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