usually clamour for
legislation to compel the natives to come and work, adding, of course,
that regular labour would be the best thing in the world for the
natives. Some go so far as to wish to compel them to work at a fixed
rate of wages, sufficient to leave a good profit for the employer.
Others go even further, and as experience has shown that the native does
not fear imprisonment as a penalty for leaving his work, desire the
infliction of another punishment which he does fear--that is, the lash.
Such monstrous demands seem fitter for the mouths of Spaniards in the
sixteenth century than for Englishmen in the nineteenth. The difficulty
of getting labour is incident to a new country, and must be borne with.
In German East Africa it has been so much felt that the Administrator of
that region has proposed to import Indian labour, as the sugar-planters
of Natal, and as those of Trinidad and Demerara in the West Indies, have
already done. But it is to some extent a transitory difficulty. The
mines at Kimberley succeed in drawing plenty of native labour; so do
the mines on the Witwatersrand; so in time the mine-owners in
Matabililand may hope to do also. They must, however, be prepared, until
a regular afflux of labourers has been set up, to offer, as the
Kimberley people do, wages far in excess of anything the Kafirs could
possibly gain among their own people, in order to overcome the distaste
of the native--a very natural distaste, due to centuries of indolence in
a hot climate--to any hard and continuous toil. This is no great
compensation to make to those whose land they have taken and whose
primitive way of life they have broken up and for ever destroyed. But
once the habit of coming to work for wages has been established in these
northern regions,--and it need not take many years to establish it,--the
mining companies will have no great difficulty in getting as much labour
as they want, and will not be obliged, as they now are, to try to
arrange with a chief for the despatch of some of his "boys."

Bulawayo is the point from which one starts to visit the Victoria Falls
on the Zambesi, the only very grand natural object which South Africa
has to show. The expedition, however, is a much longer one than a glance
at the map would suggest. Owing to the prevalence of the tsetse-fly in
the valley of the great river, one cannot take oxen without the prospect
of losing them, and must therefore travel on foot or with donkeys.