sort of immigrant. The small 
farmer, the man who would himself till the ground he occu- 
pied up to the present time has not even been invited to 
the country. All farms allotted have been given on a scale 
which made native labour a necessity to those occupying 
them. At first these grants were of 10,000 acres and over. 
Now they are 4,000. The small farmer could not profit- 
ably make use of more than two or three hundred acres 
at most. Such an experiment should have good chance 
of success. Good land near the railroad can be found, and 
settlers grouped on it; as the Boers are now grouping 
themselves, this would soon be a self-supporting com- 
munity. 
The large part of the Protectorate so far as one can judge 
can never be anything but a planters’ country. I mean 
by that a land in which the white man is the overseer of 
the black man’s labour. Where cotton, fibre, rubber, and 
other tropical plants can be successfully raised by labour 
so cheap that it would enable the planter to compete in 
the world’s market with other producers who were geo- 
graphically more favourably situated than he, till such 
