So it was in America, where the red man is dying out; and so in New Zealand, though to a less degree, for the natives there are of better stock. It is not yet to the same extent in Africa, solely because the population, in the latter days of the nineteenth century, is too redundant. But unless the black can assimilate with the white, he must as assuredly give place to those who have the mental and physical power, as the red man has been driven westward against the mountain ridges of America. Asiatics alone, among the races of colour, have held their own, because the people are intellectually sound. In that country, built up of many countries, there has been always, as far as historic time goes, civilisation. In Africa there has been none, save that alone of immigrants. In China, again, there is no dread of such extermination; its people, though barbaric, are intellectual and more than semi-civilised. In Japan the extreme case is met with. A nation of high artistic and intellectual power, not a quarter of a century ago ranking among armour-wearing barbarians, it has shown its strength in its recent war with China, and won respect and equality among the leading nations of the earth. This Africa has _never_ done, and its history therefore, as far as Great Britain’s army is concerned, is not that of the barbaric or semi-barbaric powers with whom we have come in contact, but that of savage powers who are incapable of improvement or absorption, and whose only destiny is to remain hewers of wood and drawers of water. As the red man numbered millions when the eighteenth century was dying, and within a hundred years is far less than a _quantité negligéable_, so the black man, numbering millions when the nineteenth century is also a-dying, may possibly, before another century, fade out too. There is no room for either, unless the black mends his ways better than the red man did. The earliest occupation of the African littoral was that of the North-West Coast for purely trading purposes, and that of the Cape of Good Hope for those of colonial expansion, and as one of the chain of ports uniting our Eastern and Far Eastern possessions with the mother country. In early days they were the depôts whence the essential necessaries of food, water, and stores were replenished. Now they are even more vitally important as the coaling stations for the ocean steamers.