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external support can for all time rule a coloured nation.

There is yet a third alternative, but it involves a drastic change in the conditions which offer only the two alternatives outlined. It demands nothing less than the rebuilding of South Africa upon a different foundation. Old traditions and policies must be replaced by the rigid and sustained enforcement of the White Man ideal. Such a task is not impossible if the national faith be sufficiently strong and the national will sufficiently resolute. But success can only be attained by the overcoming of obstacles formidable enough to chill all but the highest enthusiasm and depress all save the stoutest hearts.

For the building of this new South Africa free from an ultimate coloured fate, it is essential that the idea that coloured labour is the country's greatest asset should be abandoned, and that the assumption that it is the duty of the State to ensure for every industry a supply of black workers should be denied. Such a change of attitude forms the only gateway to success. Nothing lasting can be achieved as long as it is believed that the only way to provide employment for whites is to increase the employment of blacks. That school of thought can never rebuild a South Africa not menaced by a coloured fate. What would save White South Africa would be a courageous and sustained national policy covering the following points :

(1) The placing of selected whites on the best land of the country to grow the crops which experts decided would be most profitable for the particular soils. A large proportion of these settlers should be drawn from oversea, as the country needs new blood. If necessary really good land should be expropriated for this purpose. In these settlements coloured labour should be excluded, or very severely limited, under the terms of occupation.

(2) All taxation imposed on industries, whether for protection or revenue purposes, should be adjusted in order to foster the employment of an increasing proportion of white labour.

(3) A segregation policy encouraging the natives to develop in their own territories. There would be no general prohibition on the use of black labour outside native areas, Vol. 244.-No. 483.

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but the separation of the population into distinct white areas and distinct black areas would be aimed at. In the white areas an effort should be made to get even the unskilled work done by whites. The greatest obstacle to this is the present colour mixture, and the false pride it engenders in the whites.

(4) The gradual elimination of all legislation which has the effect of placing an incentive upon employers to use coloured labour rather than white labour.

(5) The ultimate prohibition of the importation of black labour from outside the Union. What supplementary labour the country needs must after a given date be drawn from white sources, and not from black sources. Any shortage of labour resulting from this policy would naturally first give opportunities of employment to the now workless whites.

(6) The fostering of a powerful public opinion in favour of the White Man ideal.

Admittedly it would not be easy to persuade the White South Africa of to-day to embark upon such a national policy. The powerful industrial interests which demand the exploitation of the resources of the country by cheap coloured labour would oppose it. The farmers might object to it on the ground that it would produce a shortage of native labour and so raise native wages. All the ingrained prejudices of generations would be against it.

Nor could the new policy be carried out without sacrifices on the part of the white population. South Africa is not a high-grade country in which the yield either of farms or mines is so substantial that more expensive labour can be easily used. It may be true that the inefficiency of the present native labour tends to restrict output everywhere; but making due allowance for that it is probable that white labour would often have to be content with a smaller return than falls to it in America, Australia, or Canada. There is undoubtedly some truth in the assertion that South Africa is a low-grade country which is difficult to work save by cheap labour. One must not base a new policy on illusions regarding the results obtainable by using white labour more freely. White labour would have to be both hardworking and efficient in order to win even a moderately good standard of living. Still, in the country

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as a whole there would continue to be employed a considerable proportion of cheap native labour which would so average down total production costs as to leave a fair margin for white wages.

The scheme outlined is not impossible. It would call for a preliminary scientific survey of all the resources of South Africa, and then the new policy would have to be gradually enforced, being applied first to the most promising activities revealed by expert examination. There must be no rash experiments, because there is very little margin in South Africa for wasteful effort. On the lines suggested it should be possible to get more of the work of South Africa done by white men, which when all is said and done is the only method by which the white race can maintain its domination and its civilisation. The result could be no more than a compromise, because it is scarcely possible now to eliminate the coloured element in the country. One could hope with some confidence, however, to check the present drift to an overwhelming majority of colour, and build up a white race sufficiently strong and entrenched to be able to hold its place.

Whether White South Africa has in it the faith and the courage necessary for the carrying through of such a task remains to be seen. The national attitude to-day is not encouraging; one can but hope that a clearer realisation of the fate toward which White South Africa is so plainly drifting may breed a new ideal. But of one thing there is no room for doubt. If there is no new aim and no change of policy-if present conditions and tendencies continue unchecked for a few more yearsthen South Africa will ultimately stand revealed as unmistakably a coloured man's land, with a coloured civilisation, ruled by a coloured race.

