I have said that the ordinary Kafir is found by the sugar grower not to be worth £20 a year. The sugar grower will put the matter in a different way and will declare that the Kafir will not work for £20 a year,--will not work as a man should work for any consideration that can be offered to him. I have no doubt that sugar can for the present be best made by Coolie labour,--and that of course is all in all with the manufacturer of sugar. It cannot be otherwise. But it is impossible not to see that under it all there is an aversion to the Kafir,--or Zulu as I had perhaps better call him now,--because he cannot be controlled, because his labour cannot be made compulsory. The Zulu is not an idle man,--not so idle I think as were the negroes in the West Indies who after the emancipation were able to squat on the deserted grounds and live on yams. But he loves to be independent. I heard of one man who on being offered work at certain wages, answered the European by offering him work at higher wages. This he would do,--if the story be true,--with perfect good humour and a thorough appreciation of the joke. But the European in Natal, and, indeed, the European throughout South Africa, cannot rid himself of the feeling that the man having thews and sinews, and being a Savage in want of training, should be made to work,--say nine hours a day for six days a week,--should be made to do as much as a poor Englishman who can barely feed himself and his wife and children. But the Zulu is a gentleman and will only work as it suits him. This angers the European. The Coolie has been brought into the land under a contract and must work. The Coolie is himself conscious of this and does not strive to rebel. He is as closely bound as is the English labourer himself who would have to encounter at once all the awful horrors of the Board of Guardians, if it were to enter into his poor head to say that he intended to be idle for a week. The Zulu has his hut and his stack of Kafir corn, and can kill an animal out in the veld, and does not care a straw for any Board of Guardians. He is under no contract by which he can be brought before a magistrate. Therefore the sugar planter hates him and loves the Coolie. I was once interrogating a young and intelligent superintendent of machinery in the Colony as to the labour he employed and asked him at last whether he had any Kafirs about the place. He almost flew at me in his wrath,--not against me but against the Kafirs. He would not, he said, admit one under the same roof with him. All work was impossible if a Kafir were allowed even to come near it. They were in his opinion a set of human wretches whom it was a clear mistake to have upon the earth. His work was all done by Coolies, and if he could not get Coolies the work would not be worth doing at all by him. His was not a sugar mill, but he was in the sugar country, and he was simply expressing unguardedly,--with too little reserve,--the feelings of those around him.