in no less measure than the average European city-dweller.  To avoid the ever-present chance of being found guilty of witchcraft, which in the past meant always death, the African has had to develop the faculty of lying to a high point of efficiency, and no one who knows him will contend that he is inferior to the European in this respect.  The natural education of the Natives include the art of lying as the education of Spartan boys included the practice of larceny.  Lying, we know, develops the memory, for a good memory is essential to successful lying.  Some of the ruses and stratagems thought out by Natives fleeing from the king’s wrath or the witch doctor’s doom, of which I have heard from the Natives themselves, have seemed to me to be in subtilty of design and in daring of execution as admirable as any that may be found in contemporary detective fiction, while the fortitude with which defeat and death has been accepted by some of the unfortunate fugitives would evoke admiration in the least impressionable of men.  I say therefore that those who deny to the Africans the capacity for sustained collective and purposive effort of mind and body because these qualities have so far not been shown by them in the building up of a civilisation of their own must consider the fact that the nations which to-day lead the world in all the ways of civilisation remained for thousands of years without leaders and without achievement while the people who now lag behind produced those mighty men that led and paved the way to the great civilisations of the past, and I think that we must recognise in that fact a lesson to teach us that present inferiority is no proof of permanent inability, wherefore it may well be that the Natives of Africa will some day rise and compete with their present overlords in the mastery of all the arts and crafts of a modern state.

“But,” says the white South African, voicing the general opinion, “this is all very well; the Native may have the brains, but he does not, even now when he has the chance of proving himself, show the same capacity for strenuous and continued effort that the white man has shown.  He cannot stand alone; if left to himself he will sink back rapidly into savagery.”

That the South African Natives are still in a stage where they cannot stand alone, so that if left entirely to their own devices they would lapse back into barbarism, is not, I agree, open to doubt.  But would not the same fate overtake any nation or community, regardless of race, if it were completely cut off from all outside help and influence.  The civilised Romans who conquered Britain in the early Christian era, no doubt, looked upon the primitive Britons as a feeble folk when compared with themselves, but the erstwhile slaves have since demonstrated their capacity for developing a civilisation utterly beyond the imagination of their foreign masters.  Rome was not built in a day.  The rearing of Western civilisation required many