L. E. NEAME.

Art. 2.-SIR WALTER SCOTT.

1. The Intimate Life of Sir Walter Scott. By Archibald Stalker. Black, 1921.

2. The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, 1825-32. New Edition. Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1891.

3. Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott. By J. G. Lockhart. One Vol. Edition. Edinburgh: Black, 1871. 4. Letters and Recollections of Sir Walter Scott by Mrs Hughes (of Uffington). Edited by Horace Hutchinson. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1904.

TWEED was roaring down in October flood when the writer and a friend on their southward road, intending the pilgrimage to Dryburgh, persuaded each the other, against his better judgment, that it would be a pity to leave out Abbotsford, and were sorry for it afterwards. Even Dryburgh itself, than which no more perfect resting-place for a King of Faery can be imagined,† could hardly atone for their mistake. The guide books will tell you-do tell you that 'Abbotsford as viewed from the Ferry Station gives a fair representation of the individual taste of Sir Walter Scott.' Whether Mr Baddeley means to be ironical or no, we cannot say.

But Scott's lovers should not go there. The taste of George IV's days is not ours, and our hero's lack of artistic taste was consummate. We should rather go six miles up the water to Ashestiel even before we attempt to reconstruct in our minds the lost farmhouse of 1812 at Clarty Hole. Over the later Abbotsford will always hang a trouble engendered of something more than clouds and weeping rain.' Yet it is not to any faults of taste there may have been in Scott's life, or in his buildings, that we can attribute the comparative neglect of his writings by younger readers to-day. And, in truth, we are sorely put to it to account for this

*The weather most bitchiferous, the Tweed swelled from bank to brae and roaring like thunder.' Scott to W. Clerk, Aug. 6, 1790. Lockhart, chap. vi, p. 45.

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And thus we have nothing left of Dryburgh' (it was an old family property on his Haliburton grandmother's side) 'although my father's maternal inheritance, but the right of stretching our bones where mine may perhaps be laid ere any eye but my own glances over these pages.' Autobiography, in Lockhart, chap. i, p. 2.

'Scotland,' vol. I, p. 43, Edition 1908.

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neglect. Are we to say, as he himself said of Byron, that Stevenson 'bet' him on his own ground? We might more truthfully say that electric light beats sunlight. Or that Romance is dead? That would be even more untrue; Romance still brings up the 9.15,' and Scott would have been the first to acknowledge this, for did he not say he could see as many genii in the curling smoke of a steam engine, as perfect a Persepolis in the emblems of a sea-coal fire as any man'?

One of his misfortunes, suffered in common with Shakespeare and perhaps with no other great magician, is that of having been so frequently made the vehicle for instruction, either in Holiday Tasks or in that dismal subject which in Elementary and other Schools is called 'English.' We think Sir Walter would rather have resented this, though he might possibly have approved of the delightful stratagem by which that tenderest of cynics, Mr Bradby, persuaded his immortal Dick to listen to Old Mortality. Perhaps he would have said, as he may have said to daughter Anne, 'Oh, novels are bad for young people.' We may take up, however, any famous publisher's catalogue and we shall be surprised at the list of editions or abbreviations of the Waverley Novels. Most of them are obviously Elementary School text-books. Sir Walter might be surprised to learn that they are exceedingly profitable productions, as they are 'paid for out of the rates.' How many times over might not the debt, which he so gallantly laboured to discharge, have been acquitted from that source! We do not exactly complain of all this, and yet are inclined to think it just a little horrible, and a rather sordid use to which to put such lofty romance. Is not 'the betting' rather against the chance of children so brought up reading Scott afterwards for sheer delight? However, on such a subject, pauca verba.

* 'Journal,' Jan. 1, 1827.

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† We have one such catalogue before us now, and we find, besides a complete edition in twenty-four volumes with illustrations, nine separate editions of single novels; we find six editions of Ivanhoe,' five 'Talismans,' four Quentin Durwards,' two 'Rob Roys' (two of these, 'Ivanhoe' and 'Talisman,' are dramatised at 4d. each for School use'); we find 'Selections from the Waverley Novels with explanatory lists of Scottish words for use in schools'; and, under the heading of 'Story Readers for Home and School use, 4th series, for children aged twelve to fourteen,' we find 'Bonnie Prince Charlie from the Waverley Novels, 128 pp., 18. 2d.'

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