OCR Rendition - approximate

350 SIR H. B. FRERE.-On the Laws afecting the swarming or emigrant stage of existence. Emigration to South Africa may be checked or diverted to Australia or America ; but it will not cease. The advanced guard of Trek Boers may advance too fast, and be repulsed or absorbed in the vast native populations on whose territories they have intruded ; but there is an impulse behind which will impel others onwards to support them, and to fill their places ; and as long as their parent race retains its inherent vigour, and the civilization which gives it the superiority over other equally vigorous but uncivilized races, and as long as it continues in the swarming stage, so long the ultimate result will always be that the European invader will prevail over the native occupants, and expel, subdue, or assimilate the weaker race. It may seem strange that I should hitherto have said but little directly on the influence of missions in altering the physical intellectual, or moral condition of the native races. This has not arisen from any doubt whether a discussion regarding the effects of missions would be appropriate in a lecture delivered before this Institute, but simply from the fact that, in South Africa, at all events, the missions of the various Christian churches embody, in the most concentrated and active form, all the most efficient European influences at work to change the character of native existence. It is otherwise in India, where the existence of powerful, active, and ancient forms of religious belief greatly restrict the dominant European race in the use of any but secular influence and teaching, and render the teaching of the missionary something apart and distinct from the teaching of the secular ruler. No such restriction exists in South Africa.. The European government there, as elsewhere, refers for its code of principles of action to the same documents which contain the moral precept as well as the religious beliefs of European nations ; and the European missionary is not only in general the person best able to instruct his native pupils in the contents of those documents, but he is in most cases the only European to be found whose direct business it is to impart such instruction. The Government official in Africa or in India may expound and apply the law when malefactors or litigants appear before him, but it is no part of his direct duty to train those subjects to his authority to understand or obey the law, and this function necessarily falls almost exclusively on the missionary, whose teaching may be taken as the only practical embodiment of European law and principle which is accessible to the natives. Of other results of religious teaching further than they affect the physical condition and moral and intellectual status of the pupil, this is not the place to speak ; I need only say that no