f-castes we have all met individuals, not only of the highest
integrity, but of rare moral beauty and of heroic and fully
developed social feelings, does not impugn the theory of his
unfortunate position. If you should sow human seed inside the door
of hell, some of it would yet come up white lilies. But as a rule
the popular verdict on the half-caste is not overdrawn."

I strongly agree with Mrs. Schreiner that this lamentable result is not
due solely, or even chiefly, to the admixture of races, but far more to
the circumstances in which he has been born and bred. He has originated
in almost all cases, not from the union of average individuals of the
two races uniting under average conditions, but as the result of a
sexual union between the most helpless and enslaved females of the dark
race and the most recklessly dominant males of the white. "He enters a
world in which there was no place prepared for him." His father was
about as sensible of his parental obligations towards him as a toad
towards its spawn in the next ditch. To him he "was a broken wineglass
from last night's feast." "Often without a family, always without a
nation or race, without education or moral training, and despised by the
society in which he was born," is it any wonder that the half-caste is
the curse of the community in which he is found;--one of those whips, as
Shakespeare reminds us, that "heaven makes out of our pleasant vices" to
"scourge" us into some sense of their seriousness?

If you would not incur that curse, that insoluble problem of the
half-caste, then in both your civil and military services send out men
of clean hearts and lives into your dependencies, Alas! in your great
military camps during your Spanish war a moral laxity was allowed,
which, had it been attempted in the Egyptian campaign, Lord Kitchener
would have stamped out with a divine fury. I had it from an eyewitness,
but the details are wholly unfit for publication.

I do not hold with our "little Englanders" that the possession of an
empire is a disaster; on the contrary, I hold that it constitutes a
splendid school for the formation of strong character,--of men who are
the very salt of the earth,--and that the sense of a great mission to be
fulfilled tends to give a nobility of soul to the whole nation; while
even the wars it may involve prove the vultures of God swooping down on
the hidden social rottennesses which in prolonged peace may b