CHAPTER XI

PROBLEMS OF CIVILIZATION IN CONTACT WITH COLORED RACES:

ECONOMIC PROBLEMS

The condition of white labor in South Africa is well set forth by the Transvaal Indigency Commission: "We have taken evidence on the question of the effect of the presence of the native (negro) on the habits and institutions of the white population from all parts of South Africa. It is a subject which it is impossible to neglect. It enters into every aspect of the social, political and economic life of the country, and no problem such as that with which we are dealing (the problem of destitution among whites of South Africa) can be properly understood until the bearing of the native question upon it is taken into account. We have found that in all parts of South Africa it exercises a dominant influence on the life and habits of the white population . . . colored labor, inefficient though it is, is cheaper to the employer for unskilled work than white labor. . When the white man does, therefore, get unskilled labor to do, he is paid a wage based on Kaffir standards of work, which is barely sufficient to keep body and soul together. The

the white man, . . the wages of the white man cannot permanently fall below the average amount it costs to maintain himself and his family at a minimum level of subsistence required of a member of civilized society. The native, on the other hand, need not earn sufficient wages with which to pay for even these modest requirements, because he has a subsidiary source of livelihood in the produce of his tribal lands and the labor of his women and children." (The male native practices plural marriage in South Africa. His wives and children support him, enabling him to work for a remuneration impossible to the white man.)

As a result of widespread miscegenation, there are now almost half as many mixbreeds as whites in the Union of South Africa. South Africa has difficulty enough in dealing with the full black, but the mongrel constitutes a problem seemingly beyond the powers of the civilization. The native problem is talked of by all. In pulpit, press and private intercourse it is the foremost question, but miscegenation has qualified the purity of so many South African families that there is a general disinclination to treat the near-white problem with frankness. The pure whites do not relish the incoming of mulattoes, but they have no social or political ma

1Extracts from Part II of the Transvaal Indigency Commission's Report, 1912.

chinery by which they may effectively exclude them. So the mixbreeds enter white circles-enter to stay.

The mixbreeds, by unions with the whites, are eliminating the pure Caucasian element upon which civilization depends. The negroes are so numerous, constituting four-fifths of the population, that their numbers appall the whites. But the negro as negro is not the immediate peril. It is not the "assagai," but the "tar brush," that imperils the civilization.1 If South Africa remains white, the civilization implanted by three hundred years of arduous toil will endure, the reins of government will be retained by Caucasian hands, even though the negro increase a hundred fold. It is not black warriors, but colored brothers-in-law who will eventually submerge the Caucasian culture. Sixty centuries of racial interminglings have given evidence that the white man rules in his racial purity and that chaos reigns when he becomes a hybrid.

If the white man is "unjust" to the black, he may become just. If he has not used his personal influence for the good of the negro, he may yet do so. If the white man does not effect the segregation of the negro in this generation, he will have opportunity in the next, but the white man become hybrid will not have opportunity of regaining racial status.

1The "assagai" is the spear used by the African negro. "Tar brush"-a popular term used to indicate the strain of black blood that qualifies the race purity of many so-called Caucasians.

All other requirements are incidental or temporary— race purity is fundamental.

In South Africa, the mulatto question is a part, and that the most dangerous part, of the "native question," though South Africa, for reasons mentioned, does not treat it as such. The negro has driven the white from the field of unskilled labor, the half-caste is driving the white from the skilled trades. The negro has pauperized the "poor whites"; the mulatto and the coolie are pauperizing the middle-class whites, making the country possible for land baron and mine magnate only. The economic problem, including that felt by the smaller merchants, is further complicated by the presence of more than a hundred thousand Indians from Asia, who were encouraged to come to the country by the propertied class of colonials. Their standards of living are far beneath those of the Caucasian, and they furnish a very difficult problem, for they are more capable than the negroids and they constantly threaten to involve the British Empire in discord by demanding equalization with the whites.

South Africa is the wealthiest country in the world in proportion to white population, and threefourths of the white population are the poorest in the world in proportion to the national wealth. But the negro problem there differs only in degree from the negro problem in the Southern States, and what the negro problem is in South Africa today it will

be in certain of the Southern States tomorrow. The white man is hardest pressed in South Africa, and it is here that the difficulties surrounding civilization in contact with the negro can best be seen; however, the tendency of the negro to concentrate in "the black belt" of the United States, if it continues, will render the position of white labor as difficult in this portion of the nation as white labor in South Africa.

Contract labor, which is in effect a modified form of slavery, prevails in South Africa and in certain other British colonies, and this institution, like slavery, has its tap root in economy. Negroes are taxed to make them work. Pressed from his home to the white man's labor market in order to secure money with which to pay the tax judiciously imposed for this purpose, the negro comes under the terms of the contract labor regulations, the penalties of which, like those of slavery, are administered by criminal not civil jurisprudence. The scheme is devised by the land and mine owners to insure a supply of cheap colored labor. The influence of these two cliques is all powerful in political circles, and hence the unlikeliness of a change such as will benefit the white laboring class.

Contract labor, without which the negro workman would be uncontrollable and hence unprofitable, is the corner-stone of South African capitalism, and capitalism, as the expression of the prevailing eco