This step was adversely criticized by the Liberal party in Great Britain, not because that party was inclined to deny that a share of African development might be allowed to the Asiatic, but on the ground that the conditions under which the indentured Chinamen were to serve in the South African mines were not only opposed to British ideas of freedom but were detrimental to health and morality. Their anticipations of the bad results which might accrue from the employment of Chinese labourers in compounds were fulfilled; and in 1906-8 the Chinese were gradually repatriated from the Rand (as the mining area of the Southern Transvaal is called). The great question of the participation of the Asiatic in the development of South Africa and East Africa depends on the determination of the white man and the black man to be self-sufficing for the development respectively of the tropical and temperate districts of that continent. The black man must be less lazy and the white man likewise, as well as less proud, if both together are to be justified in denying to the yellow man a share of the Dark Continent, either as a settler or a merchant. It is interesting, however, to note that the white population of Cape Colony showed a considerable increase between 1891 and 1904. In 1891 the population of European descent numbered 366,608. In 1904 it was stated at 579,741. In the Transvaal the white population rose to 300,225; in Natal to 97,109; in the Orange Free State to 143,419; in Rhodesia to 12,623; and in Basuto- and Bechuanaland to 1899. In British South Africa the coloured (mainly negro) population was nearly 5,500,000. In 1912, the total white population in British Africa, south of the Zambezi, was about 1,306,400, and the negro and negroid about 5,800,000. There were also about 192,000 Asiatics, chiefly in Natal; and these Asiatics consisted mainly of natives of Southern India (some 172,000), together with 15,000 Malays in Cape Colony, a few Chinese, Japanese, Arabs, and Syrians. North of the Zambezi, in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, there are about 2200 whites, 1000 Asiatics and nearly 2,000,000 negroes: a total population of about 9,300,000. The area of all British South and South Central Africa (including Walfish Bay and the islets off the south-west coast) is 1,148,619 square miles, extending from the frontiers of Angola and the Belgian Congo, Tanganyika and German East Africa to the coasts of Cape Colony and Natal—an Empire which is barely 100 years old, and which began in 1814[160] with an area of 125,000 square miles, with a population of about 150,000, of whom some 26,000 were whites and the remainder Negroes, Hottentots, half-breeds, and Malays.