OCR Rendition - approximate

Relations between Civilized and Savage Life. 343 The evil effects of spirit-drinking are certainly greater and more marked among the Hottentots and their cognate races than among the Kaffirs. But even the Kaffirs suffer more than Europeans, and if the mischief done were no greater than follows the conversion of a sober English workman and his children into a family of gin-drinkers, the evil would clearly be one deserving the most serious attention of statesmen. At present, unhampered by the existence of any enormous excise revenue, the South African Colonies have an easy mode of checking the mischief, by forbidding the indiscriminate sale of spirits to natives not specially authorised by the magistrate. The use of unadulterated Kaffir beer might be left untaxed. The use of hemp, by smoking or drinking the juice of the macerated leaves or stalks, is the only other form of ordinary Kaffir intoxication, and it is not apparently of European origin. After making every deduction for the evil results to the native races from contact with Europeans, I have myself no doubt that the balance is greatly in favour of the natives generally, but especially the Kaffir races, having increased in numbers as well as having improved in physique by such contact. We have hitherto considered chiefly the physical results of European contact. Let us now briefly consider how such contact has affected the general intellectual and moral standard of the native races. As regards intellectual change, there can, of course, be no doubt of the enormous extent of the change as well of the advantages to the natives, which result from communicating such arts as writing, reading, and printing, and from opening to untutored and unlettered races the vast stores of accumulated knowledge which but for those arts could not be collected or preserved. One hears, occasionally, doubts on such points expressed by those who have known uninstructed and uncivilized persons of more than average natural quickness of apprehension and sagacity ; but no one can seriously weigh the mental powers of the ablest savage ever known, against those of a man of the same race who has received an European education, without feeling that there is no comparison between the intellectual powers of the two men, and that, however great the natural force of intellect may be in the one, it is impossible to resist the conviction that his intellectual power would have been infinitely increased could he have enjoyed the advantages of education accorded to the other. The question of the moral improvement of natives through contact with European civilization is, I will not say less clear, but it is certainly more controverted. We constantly hear it said