expect more effort than we find.  When education becomes as general in South Africa as it is among the people of Europe then it will be possible to institute fair comparisons.  Education is the discoverer of ability and without the opportunity it gives genius will languish and die unknown, as said that acute observer of human nature, Machiavelli, in speaking about the leaders of antiquity, “Without opportunity their powers of mind would have been extinguished and without those powers the opportunity would have come in vain."[20]

Assuming that the capacity for acquiring Western education and civilisation is no greater in the American Negroes than in the Bantu we may note the opinion of a recent student of the race question in America, as being in point here.  In his book “Children of the Slaves,” Mr. Stephen Graham says “The fact is, Negrodom has to a great extent qualified to vote.  Half the population is sunk in economic bondage and illiteracy, but the other half has more than average capacity for citizenship."[21]

The opinion so often expressed in South Africa that “Education is a kind of thing that doesn’t agree with the Nigger” is born of the same feeling that animated the power-holding minorities against the illiterate majorities in Europe not many years ago, and, in justice to the minorities, it must be conceded that the effect of education upon the masses has always been disturbing and often disastrous.

Speaking now from my own experience I can say that I have found no ill-effects from education in Natives; on the contrary, I have found, as a rule, that the Native who has had an ordinary school education is generally more amenable to precept and admonition than the raw kaffir though less bovinely submissive and therefore more resentful of indignities offered to him.  The fact that the educated kaffir comes more often in the way of committing theft and dishonesty than his illiterate brother is in itself sufficient to account for the not unduly large number of theftuous crimes with which he is credited as a class; but on the other hand, the propensity in the primitive male that leads to sexual assaults upon women is undoubtedly checked and lessened by education and school-discipline.  Education will bring out and give scope to all that is good and all that is bad in the Native as it has done with the white man.  If the Natives have not sunk to those depths of infamy which are disclosed daily in the criminal courts of Europe and America it is not because of want of the usual percentage of criminally disposed people among them but because of want of education and opportunity.  Commercial immorality and developed swindling are impossible without a commerce, but the cupidity that begets these forms of vice is not lacking amongst the Natives and waits only for the opportunities which developed commerce affords.  The potential capacity for criminality and immorality is indeed no less among the Natives than among Europeans.  Theft, arson, murder and