some means whereby the portions of India not under native sovereigns, and all those Crown Colonies and Protectorates at present without representative institutions, were represented directly in the Imperial Parliament by a few persons whom the natives of the aforesaid countries have freely elected?

As a rule an unbroken rule, I believe-when India or the Crown Colonies and Protectorates have to be represented in London or elsewhere at any great conference, ceremony, or function, they are represented not by natives of those countries (however distinguished they may be), but by English officials designated by the India Office or by the Crown Agents for the Colonies.

But there must be 'give' as well as 'take' in any earnest attempt to advance with the times and gradually to pave the way from precedent to precedent' towards a more perfectly governed empire. There are miseducated natives of India who are attempting to deal more harmfully with their mother land than the stupidest British soldier who, in the days before Lord Curzon's or Lord Kitchener's reforms, may have kicked a coolie in the stomach and have broken his spleen, or have shot at a native marker at the butts for not cheating in the score; yet who was-and is-the one certain bulwark against an Afghan raid. Some true friend of India, some native of India should compile from the most accurate records available the history of the people of India under the Mughal Empire between 1526 and 1761; or, better still, from the time that the Muhammadans invaded India in 711 down to the real effective establishment of the British power. During this period the soil of India has been blood-soaked, the loss of life has been frightful, the sum of human agony and misery unapproached elsewhere (that is, at least, what I deduce from such studies of Indian history as the ordinary Englishman may acquire, made perhaps more real to me by my own journeys in India). If, on the one hand, there are criticisms and complaints of the present method of administering India, or even of the new method under Lord Morley's reforms, an honest man would put into the hands of the Indian student not only a legitimate criticism of the government of to-day, but an exact record of the government of the past. This student, then, might be brought to realise what would happen to India if the British withdrew or were driven out of it within the next fifty years: in all probability a desolating warfare between Muhammadan and Hindu ; Pagan and Buddhist; Chinese and Tibetans versus Bengalis; Afghans (the worst of all India's enemies) against Sikhs (the best of all India's peoples). There are at the present time only two religions in India that have made for peace and humanity—the Jains and the Christians; and they only number unitedly 4,300,000.

4

What would it mean to India, the loss of British credit and capital? 1

Who would invest money in India-or at what rate of interest-without the guarantee of Great Britain ?

What causes have been gained, what aspirations secured by murder and outrage? There would probably be now established the selfgovernment of Ireland had it not been for the work of the Irish dynamiters and the assassins of Cavendish and Burke. The English people can, fortunately, be persuaded, chaffed, and sermonised into the granting of reforms; but, so far as their history goes, they have never been driven to legislation by deeds of violence. One can make oneself vastly disagreeable to a tyrannical minority without breaking the law. Any more bomb outrages in India, or shooting at trains (slaying almost invariably people quite unconcerned with the issues at stake), or assassinations in England, will do far more than the stupidity of English Jingoes to impede the progress of representative institutions in India. Let constitutional methods (and the Irish Home Rule party have taught us their efficiency) be patiently pursued, and India will slowly ripen towards self-government; women in Britain, as in Australia, New Zealand, and Colorado, will receive that franchise which is unquestionably their due; and other grievances and inadequacies be gradually set right.

But there should be no backward step in the British Empire. And we are threatened with such now in South Africa. By the Acts of 1853 and 1892 the franchise under the constitution of Cape Colony was conferred on all inhabitants of that Colony without distinction of race or colour. Under the existing circumstances of that Colony a property qualification of a moderate kind has been wisely instituted (it is actually the possession of property worth 751. or the receipt of a minimum salary or wages of 50l. per annum); and all persons applying to be registered as voters are required to prove their literacy by being able to write intelligibly their name and address. The white population of Cape Colony at the present day in round figures is 580,000. The coloured' population is 1,820,000. This last is divided into 300,000 coloured persons of mixed European and African descent and 1,520,000 negroes. Can it be said by anybody who reviews the history of Cape Colony since 1853 that the coloured element in the population has abused these privileges? It has even been so modest in exercising them that (I think I am right in saying), although many districts of Cape Colony are inhabited by nothing but negroes, a large proportion of whom are well educated, they have not even as yet returned to the Cape Parliament a negro to represent them they have preferred to elect a white man. But this is partly because they are completely satisfied with things as they stand. Possibly very few of them cast their votes, but some fifty thousand of them possess the franchise and could exercise it if they pleased; and with that they are perfectly content.

