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 divides a policy designed to provide a sufficiency of fertile land for the requirements of the native population—allowing an ample margin for natural growth—for agricultural and ranching purposes; and a policy which aims by successive encroachments, under one pretext or another, upon the native "reserves," or by shifting native communities from good, arable land to arid or swampy locations, to prevent the increase of a native farming, planting and ranching class working as its own master under the native system of tenure, and thereby gradually to reduce the native population to a landless proletariat working as hired labourers for the white men on the land, or in the mines. There can be no doubt on which side of the line lie duty, justice and (if the average white South African could bring himself to a mental contemplation of the not-far-distant future when South Africa will be mineralogically exhausted) commonsense. Neither unhappily, is there any doubt upon which side of the line average South African opinion is ranged, nor towards which side of the line South African official policy has usually inclined. The Chartered Company's land claim in Southern Rhodesia is the latest and the most striking object lesson open to study in this regard: but it is not an unique phenomenon by any means. Abundant and cheap supplies of African labour—that is the avowed purpose of the controlling spirits of industrial South Africa, as of the financial magnates at home, and their gramophones in the Press, who talk at large about the Empire, but whose conception of imperial responsibilities begins and ends with dividends. Nor, it would seem, is a section of white labour in South Africa above supporting that policy, although if. is actuated in so doing by different, but not by worthier motives.

This demand for cheap and plentiful black labour in colonisable Africa is quite intelligible, and within limits is justifiable. But those limits are exceeded when, in order to realise it, policy is deliberately directed to lowering the human quality and undermining the economic independence of the aboriginal population by uprooting it from the soil, thereby converting land-owning communities, kept self-respecting under their own institutions, into a disrupted mass of shiftable labour. A certain proportion of an aboriginal population, even when settled on the land, is always procurable for external labour