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one acre in every 500 is capable of immediate use for the production of wheat crops; but a very much larger portion will produce mealies, Kafir-corn, pumpkins, and the like. It may be as well to mention here that the word "dam" in Africa means reservoir, and not "containing wall," as it does here.

The reason of this apparent infertility of the largest portion of the country is, not that the climate is excessively drynot that the Transvaal is subject to drought (which it is not) -but because wheat, as a summer or rainy-season crop, is subject to rust, and therefore can only be profitably grown as a dry-season or winter crop under irrigation. At one time large breadths of land were under this cereal, of which it happened that by far the largest portion lay in the feverveld, and has since been practically abandoned.

Besides this cause for the abandonment of wheat-culture, there was the enormous expense of the waggon transport required to draw it from the farms to distant markets. This is even now so great that it ought not to be reasonably expected that Transvaal farmers, for many years to come, should attempt to produce more than is likely to be required for immediate consumption in their own neighbourhoods. Taking the year through, the average price of the transport of corn from the wheat-growing districts of the Transvaal to "Pieter Maritzburg" (Natal) will not be less than 16s. per cwt.—that is, of course, where the article is carried by hired waggons. If, on the other hand, the grower attempts to perform his own carriage, thereby earning the money which would otherwise be expended on transport, he must be absent on a journey that can be reckoned by months from his homestead and family, to the great neglect of his other and perhaps better interests. Common-sense will show that while this is the case, farmers, whether they be Dutchmen or Englishmen, are not likely to go in for extensive cropping. Circumstances occasionally arise that promote a local demand for corn at high prices, such as wars, movement of troops, and gold-rushes; but such isolated and almost accidental markets, the duration of which cannot be computed, and sudden demands, the extent of which cannot be preestimated with any degree of accuracy, are not likely to

encourage steady and "persistent effort in any direction. Even if a railway is made leading to a port of shipment, there will still be considerable difficulties to be got over before the best parts of the Transvaal become the fields of waving grain that imaginative persons anticipate. There are dams to be built and lands to be enclosed at an expense of millions before corn cultivation and export can ever become of serious importance as a source of material prosperity for the dwellers north of the Vaal.

Pumpkins, maize (Anglo - African mealies), oat - forage, potatoes, and the like, in sufficient quantity for the needs of the country, can be grown without any marked extension of the lands at present under tillage; and the supply of these minor products and daily necessaries can be increased without involving any great additional expenditure for works of irrigation. So far as present appearances go, the Boer system of large farms, on which herds of cattle and sheep can pick up a cheap subsistence, but on each of which some small running water indicates a naturally inexpensive and convenient site for a cottage and a garden, with perhaps ten or twelve acres of plough-land, is the only one under which the Transvaal can be said to be habitable by Europeans. If English emigrants choose to select Central South Africa as a field for their labours, they must to a very great extent begin under similar conditions to those in which the Boers exist.1

African farming does not promise large fortunes; and enterprise will find in Africa few opportunities for extensive and readily remunerative improvements. Progress for years to come must be slow. Success is not to be achieved by rushes; and I feel myself bound, as a public writer, to warn people not to be led away by the glowing accounts of interested land-jobbers, or of enthusiastic travellers, into dreams of high farming, wonderful improvements, and immense returns in connection with any part of the Transvaal. It is a fine country to settle in, for a man of moderate expectations,

1 "The English and Scotch in South Africa have gone there mostly to make fortunes, and to return when they are made. The Dutch alone are attached to the soil; and unless we change our ways, the Dutch must be the ruling race there."-FROude.

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who hopes, by the exercise of thrift and energy, to leave to his family the means of comfortable subsistence, as rich peasants or second-class graziers. The emigrant must, from the first, look upon himself entirely as a settler and a colonist; and on South Africa not only as his own home, but as the birth and abiding place of any descendants he may be blessed with. No idea of the speedy acquisition of wealth, with a subsequent return to England amid all the glory and éclat of successful adventure, must be indulged in. If such bright anticipations are formed, they must be realised in Australasia, New Zealand, or elsewhere, for they certainly seldom can be in South Africa.

