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back on the Lake. This volume, by the way, opened of its own accord at a page whereon were inscribed the names of a Spaniard, a Belgian, and a German-all nobles of high degree, who had spent a night here last September on their way to the moose and wapiti country in the NorthWest. We, who had met them in Winnipeg, chuckled at the idea of their first experience of roughing it in Winnipegosis, but the inhabitants assured us that they had taken it all smiling, and they had evidently convinced the natives that all the good sportsmen are not necessarily of Anglo-Saxon stock. Then the doctor appeared, with an invitation to spend the evening trolling for pickerel in the Mossy River; and we jumped at the chance, paddling the canoe for three or four miles between low grassy banks thick with willow and alder, portaging her past a log boom, and pulling out pickerel of two or three pounds' weight, and then throwing them back again. We landed at a miniature rapid, and fished from the rocks on the shore till the mosquitoes drove us back to open water, and then we drifted home lazily in the moonlight.

There will be more names on the register of the little hotel in a year or so, when sportsmen at home realise what a paradise they have within ten or twelve days of Liverpool. Besides the moose and wapiti and bear that abound in the forests, you can shoot ducks and geese to your heart's content as they fly to and from their feeding-places

over the long points that jut from the lake - shore. The doctor fired off 150 cartridges in a couple of hours last fall. The prairie chicken are very plentiful, and the fact that the Dominion Government has decided to make the Duck and Riding Mountains a permanent timber reserve, and that the vast unorganised territory lying to the west of Lake Winnipegosis is mostly unfit for cultivation, will prevent the game from being driven out for many a year to come. The game-laws now, quite rightly, forbid duck - shooting in the spring, so that we had to confine ourselves to fishing; but we left with the full intention of returning, if possible, in the autumn and engaging the services of some of our Saulteaux friends on the Pine Creek Reserve.

Dauphin, with its hotels, fire-hall, churches, barbers' shops, and public park, seemed to be a centre of civilisation after Winnipegosis. In 1896 the "field" on which the town now stands produced 35 bushels to the acre, and during the previous year crops of 40 and 45 bushels were not uncommon. The land is a rich dark olay loam, and one breaking of the new soil is quite enough to prepare it for a crop, no backsetting being required. Hitherto the great plain of 100 miles by 30, that lies to the south and west, has been thinly settled, but the opening up of new railways is rapidly adding to the population. The principal timber is oak, ash, elm, poplar, and tamarac, and the uncleared

behind us, and we found a third in similar plight at the place where the first accident had occurred the previous day. Here our engine left us in quest of a flat car full of sleepers to mend the roadway, and we got off to inspect damages. The rails had been sprinkled with fresh sand, and the ties were scored deep for fifty yards or more where the derailed cars had ploughed their way along them. There was a little group of hand-cars which had brought up the wrecking-gang, and the men

bush is thick with ash, maple, another train off the track cherry, and saskatoon. We drove for hours in the afternoon through a park-like country that melted away into a low range of distant hills. The Winnipeg train was seven hours late, having been "ditched" 100 miles away in a soft place on the track, but we only caught the fringe of the storm here, and the evening was hot, with the crystalline clearness that comes after rain. The two of us strolled out across the little valley of the Vermilion River, which winds along a grassy stretch of oak and elm, with green paths between the trees, that looked as if they led to some old English manor-house beyond; and we both suffered from that strange phase of nostalgia which occasionally attacks all exiles, I suppose, and which makes you shake yourself to make sure that your present life is not all a dream, from which you will wake up to find yourself at home, on the hillside, with a gun on your shoulder. We sat on the embankment and looked along the rails that stretched away, dark red, with the colour of long-spilled blood, towards the western sky. There were still pools of surface-water along the track, stained with the hues of the sunset; and the white arms of the crossing-posts stood out clear against a background of vaporous gold and rose that foamed up into billowy snow, and then gloomed into dovecolour and purple as the sun sank behind the grey slaty hills. We left "on time" the next morning, though there

