The compound of the Premier Mine contained, at the time of my visit, something over twelve thousand natives, representing nearly every tribe from Pondoland to the head-waters of the Congo. Here one sees Zulus, Fingos, Pondos, Basutos, Bechuanas, Matabele, Mashonas, Makalaka, and even Bushmen from the Kalahari country and Masai from German East Africa, all attracted by the high wages, which range from five to eight dollars a week. When the native's six-month contract has ended, he takes his wages in British sovereigns—and his earnings accumulate quickly because he can live on very little—goes home to his own tribe, perhaps six weeks' journey away, buys a wife and a yoke of oxen, and lives lazily ever after. Not all of the natives are of so thrifty a turn of mind, however, for the company store holds many attractions for them and they are heavy purchasers of camel's-hair blankets, French perfumes, and imported cutlery, refusing almost invariably to take anything but the best. I have tried to paint for you a comprehensive, though necessarily an impressionistic, picture of this great new nation that has sprung up so quickly in the antipodes, and to give you at least a rough idea of what its people, its soil, its towns, its climate, its resources, and its problems are like. That South Africa will always be a country of great mineral wealth there is little doubt, for, when the supplies of gold and diamonds are exhausted, copper, iron, and coal should still furnish good returns. Likewise, it will always be a great ranching country, for nearly all of its vast veldt is ideal, both in climate and pasturage, for live-stock. It will probably never become a manufacturing country, for coal is of poor quality, there is neither water power nor inland waterways, and labour is neither good nor cheap. If, as I have already remarked, government irrigation can be introduced as successfully as it has been in our own Southwest, and if the malaria which makes the rich coast-lands almost uninhabitable can be exterminated as effectually as we have exterminated it on the Isthmus of Panama, I can see no reason why South Africa should not eventually become one of the great agricultural countries of the world. Though many South Africans look forward to a day when the natives will begin to retire to the country north of the Zambezi, and when a large European population will till their own farms, by their own labour, with the aid of government-assisted irrigation, I am personally of the opinion that South Africa will never become at all evenly populated, but that it will always bear a marked resemblance to our Southwest, with large areas devoted to the raising of sheep and cattle, with certain other areas irrigated for the raising of fruit, and with its population centred for the most part in towns scattered at long distances from one another, but connected by rapid railway communications.