there the conditions were different.  They were new countries, which attracted large numbers of white men, and, when they found the gold fields did not pay, they made homes for themselves on the land.  Unfortunately, that state of affairs does not exist at the present time in South Africa, and that brings us face to face with the great problem on which Sir Frederick Young has touched—­the great problem which we have always before us—­viz., how two races utterly alien to each other, the black and the white, are to live and increase side by side.  South Africa is the only country in the world where that problem exists, excepting the Southern States of North America.  This is a great question, on which the future of South Africa depends.  Unfortunately, the white men do not work in a country where the black race flourishes.  If the white man does not become a “boss,” he sinks to the level of a mean white man.  The difficulty is to get a state of society in which the white race shall flourish side by side with the black; and when people talk about the “local politicians,” the “average Cape politician,” and the like, they should remember we have to deal with this enormous problem—­that we are anxious to do justice to the “black,” and at the same time we are naturally anxious to see the European population flourish.  I believe the gold fields will attract a large European population.  The wages are enormous.  There are 20,000 black men, without a stitch upon them, earning as much as eighteen shillings a week a-piece, and getting as much food as they can eat, in the mines of Johannesburg.  People talk about the treatment of the blacks.  Nobody dares to treat them badly, because they would run away.  There is a competition for them, and the black man has an uncommonly rosy time of it.  The white men naturally won’t work under the same conditions as the blacks.  I saw a letter from an operative cautioning his fellow artisans against going out.  He says, “We get thirty shillings a day, but it is a dreadful place to live in.”  I ask the operatives in England to mistrust that statement. ("What is the cost of living?”) You can live at the club very well indeed for L10 a month—­the club, mind you, where the aristocracy live.  It is idle to tell me the honest artisan cannot live.  In addition to the black and white population, there is another problem, and that is, the influx of Arabs, who creep down the East Coast through the door of Natal.  They are gradually ousting the English retail trader.  You may go to up-country towns, and in whole streets you will see these yellow fellows, sitting there in their muslin dresses, where formerly there were English traders.  In places where we want to cultivate the English population, that is a very serious thing.  Our yellow friends come under the garb of British subjects from Bombay, and are making nests in the Transvaal and elsewhere by ousting the English retail trader.  Sir Frederick Young has alluded to State colonisation.