he same conditions as the blacks. I saw a letter from an
operative cautioning his fellow artisans against going out. He
says, "We get thirty shillings a day, but it is a dreadful place to
live in." I ask the operatives in England to mistrust that
statement. ("What is the cost of living?") You can live at the club
very well indeed for L10 a month--the club, mind you, where the
aristocracy live. It is idle to tell me the honest artisan cannot
live. In addition to the black and white population, there is
another problem, and that is, the influx of Arabs, who creep down
the East Coast through the door of Natal. They are gradually
ousting the English retail trader. You may go to up-country towns,
and in whole streets you will see these yellow fellows, sitting
there in their muslin dresses, where formerly there were English
traders. In places where we want to cultivate the English
population, that is a very serious thing. Our yellow friends come
under the garb of British subjects from Bombay, and are making
nests in the Transvaal and elsewhere by ousting the English retail
trader. Sir Frederick Young has alluded to State colonisation. I am
sorry to differ from so amiable a critic of our ways, but, as one
who has had a little experience, I can tell him that you may send
Colonists out, but you cannot as easily make them stay there. If
they make their fortunes, they come home to England to spend them.
If they are poor, and bad times come, the black man crowds them
out, and off they go to Australia. You can depend on a German
peasant settling, but bring an Englishman or a Scotchman, and he
wants to better himself. In that he is quite right, but he does not
see his way on a small plot of ground, and off he goes down a mine,
or something of that sort. There are great difficulties in the way
of State-aided emigration. We do not want the riff-raff; we don't
want the "surplus population." It is one of the greatest
difficulties to get decent, steady Englishmen to settle on the
land. It is the people who settle on the land who make a country,
and if Sir Frederick Young can give us a receipt for making English
people settle there he will confer one of the greatest possible
benefits on South Africa. Sir Frederick Young departed from the
usual custom on such occasions b