of three causes. One of these is the
character which nature has impressed upon it. Of this I have already
spoken (Chapter VI), pointing out how the high interior plateau, with
its dry and healthy climate, determined the main line of European
advance and secured the predominance, not of the race which first
discovered the country, but of the race which approached it, far later
in time, from its best side. It is also in this physical character that
one must seek the explanation of the remarkably slow progress of the
country in wealth and population. South Africa began to be occupied by
white men earlier than any part of the American continent. The first
Dutch settlement was but little posterior to those English settlements
in North America which have grown into a nation of seventy-seven
millions of people, and nearly a century and a half prior to the first
English settlements in Australia. It is the unhealthiness of the east
coast and the dryness of the rest of the country that are mainly
accountable for this tardy growth--a growth which might have been still
more tardy but for the political causes that drove the Boers into the
far interior. And again, it is the physical configuration of the country
that has made it, and is likely to keep it, one country. This is a point
of cardinal importance. Though divided into two British Colonies, with
several other pieces of British territory, and two Boer Republics, the
habitable parts of South Africa form one community, all the parts of
which must stand or fall together. The great plateau is crossed by no
lines of physical demarcation all the way from the Zambesi to the Hex
River (some fifty miles north-east of Cape Town), and the coast regions
are closely bound by economic ties to the plateau, which through them
touches the outer world. Popular speech which talks of South Africa as
one whole is scientifically right.

The two other causes that have ruled the fortunes and guided the
development of the country have been the qualities and relations of the
races that inhabit it, and the character of the Government which has
sought from afar to control the relations of those races. These deserve
to be more fully considered.

English statesmen have for more than fifty years been accustomed to say
that of all the Colonies of Great Britain none has given to the mother
country so much disquiet and anxiety as South Africa has done. This is
another way of expressing the fact which strikes