It has been said by a leading speculator and millionaire in South Africa that, if the States of South Africa could be broken down and crushed into one, a united and uniform labour system might then be adopted, and the wages of natives brought down; and he has held up as an ideal for imitation the condition in India where natives are supposed to labour for twopence a day, living therefore so closely upon the border of starvation that the slightest rise in the price of foodstuffs renders them liable to widespread famine and destruction, and therefore also eager to accept the smallest amount of remuneration which will maintain life.
To this end the Speculator and Capitalist, among others, have sought to enter political life in South Africa, and in order that, by the passing of laws dispossessing the native by indirect means of his hold on the land, and breaking up his tribal tenure, and by the making of direct wars upon him, the native, at last being absolutely landless, may be unable to resist any attempt to lower wages, and may then sink into the purely proletariat condition of a working class always on the border of starvation, and therefore always glad to sell his toil for the lowest sum that will maintain life.
Were this plan entirely successful, South Africa as a whole would lose all the native now gains, the increased profit going to enlarge the wealth of the foreign Speculator and often aristocratic shareholder; and South Africa would then be saddled with a proletariat class of the very lowest type. For, the only hope of the African native's rising, and becoming a valuable and intelligent labouring class, lies in his receiving such remuneration for his labour as shall enable him to grasp at least some of the subordinate advantages of civilization, along with those of its evils which are necessarily forced on him. If the South African native is not in the position to obtain primary education and in some measure to grasp such advantages and privileges as there are in our modern civilization, then, as his old tribal ideals and institutions are destroyed, he must inevitably sink into a condition lower and more terrible than that of the lowest proletariat in Europe; and, as he forms (and must do for generations, in a land where white men refuse to perform the bulk of physical labours) the major part of the population, South Africa will permanently be weighted and degraded by the degradation and degeneracy of the great bulk of the inhabitants.