was

were working for their lives, maddened by the swarms of hungry mosquitoes from the marsh adjoining. For twenty years, said the "rear-flag," he had never seen them so bad; and it is an actual fact that two of the hands broke down and cried helplessly, tortured out of their manhood by the heat and the flies. Luckily we were only delayed for a couple of hours, and then we steamed smoothly home-past lush restful marshes, from which the long lazy bitterns fluttered gawkily up; past leagues and leagues of fresh young wheat that rippled in the sunlight; past tiny stations where brownlegged children waved frantic salutes from the wooden steps of the "general store"; through jungles of tangled bush and juicy green poplars; and through country that was as trim and formal as a Dutch landscape; till we slowed up at last above a fleet of steamlaunches and canoes on Red River.

the

CHAS. HANBURY-WILLIAMS.

THE AFRICAN COLONY.

THERE are more than sufficient reasons why this book 1 should find readers in our own country at this time. We are only on the threshold of a great task in South Africa, and we have neither learned as yet the greatness of that task nor how to disentangle its leading features amidst the tangled maze of party struggles and recrimination, nor how to separate the central principles which can guide us from that "continuous stream of incidents"-a stream mean and muddy in its source and in its issue-from which it is the desire of some of our Parliamentary legislators to draw the sustenance on which their factious energy may live and thrive. Under the mass of conflicting evidence, amidst the baffling variety of testimony which reaches us from men too much occupied with the grim realities of their daily task to have time to take a calm survey of the whole horizon, it is difficult to form a worthy estimate of the leading principles which must decide the fate of South Africa. But it is just this estimate which Mr Buchan's volume helps us to essay, and we earnestly desire that it may obtain the attention which his work merits, and the careful study which, for its full understanding, it demands.

Mr Buchan does not profess to give any historical account

of the evolution of South Africa as it now is. He can at most indicate some of the forces that have gone to the making of it, and trace in the merest outline the shadowy figures which loom out of the stories of enterprise, and struggle, and failure that have passed across the stage for five centuries, and have left, each of them, some episode of tragedy, to the scene as it now lies before us. He attempts no narrative of recent developments, and studiously avoids discussions as to the network of complicated poli cies and the webs of negotiation that issued in the late war. Such a narrative and such discussions would only divert our attention from the problems which he desires to place before us, and on which, as citizens of an empire now brought face to face with them, we are bound to exercise our own judgment. That judgment of Imperial citizenship-how often it is shirked, with how much factious venom it is perverted, and with what imbecile futility its conclusions are often formed!

The drama of the past of South Africa is picturesque enough. But over by far the greater part of it an impenetrable curtain of oblivion has fallen, which no historical research will ever draw back. We cannot trace the evolution of the native races, nor the dire

1 The African Colony: Studies in the Reconstruction. By John Buchan. William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh and London. 1903.

struggles through which they emerged into the present tribes, which are clearly enough graded and distinguished, although they preserve no certain marks of their relationship. We see the successive footmarks of races of a far higher civilisation even in the remote past. Ethnological science and archæological research may hazard conjectures as to the sources of that civilisation, and may some day supply us with some plausible theories. As yet the Zimbabwe ruins are only grim monuments, which have something of the mystery and remoteness of Nature, and which mock the inquiries of the palæographist. In the centuries that lie comparatively near us we see the great epopee of Portuguese enterprise gradually dwindling into inefficiency and decay. From no part of South African history can a lesson of sterner significance be drawn for us than that which is conveyed by the history of Portuguese failure; and Mr Buchan points that lesson in some graphic pages. It teaches us the diverse errors that may mar colonial enterprise- errors which the genius of our race has taught us how to avoid. France fails as a colonising Power because the Frenchman never can forget Paris and her boulevards; "he is for ever an exile, not a settler." Portugal failed from precisely the opposite defect. The Portuguese colonisation broke down because the Portuguese forgot Portugal. "The white man's pride died in their hearts." They sank towards the level of the natives, with whom the white man can co

