Page:South Africa (1878 Volume 1).djvu/337

 to the stranger after a short sojourn in the land. I was travelling through the country by a mail cart, and had to stay at a miserable wayside hut which called itself an hotel, with eight or ten other passengers. Close at hand, not a hundred yards from the door, were pitched the tents of a detachment of soldiers, who were being marched up to the border between Natal and the Transvaal. Everybody immediately began to warn his neighbour as to his property because of the contiguity of the British soldier. But no one ever warns you to beware of a Zulu thief though the Zulus swarm round the places at which you stop. I found myself getting into a habit of trusting a Zulu just as I would trust a dog.

I have already said something of Zulu labour when speaking of the sugar districts round Durban. It is the question upon which the prosperity of South Africa and the civilization of the black races much depend. If a man can be taught to want, really to desire and to covet the good things of the world, then he will work for them and by working he will be civilized. If, when they are presented to his notice, he still despises them,—if when clothes and houses and regular meals and education come in his way, he will still go naked, and sleep beneath the sky, and eat grass or garbage and then starve, and remain in his ignorance though the schoolmaster be abroad, then he will be a Savage to the end of the chapter. It is often very hard to find out whether the good things have been properly proffered to the Savage, and whether the man's neglect of them has come from his own intellectual inability to appreciate them or from the ill