In fact, the intending South African settler, if he means farming in the Transvaal, must look to becoming a Boera rich Boer, a successful Boer, and a well-washed and nicelydressed Boer; but a South African Boer, though not a Dutchman for all that. His children will learn Kafir and Dutch before they can speak a word of English; and although for generations to come they may speak of England as "home," yet in a very few years they will have become Africanders, in feelings, instinct, and prejudices. The world for them will have all but stopped. Still, if I were an English farmer with some means, but not enough to provide well and handsomely for a growing family; or a man blessed with a large family, and a capital utterly disproportionate to the position in life which they were born to, and in which I hoped to place them, I think I should go to the Transvaal-to its wider fields-its freedom from pretence and expense, its immunity from the inflexible tyranny of certain social enactments, its cheerfulness, its economy, and its stagnation. I should be very happy even in a house built of dried bricks, although the floors could not be boarded for a few years, and snakes wriggled in and out amongst the sheaves of oat - hay in the loft over the stable. My children would have health and lands to inherit, horses to ride, and ample occupation for their hands, if not for their minds; and although they did speak a little Dutch and Kafir, and perhaps visited towns only once a-year, and then for a short time, I think that, with books and newspapers, and perhaps a year or two at school, they might

grow up to be good, useful, and happy men and women. do not think I should even regret their being Boers.

I

Africa will and must have a future, and with that future the descendants, both of Boers and Englishmen, can well afford to be content. There are openings for sheep-farmers on the Transvaal Highveld, as well as on the barren-looking plains of the Free State. A man in time may even have ten or twelve thousand sheep, which will clip 3 or 4 lb. lighter, and 6d. a lb. worse, than Australian sheep of the same age. A man may have a comfortable home, twenty or thirty acres of plough-lands, a decent house, and be able to pay £100, or perhaps £200 per annum for a schoolmaster and a governess, and all this may be obtained from small beginnings by a very small capitalist indeed; but the sensible immigrant must not hope for better or greater things than these. If he does, he will certainly be disappointed. There are men in South Africa whose ideas are too great for the circumstances of the country, and who will not see, in the pride of their wonderful knowledge, and in the enthusiasm of their undoubtedly honourable though misdirected zeal and ambition, that it is not the Boer that has made Africa what it is, but Africa that has formed, moulded, and constrained the industrious Dutchman to be the apparently unprogressive and ignorant farmer the world recognises him to be.

Of course, if roads are opened, markets created, and millions spent on the development of the Transvaal, the country will offer a widely different future, an almost boundless field, for the employment of the energies of the industrial and the agricultural immigrant. Then there will be not only hopeful prospects, but certain wealth for cotton as well as wheat growers, copper-miners, and gold-diggers, with all the countless trades that follow in the wake of enterprise. But I must say that at present I see no prospect of the speedy bringing about of such a state of things; therefore let the merely speculative keep away from the Transvaal, for as yet that little world is unprepared for their advent.

There is one class of investors, however, who can, even now, do well by turning their attention to laying the foundations of future fortunes in South Central Africa. These

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are men with sufficient means to purchase blocks of ground suitable for immediate settlement. In the Transvaal there are large and fertile valleys, which, if divided into allotments and peopled by a race of small cultivators, would repay the investment a hundred-fold in ten years. Here and there throughout South Africa, settlements peopled almost entirely by Germans are to be found; where cultivation, which might almost be called "high," is carried on-where the necessaries and even comforts of life abound—and where compact, and consequently progressive, communities, are already existent.

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Formerly the greatest names of England seem to have been connected with schemes of colonisation and settlement. In the West Indian Islands, on the continent of America, and elsewhere, princely estates were created, and the foundations of almost princely fortunes laid, by Englishmen already possessed of both rank and wealth in their own country. It is much to be wondered at that somewhat similar processes are not taking place at the present day. Every new man cannot have, be he ever so wealthy, large estates commensurate with his fortune or his ambition within the narrow limits of Great Britain and Ireland. In South Africa, in the Transvaal especially, such estates are to be acquired at a comparatively small outlay; and with assisted emigration, tree-planting, and proper subdivisions into farms and allotments, such estates would become, in a very few years, just sources of legitimate pride and princely profit to their proprietors. There are many specialties that would repay the investment of capital even to-day in the Transvaal, chief amongst which will be found to be tobacco-growing, beetcultivation, with the manufacture of beetroot-sugar, and the formation of plantations of trees to provide fuel and timber, which, always scarce, will soon become priceless.

Lydenberg district, especially Origstadt and its vicinity, was famous for growing the best wheat in Africa; and the country generally thereabout, if proper sanitary measures were taken by the inhabitants, offers one of the finest fields for agricultural production in the world. The Waterfall Valley produces a native indigenous cotton, as well as some of the best subtropical fruits that can be named. Grapes,