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exist as master, and as master only. As Mr Buchan lightly says, "Concubinage is bad, but legitimate marriage with halfcastes is infinitely worse for the morale of a people." In spite of all the ravings of Exeter Hall, it needs only a very small acquaintance with the real problems of South Africa to burn into the conviction of any one not besotted with sentimental folly the absolute truth of these words. Justice, fair dealing, that toleration which is of the very essence of real mastery, all these must be enforced; but the slightest tendency towards a flaccid intermixture of equality is the fruit only of feebleness and infatuation, and that way ruin lies. The Englishman owes his success as Я colonist to the fact that he can be described, in described, in words quoted by Mr Buchan from Emerson, as one of "a people scattered by their wars and affairs over the whole earth, and home - sick to а man. Emerson hardly understood the significance of his own words; but in them lies the secret of our colonial empire. We have "decentralised our energy"; we could not be true colonists if we wholly decentralised our sentiments and our memories.

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We have largely borrowed from Mr Buchan's own words to describe this defect of the Portuguese enterprise, with all its romance and heroism, and to enforce the lesson which it has for us. Of the Dutch colonisation and of its collisions with our own, it is no part of Mr Buchan's scheme to give us a historical account. What he attempts to portray

are only the salient features of the character of the Boers, whom it is the task of future administration to weld into one nation with ourselves. Mr Buchan eschews both sentiment and rancour in his description. The Boer character presents & strange amalgam. In spite of all the dulness and lack of imagination; the strange perversity that is so apt to turn to obstinate lawlessness; the perverted moral sense that combines mendacity with a sincere stubbornness of religious conviction; in spite of an occasional ruthlessness of cruelty, which seems almost borrowed from contact with savagery, -Mr Buchan gives to the Boers full credit for that strength of will which made them "present an admirable front

to savage nature.” The Boer

suffers from no such delusions
as are indulged in by those
Exeter Hall friends of his with
whom political exigencies have
brought him into a comical
alliance. He is subject to no
sentimentalities about a Kaffir
brotherhood. If he suffers such
sentimentalities to be discussed
in his presence without evincing
the most emphatic disgust, it
is only because there are no
bounds to the facile adaptive-
ness of his diplomatic astute-
ness. If he lacks imagination,
he is also superior to any of its
delusions. If he is stubborn,
he also knows how to respect
firmness in others. No fan-
tastic Utopia will ever attract
him and no doctrinaire poli-
tical abstractions will
make him risk his practical
wellbeing. Such a character
makes a man a good citizen

ever

under a firm rule: an inveterate intriguer in the face of vacillation and weakness. There is no unfriendliness in Mr Buchan's final verdict.

"If the Boer is once won to our side we shall have secured one of the greatest colonising forces in the world. We can ask for no better If the dwellers upon a frontier. African possessions are to be perplateaux of our Central and East manently held by the white man, I believe it will be by this people who have never turned their back upon a country which seemed to promise good pasture-land. Other races send forth casual pioneers, who return and report and then go elsewhere; but the Boer takes his wife and family and all his belongings, and in a decade is part of the soil. In the midst of any savagery he will plant his rude domesticity, and the land is won. With all her colonising activity, Britain can ill afford to lose from her flag a force so masterful, persistent, and sure."

After the history of South Africa, traced in outline from the murky shadows of the past, Mr Buchan naturally passes to the description of the country as it presents itself to the traveller to-day. No scene eludes so easily and with such consummate indifference the pen of the literary landscape-painter, and yet none fixes its impression on us with such indelible marks. This is not due to any persistent monotony of tone. On the contrary, it would be hard to equal the variety that strikes the traveller in the forty-eight hours' journey from Capetown to Johannesburg. We pass, in a few hours, from the green foliage that skirts the sea under the majestic slopes of Table Mountain, and are lost amid the gaunt cliffs and towering heights of the Hex River Mountains and the Draken

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