Favourable and encouraging accounts, contrasting strongly with Mr
Nicholson's melancholy reports! That gentleman's book, if read and
credited, is of itself enough to stop emigration to the country
whither Mrs Ward thus strongly advocates it. And we must bear in mind,
moreover, that the colonial districts of the Cape include the least
fertile and valuable portion of South Africa. The finest pastures and
most healthy tracts are held by Hottentots, Kaffirs, and Fingos.
Savages, experience teaches us, recede and dwindle on the advance of
the white man. Increase the population of the Cape Colony, and in due
time the colonists will push their way. But Mr Nicholson strongly
objects to such increase, and holds it unwise and impracticable. We
cannot repeat, even in a compressed form, all the gloomy statements of
his eighth chapter, but will just glance at one or two of its points.
In the first place, in the country which, as Mrs Ward maintains, would
receive "the starving population of Ireland," and be the better for
their arrival, so long as they were willing to work, Mr Nicholson can
only make room for one thousand of the humbler classes of emigrants.
This, he opines, "would be the greatest number who could obtain
employment suited to the capacities and habits of decent labouring
people." They are to be principally female house-servants, cooks,
housemaids, and nurses; and with respect to the few out-door labourers
he is disposed to admit, those, he tells us, "would succeed best who,
without having previously followed any particular occupation so
closely as to be almost unfitted for any other, can, as the term is,
'turn their hands to any thing.'" Married men, in his opinion, should
not go out at all. These are certainly singular doctrines, rather
contrary to received notions concerning emigration, as well as to Mrs
Ward's opinions. As to persons of a superior class going out to take
farms, expecting to live upon their produce, Mr Nicholson treats the
idea as utterly visionary and chimerical. Such persons must possess an
independent income, in addition to what it may be necessary to invest
in a farm. The question then is, how do the Dutch manage? since the
"late resident" admits the superior success and contentedness found
amongst the Boërs, and which were far more evident before the
wealthiest and most intelligent of them had left the colony, to seek
at Port Natal refuge from foolish legislation, and from the
slave-emancipating absurdities of the philanthropists. May not an
answer be found in the following extract?--"It must be admitted that a
British population is of more intrinsic value than a colonial Dutch
one; but then the latter has, by long experience, been taught _to
moderate hopes and necessities within a compass little in accordance
with the go-a-head notions of the present race of Englishmen of all
classes of society_." Of course if "fast men" go out to settle at the
Cape, with Captain Harris's book of South African sports and a case of
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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