Yet I grieve to learn and to state that there is a powerful party, supported mainly by the Dutch element in the Transvaal and the British in Natal, which desires, as soon as the Act of Union is passed,

and sanctioned by King Edward, to disfranchise the coloured people of Cape Colony. I am brushing aside sophistries and the involved hypocrisies which spring so naturally to the mouth and pen of the Anglo-Saxon (and the Dutchman is simply a descendant of the AngloSaxons who did not migrate to Britain). It is on this issue that a deputation has now come to England to plead with the British Government as a condition of its sanctioning the union of all South Africa (an event which almost everyone heartily desires to see accomplished) to exact a promise from the responsible Governments in South Africa that the status quo of the native' franchise question shall be respected -in other words, that after the unification of South Africa the South African Parliament shall not take away the franchise as it exists at present from the coloured and negro peoples in Cape Colony. Educated negro opinion in South Africa, as represented by Mr. Mangena and others, asks for no more than this. They realise the extremely difficult positions at present between the two races in the Transvaal and Natal; they realise that, in cutting off Basutoland from the Orange Free State and in guaranteeing the independence and self-government of the Basuto from 1868 onwards, the British Government practically provided a solution of the native' question in the Orange State. The country now occupied by the Boers and British settlers in the Orange Colony was by the valour of the Boers conquered from the devastating hordes of Moselekatse, at a time when it had been almost depopulated. But for the Boer victory over Amangwane and Amandebele there would have been scarcely any human inhabitants left in what is now Basutoland. Even more has this been the case with Natal, where the negro population was reduced (it is estimated) to scarcely more than 10,000 by the raids and massacres of Dingiswayo, Chaka, and Dingane, before it became a British Colony. Now the negro population of Natal proper stands at 700,000.5

The white population of the whole Colony of Natal (which now has an area of 35,371 square miles) is only about 95,000. There are only six negroes in Natal who possess the franchise at the present moment. Well, so be it. The circumstances of Natal are difficult and peculiar, and nothing is to be gained by forcing the question of negro franchise. Far better for negroes, as well as for white men, at the present day is a Natal governed by Europeans than a Natal governed by negroes. If the Kafirs of Natal cannot live happily without obtaining a vote, they must set to work to educate themselves and make money: above all, to make money. The possession of money is the surest route to the purchase of freedom. Let the negro not forget that it was by incessant industry and the making of money

That these Bantu negroes have prospered and increased under British rule is shown by the fact that the present population of Zululand-until recently governed by native chiefs-is barely 250,000, as compared with the 700,000 of old Natal.

that the Jews fought their way to an honoured position in the modern world.

Then as to the Transvaal. That, too, was a country becoming rapidly depopulated through the savagery of its negro peoples until it was taken possession of by the emigrant Boers. As to the regions beyond, they have only recently emerged from a long-continued period of slave raids and intertribal slaughter. Their education is proceeding apace under missionary societies; yet their right to the franchise will scarcely become a burning question for the next thirty years.

But all educated black and coloured men in South Africa at the present day (under which category there are at least 500,000 people) have their eyes fixed on the franchise in Cape Colony. If this is taken away by the new South African Parliament (by the two-thirds majority suggested), I make bold to say that the seeds will be sown of a profound discontent with the white man's rule and an utter disbelief in the advantages of belonging to the British Empire. I do not think that a more disastrous step backwards could be taken in Africa. I would hope that the bishops and archbishops who are now rightly agitating on behalf of the maltreated natives of the Congo, of whom we are one of the guardians and guarantors, will not the less raise their voices on behalf of the enfranchised negroes and mulattos, Grikwa, and Malays of Cape Colony, from whom it may be attempted to remove that franchise (which they have never hitherto abused) when the union of South Africa is effected.

I would press this question merely on the plea of expediency, and not of sentiment. Even supposing during the next twenty years that the coloured electors of Cape Colony did elect a coloured man to represent them in the supreme Parliament of South Africa? Why should that be such an odious possibility to the future million and a half of white people in that sub-continent, wherein there is also a coloured-mainly negro-population of 7,000,000? Surely it is not the 'Imperial' way of looking at the question, with such possibilities as may be dawning before the great South African Dominion? It seems to me a provincial, a narrow-minded point of view, such as one should not expect from prominent white politicians in the four great Colonies of South Africa, who, besides knowing well the needs of their own immediate districts, ought to be well informed and deeply interested in the remainder of Africa. You cannot detach South Africa from the rest of Africa, for this fact, among others, that in all the territory between Tanganyika and the Cape of Good Hope, which is under the British flag, there is a negro population of nearly 7,000,000, at least six and a half millions of which speak Bantu languages closely related to those of East, West, and Equatorial Africa. The missioneducated natives of Buganda and of other parts of East Africa; of Nyasaland and of the Barotse country; of the Congo basin; of the

great British West African possessions, have all got their attention turned to the present state of affairs in South Africa.

Again, it seems to be assumed by the real 'Little Englanders,' the people who will not observe and connote, that all these African peoples north of the Zambezi have no voice, no understanding, no means of making themselves agreeable or disagreeable to the Imperial idea. But they have. A large number of them speak, read, and write English with fluency; they have their own newspapers; they are visiting England, and are being educated there in increasing numbers. In the West Indies as in West Africa the negroes are at present ardent Imperialists because they have found in the British Empire an immense relief from native conditions of anarchy and bloodshed, vast resources in capital, and an unfaltering spirit of justice which has, especially of late, made no distinctions of race and colour. These people and the still small class (proportionately) of educated men in India will observe with the greatest interest the course which will be taken by the British Government in regard to the protection of the interests of the coloured' people in South Africa, and their own views as to the advantages of belonging to the British Empire will inevitably be tempered by the results of such action.

H. H. JOHNSTON.