rape are the most common forms of crime committed by the Natives to-day because the opportunities for perpetrating systematic fraud are as yet few among them.  Unnatural immorality is common enough in the kraals and in the “compounds,” for the Natives have their “perverts” as well as the whites.  At the Native “beer-drinks” crapulous lewdness is as common as it is in the bucolic orgies of European peasantry.  There is no “Native” innocence nor is there any “Native” vice, the virtue and the vice, the capacity and the character of the Native are the human qualities and failings that are common to mankind.

The Native is no more able to withstand the enervating effects of isolation than the European, he is no more anxious to work hard for small wages, no more and no less capable of honesty and thrift, no more and no less endowed with human virtue, no more and no less cursed with the vices of the world, no more human and no less divine than is his master, the white man.

When Machiavelli asserts in general of men that “they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowards, covetous, and as long as you succeed they are yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life and children—­when the need is far distant; but when it approaches they turn against you.”  He thought, no doubt, of white men only, but to me his appreciation of the baser side of human nature seems no less applicable to the black people of South Africa, and when, on the other hand, Shakespeare declaims: 

     “What a piece of work is man!  How noble in reason!  How infinite in
     faculty!”

he also, we may be sure, thought of his own kind, but to me, again, the beautiful words, which usage cannot cheapen, express the wonder I have often felt at the wealth of imagery, the mental grasp, the wisdom and the natural dignity in very many untutored natives I have met with, and it is this experience which makes me believe that the present difference between the Europeans and the Native race is one of degree and not of kind, and that, in the fullness of time, achievement will follow the latent genius with which, as I hold, nature has endowed, in equal degree with ourselves, the great Bantu branch of the human family.

Yet I am no encomiast of the Natives, for I know them to be no better than other people, but search as I may, I cannot find that Native character which is alleged to be inherently different from the white man’s character.  Did not Mark Twain find, as the most conspicuous result of his travels, that “there is a good deal of human nature everywhere,” and is it not true that human nature is everywhere the same?