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 



