‘614 REPORT—1905. 
cheating, and stealing, go to a Christian Endeavour meeting in order to pass a 
note during the opening prayer to his inamorata for the time being, and then pray 
fervently that his form-master may be led into the right path. The consequence 
is that in no other country is practical morality so entirely divorced from professed 
religion. 
But the greatest disability of the young South African is the lack of money 
spent upon his education. This money is dependent on drought or rain, on slumps 
or booms in the share market. In the seven fat years the eldest son may receive a 
good education, in the seven lean years his younger brother is kept at home to 
feed sheep or ostriches. There is no steady golden stream, no generous endowment, 
asin America. Economy is the fashion in all the Government departments, but 
economy in education is the grossest profligacy of the State’s greatest resource, the 
intellectual potentialities of her children. The consequences of this paucity of 
money, this lack of endowment, are terrible. There are few beautiful school 
buildings, and consequently little habitual training in that fine sense of artistic 
proportion which has made the Japanese Empire what it is to-day. If a boy’s 
school associations are to be of an ill-paid schoolmaster, of a playground ten yards 
square filled with old papers and broken rubble, of an oblong rectangular building 
covered with cracked and dirty plaster and roofed with corrugated iron, his 
imagination, his feelings, his sympathy will suffer. There are few real scholars 
turned out by the country, as a consequence of the massed effect of all these dis- 
abilities of environment. In law alone, the one dish in the endless bill of fare 
that he has tasted nothing of in South Africa, does the young South African shine 
when he visits other countries. 
It is solely lack of endowment which confin\s the Cape University to the 
function of examining schools, which thwarts resyarch work and higher studies, 
and has eliminated that highest function of a un1,ersity, a corporate residential 
life. The young South African is cut off from that golden arena of physical 
prowess and intellectual emulation which is the birthright nowadays of British and 
American youth, when as a man he rejoices in his strength, and as a sentient being 
he feels his mind moving for the first time through the great world-problems of 
life and death, of good and evil. A residential South African university, such 
as the late Cecil Rhodes, but for the jealousy of vested interests, would have 
erected on the slopes of Table Mountain, with a thousand students drawn from all 
parts of the country, would be an asset worth a hundred mines, a million miles of 
railway. 
Money may be the root of all evil; it isthe want of it which is the curse of educa- 
tion in South Africa at the present moment. The young South African has all the 
makings of a noble manhood in him. With proper guidance he becomes a magnifi- 
cent athlete ; with right treatment the generous and hospitable and kindly side of 
him prevails over the ignorance and prejudice and craftiness which he too often 
inherits in his blood ; in his studies he shows a desire for higher knowledge and a 
capacity for hard and steady work which almost amount to genius. But bricks 
cannot be made without straw, and until magnificent endowment of education has 
put fine schools and noble universities within his grasp at a moderate cost all 
these latent possibilities will remain dormant. 
