There are also some who think that the Native has no great capacity for
mechanics and engineering generally, but I have seen so many instances
of mechanical resourcefulness and inventiveness in Natives who have only
had a superficial acquaintance with machinery that I cannot doubt that
with technical education like that given to European apprentices they
will attain to proficiency equal to that of the whites.

I do not profess the knowledge of a pedagogue in these matters. I speak
simply from an insight gained through many years of observation and
study at first hand. I have listened to thousands of old Native men of
many different tribes in my time, I have heard them speak their inmost
thoughts, not through interpreters--who ever learned anything through an
interpreter?--I have studied these people in and out of Court,
officially and privately, in their kraals and in the veld during many
years, and I say that I can find nothing whatever throughout the whole
gamut of the Native's conscious life and soul to differentiate him from
other human beings in other parts of the world. In his sense of sorrow
and of humour, in his moral intuitions, in his percipience of proportion
and in all the subtle elements that go to make up the mental
constitution of modern man, I see no difference in him from the European
variety which to-day stands at the highest point of human achievement,
but I freely confess that the African Native has so far shown a lack of
that will to think analytically and critically which in the civilised
man is the result of a continuous discontent with things as they are, a
discontent which has urged him up to his present plane of racial
supremacy.

But the reason for the fact that the African Natives have never thought
as hard and as long as the ancient and modern peoples of other lands