24 AFRICA AND HER FUTURE. 



ditioHS, they have shown themselves v^^illing to raise 

 crops for market. In Bechuanalaud, under British su- 

 zerainty, certain amounts of the very fertile grain lands 

 have been reserved for the natives, and already thirty 

 thousand tons per annum are grown there. 



But in considering the future of Africa, we are brought 

 face to face with a question which is both serious and 

 difficult to answer. What, in the future, shall be the rela- 

 tions of the white and black races, dwelling together. 

 We are no strangers to that question in our own coun- 

 try. We have seen the blacks in America, increasing 

 year by year more rapidly than were the whites, with no 

 tendency anywhere to the disappearance of the line 

 wliich separates them, and many of us have been led to 

 ponder uuto what that must lead in the coming years. 

 Exactly the same facts confront us in Africa wherever 

 Europeans have long resided, and from such evidence we 

 are led irresistably to the conclusion that these facts will 

 be repeated over the whole continent, when once it is re- 

 deemed from its present wild conditions. The aborigines 

 of America and Australia disappeared before the white 

 man and left the country to be occupied by him wholly, 

 but the African shows no such tendency. Cape Colony 

 has been long occupied by Europeans and the country is 

 perfectly healthy for them, yet they fail utterly to main- 

 tain their relative numbers. A large proportion of that 

 land is now occupied entirely by aborigines except where 

 missionery stations are established. Fifty years ago the 

 country now constituting Natal and the Transvaal was a 

 wilderness, being kept depopulated by the raids of the 

 surrounding tribes; now under the peace kept by the 

 Europeans, one and a half million blacks are dwelling 

 there and the number is constantly multiplying. When 

 the same strong arm of civilized government shall stop 

 the inter-tribal wars and the still more destructive slave 

 raids, we may expect such a swelling of the numbers of 



