cause for consideration and most anxious doubt. We are going to spread freedom and justice over the earth, but in Africa at present our doom seems to be to drag its natural wealth from its bowels, and to expend it in intensifying the luxury of the old world. We prefer, as a great South African millionaire once said, "the land to the Natives," and for a time that part of us which seeks to rule over nations and permeate the peoples seems silenced by that part of us which desires to fill its hands with the fruits of the land and the labour of its people--and then desires nothing more. All this we see and see clearly. That a tree is full of buds does not prove that there will ever be fruit; that a child moves beneath its mother's heart is no certain promise that there will ever be a man; and, seeing clearly many conditions which may check its progress and even symptoms of conditions which may ultimately terminate its existence, nevertheless, while the buds are on the tree, we do not fail to dig and water, and, while the child is in the womb, we do not cease to prepare for its coming because of the possibility of its abortion. To those of us who take this view of conditions, functions, difficulties and possible future of the English race, it is not very difficult to determine what in the little South African world our relations and course of conduct towards the black man and the alien races should be. The man who holds to the upas-tree function of the English race and the possibility and desirability of our exterminating and using entirely for our own advantage all the peoples of earth is not more confident as to what his line of action should be than we. Nay, we believe we are a little more confident, because we believe there lies in every Englishman, behind his philistinism and jingoism, something that makes the upas-tree line of action a little difficult to him. We are not unaware of the difficulties and complexities of our position in this country, but upon all matters small and large we know our course. We are asked sometimes: "Well, but what do you intend this country to be, a black man's country or a white?" We reply we intend nothing. If the black man cannot labour or bear the strain and stress of complex civilized life, he will pass away. We need not degrade and injure ourself by killing him; if _we_ cannot work here, then in time, wholly or in part, the white man will pass away; and the one best fitted to the land will likely survive--but this we are determined to do: we will make it a free man's country. Whether the ultimate race of this country be black, white or brown, we intend it to be a race permeated with the English doctrine of the equal right of each human to himself, and the duty of all to defend the freedom of it. If it be suggested to us that the Natives of the land are ignorant, we have the reply to make that we are here to teach them all we know if they will learn--if they will not, they must fall.