TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION L. 611 
The seemingly innocent conditions of sunny skies and bright atmosphere must 
be sternly arraigned before the tribunal for their malign influences upon the school- 
boy. The land- and sea-scape of the Peninsula, the Karroo stretching straight and 
level to its boundaries of purple hills, the rolling bush and forest of the Hastern 
Province, must be charged with the crime of dwarfing the intellectualities, without 
fostering the imagination, of the youth which grows up beside them. A savage 
may in a blind, unreasoning way appreciate the beauties of bis native scenery, 
but it is the trained and educated mind which realises to the full the beauties of 
uatural landscape, and the very charm of his surroundings tempts the Seuth African 
boy from that settled study which would enable him to see with a more seeing eye 
the majesty and grandeur of his home. Even in the towns the bloom upon some 
distant mountain will attract the boy from book and study to open-air wanderings. 
British fog, or rain, or sleet, will drive a boy in spite of himself to some snug 
corner of his school library. In South Africa, when all Nature smiles without, a 
library is a prison and books are fetters. And so there is no real love of literature 
in the country, no taste for poetry, and little real culture. People do not learn in 
their boyhood rational methods of employing their leisure time. 
Moreover, this wealth of sun and ozone is a gift which our young African Midas 
may well ask the gods to recall. At seventeen he is in the spring of his life, a 
giant in thew and sinew, a very Saul in stature, and his fancy turns lightly to the 
neighbouring girls’ school, where the lavish sun has gifted girls of fifteen with the 
growth and passions of women. It is no uncommon thing to find boys and girls 
in a mixed school engaged to one another, or to someone in a lower standard. And 
this rapid growth of body too often takes place at the expense of the brain, and 
young giants arrive at school who, good fellows and hard workers though they be, 
have no chance of ever making any intellectual progress. 
When the emigrant or exile of any race, under stress of political grievance or 
religious persecution, turns his face to the trials and dangers of an unknown land, 
his new life is characterised by a stern simplicity, an unwavering uprightness, a 
humble trust in God. God is the moving and controlling spirit of that wild 
nature in which he finds himself. Lurking savage and beast of prey sharpen in 
him a sense of alertness and self-reliance. Life becomes more precious the more it 
is menaced, the love of wife and children more engrossing when there is such risk 
of losing both. The pioneer becomes hero and saint through his environment of 
danger and solitude. But as time passes, and forest and savage retreat before the 
axe and gun of the settler, villages arise and security reigns where fear was lord. 
Men trust less in a God whose protection they seem less to need. The stern 
habits of penury and solitude give place to the vices of society and civilisation. 
Of all the evils that ensue, none has such far-reaching effects as the proximity of 
the conquered and subject savage race. In South Africa the pious Huguenot and 
the fanatic Voortrekker, who trusted in God and kept the powder of their muzzle- 
loaders dry for operation upon lion or leopard, Zulu or Hottentot, have sadly 
deteriorated since those early days. The1820 settler, who struggled with pests and 
Katftirs in the district of Albany, was a better man than his prosperous descendant, 
with his smiling farm and his slave population of black farm-servants. 
The young mother yields her babe to the tender mercies of some Kaflir girl or 
woman. What dangers of falls, of neglect, of dirt, of disease is not the child 
exposed to? The youngster learns to toddle, and his earliest playmates are the 
naked children of herdsmen and labourers, from whom he learns to shout instead 
of to speak, to grunt instead of to articulate, to steal, and to lie, Tor if it be true 
that the descendants of truth-loving British and Dutch have fallen into habits 
of untruth, no surer reason can be found than early intercourse with lying 
natives, 
When the boy grows into a lusty stripling his former playmate has fallen in 
the scale. He is now a little lower than the dogs, who receive less kicks and 
curses. The recent Pelser case, of undying infamy, shows how lightly estimated 
are the results on native life if a stirrup-iron is swung too heavily or a sjambok 
laid on too cunningly. Along with this reckless disregard of human life and 
personal dignity comes the degradation of manual labour, Hard work consists in 
° RR2 
