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 if it has 'stayed the rot' and tided the country over the Kaffir labour crisis. Or, in the other event, the likelier on the whole, the Chinese experiment is destined to a longer continuance, long enough to make its secondary effects worth considering; in that case Milner has given his enemies the hostage of a direct prediction, and the figures are filed for reference. The tide of white immigration into the Transvaal, especially of white men with families, will save or sink him, so far as this question is concerned, as mathematically as an Egyptian Budget depends on a good or bad Nile. Let the white tide sink with the rising of the yellow one, as opponents say it will, and Milner as a prophet is self-condemned. Let the two rise together, as he declares they must, with certain broad effects upon the ratio, not of white to colour, but of British to Boer, and Milner is vindicated. Or, if not that—for this policy has had breathed against it

at any rate, in that case, the heart will die out of the anti-Chinese cry throughout the Empire as it has died already in South Africa. I do not mean by this that no importance attaches to the other objections which have been raised, moral or constitutional; but only that, on the assumption stated, means will somehow be found to meet these in the case of the indentured Chinamen, as in the case of the indentured Indians on whom Natal depends, or as in the case of the pre-existing Kaffir labourers on the Rand itself, most of whom are temporary human exports, forwarded without wives, from Portuguese Africa, and all of whom are, in a degree only less than the Chinamen, and under our pledge to the Boers must remain, Gibeonites, helots, persons in a non-civic status.

It is natural that the hostility should die harder in parts of the Empire which are innocent of colour problems, and therefore unhardened to the makeshifts