coloured boys and youths, by reason of the lack of the right kind of
home-influence, which is the result of the unfavourable position in
life of the bulk of their parents, naturally gravitate towards the
levels where it becomes difficult to avoid crime. But despite all these
adverse conditions that press so heavily against them the coloured
people of South Africa, taken as a whole, stand justified of the
calumnies uttered against them. The coloured people as a whole are not
behind the whites in anything except in the lack of opportunity for
education and self-improvement, a lack caused not by themselves, but by
their inimical surroundings.

That many of the coloured people are immoral and shiftless need not be
denied; the same may be said about the "poor whites," who as a class
perplex well-meaning legislators, but neither of these proved
accusations give reason for thinking that either of these classes is
inherently inferior to their more favourably-placed fellow-beings. We
must always remember the tremendous handicap of being reared in the
depressing surroundings of sloth and squalor. I have seen hundreds of
poor whites--as white as any blond German could wish to be--who seemed
utterly unfit for the complexities of civilised life, but I have also
seen many of the children of these people who, after being removed from
their home surroundings, have risen to positions of usefulness and
trust, in which they have earned reputations for integrity and capacity.
The trenchant saying of a British working-man is in point, "Treat a man
like a dog and he will behave like a dog," and the corollary is equally
true, that if you treat a man as a man he will, as a rule, rise and quit
himself like a man.

The familiar cry that once white blood is diluted with black it is "all
up" with our civilisation is not convincing when we remember that the