At Montague, as we were waiting outside the inn for our cart, two sturdy English beggars made their appearance before us, demanding charity. They could get no work to do,--so they said,--in this accursed land, and wanted money to buy bread. No work to do! And yet every farmer, every merchant, every politician I had met and spoke with since I had put my foot on South African soil, had sworn to me that the country was a wretched country simply because labour could not be had! The two men had Cape Smoke plainly developed in every feature of their repulsive faces. As we were seated and could not rid ourselves of our countrymen without running away, we entered into conversation with them. Not get work! It was certainly false! They were on their way, they said, from the Eastern Province. Had they tried the railway? We knew that at the present moment labour was peculiarly wanted on the railway because of the disturbance created by Kreli and his Galekas. For the disturbance of which I shall speak in one of the concluding chapters of my work was then on hand. “Yes,” said the spokesman who, as on all such occasions, was by far the more disreputable of the two. “They had tried the railway, and had been offered 2s. 6d. a day. They were not going to work along side of niggers for 2s. 6d., which would only supply them with grub! Did we want real Englishmen to do that?” We told them that certainly we did want real Englishmen to earn their grub honestly and not to beg it; and then, having endeavoured to shame them by calling them mean fellows, we were of course obliged to give them money. Such rascals might turn up anywhere,--in any town in England much more probably than in South Africa. But their condition as we saw them, and the excuse which they made for their condition, were typical of the state of labour in South Africa generally. The men, if worth anything, could earn more than 2s. 6d. a day,--as no doubt those other men could have done of whom I spoke some chapters back;--but an Englishman in South Africa will not work along side of a coloured man on equal terms with the coloured man. The English labourer who comes to South Africa either rises to more than the labouring condition, or sinks to something below it. And he will not be content simply to supply his daily wants. He at once becomes filled with the idea that as a Colonist he should make his fortune. If he be a good man,--industrious, able to abstain from drink and with something above ordinary intelligence,--he does make some fortune, more or less adequate. At any rate he rises in the world. But if he have not those gifts,--then he falls, as had done those two ugly reprobates.