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 centuries, and it can hardly be
doubted that if the early builders of the great cultures had been left
in isolation instead of being stimulated continually from without
through foreign learning and influence neither Ancient Rome nor Modern
Europe would have come into being. Isolation has always and everywhere